It's changing rapidly, though. In 1997, 29% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today, it's less than 9%. Stunning, but true.

Or to put it another way... 50 years ago, people lived like that in Scotland. They don't anymore. Who's to say that places in the world that live like that today won't be as successful as Scotland has been in putting poverty behind them?

Hmm I'm always wary of those statements. The concept of "living in extreme poverty" is not a good way to measure progress in any sense. First because "poverty means earning less than x" implies that x needs to be updated and its not obvious how to do so; indeed it can be manipulated to push an agenda. Second because it reduces everything to money. You can make more money, but is your life actually improved? Sometimes yes, but surely not always. For example: millions of people have been relocated from the countryside to factories in China. They are now "lifted from poverty" according to that number. But now they live in smog-infested cities, stacked like sardines, working 12 hours per day, where before they had their homes and some sense of peaceful community. Have their lives improved?

In the end, you're judging the success of a system (capitalism) with a metric internal to that system. What does that tell you?

It's in fact so ridiculous a measure that a slave/indentured servant "earning" 5$ a day is considered a-ok in that metric.

EDIT: I'll just rememind that downvote is not a "disagree" button.

I agree poverty is a blunt measure, but literacy, infant mortality, poverty, life expectancy are all improving globally. By almost any measure life has improved dramatically over the last hundred years. It is no longer nasty, brutish and short for the majority, and the rural life people leave for factories is not an idyll, but instead often grinding poverty and early death with no way out. That's why they leave.

Europe went through the same things - from largely rural extreme poverty, to dirty industrial cities, to modern clean, wealthy Europe. Heck, these very photos show a step in that process, from 50 years ago, when Scotland was in the state you're so horrified about imagining China in today.

And yes, working 12 hour days in a smog-infested city is better than extreme poverty. Life isn't a socialist realist painting. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Vaccination is better than no vaccination. Water from a tap is better than water in a bucket that you have to walk to get. Etc. People don't move to the cities because country life is getting worse; they move because city life is better.

Is income a pretty measure? No. But it's a good proxy. It's more fine-grained and less messy than something like birth rate.

Read Enlightenment Now by Pinker!

Reminds me of the Bronx, from a train window, in about 2005.

Still, seeing white people living in such a bad conditions is striking.

Please don't take out of context my comment, it's just what I think. I am brown by the way.

Poverty is a class issue, not a race issue. Sometimes they are correlated (US cities, all of the US southeast), sometimes not (west Virginia, rural everywhere EXCEPT the southeast, everything Irish - - you can't get whiter than Irish)

"you can't get whiter than Irish"

Sectarianism was a pretty dreadful problem in Glasgow (and to a lesser extent the other cities in the Central belt of Scotland) - it still exists although not nearly as bad as it used to be:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarianism_in_Glasgow

My (poorly articulated) point is that all the non-class markers we use to oppress people - whether skin color, religion, accent, clothing style, music preferences, etc - just disguise class oppression. In the USA, I think we emphasize color in order to avoid the hard truth that society was created so that a few could fuck the many.

And I meant "white" literally, to point out the absurdity that poverty is a function of skin color as opposed to deep class organization. If light skin color is what made one rich and powerful, then Catholic Irish would be at the top. But...

I agree with that, recently read a rant about how liberals have fallen into the trap of seeing oppression as caused by discrimination based on skin color, instead of of oppression as a power class thing. And think if only some of the feet in the boot were brown that'll be fair.

Does it help a man of color if the foot in the boot is sometimes brown? I think not a boot is a boot.

Poverty is a class issue.

Class is a race issue.

Poverty is not a race issue.

And something has gone wrong with this argument.

How is class a race issue in somewhere like Scotland?