I'd posit that anyone characterizing this as an apocalypse story hasn't actually read the article.
Name a measure of human suffering that has not improved. Healthy lifespan, deaths in childbirth, infant mortality, they’ve all gotten better.
> - Using $1.90 as the baseline to beat is too low for what we would consider as being out of poverty.
The trend is the same regardless of which poverty line you pick. Poverty is decreasing, education, literacy and health are rising.
> - Most economic successes have not been due to neoliberal markets but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation.
Indeed, in every state where they’ve followed an industrial policy of “Let’s do capitalism.” poverty has decreased, whether with heavy handed government economic intervention like Japan or Korea or just leaving business alone like Hong Kong. If protectionism worked Argentina would have a car industry. They tried for 30 years. It doesn’t.
> - Most quality of life improvements have not been due to neoliberal globalization but simple public interventions including free healthcare and education.
The UN’s human development index is 70% explained by GDP per capita. Poor countries can’t afford good policy and capitalism is the proven way to escape poverty.
> - Progress is slowing relative to the resources available to tackle the problem.
As far as absolute poverty goes, maybe, kind of. The countries that have shown no real improvement are the ones with no real government or state capacity. Everywhere else is in the process of escaping absolute poverty or has done so. These are the countries that do not work, mostly in Africa. We just have to work towards integrating them into the global economy so they can grow. One hopes the nearby example of Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa or Nigeria will help, as they grow their way out of poverty.
The story changes quite a bit - and you know it. If we use $7.40 per day, we see a decline in the proportion of people living in poverty, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as your rosy narrative would have it. In 1981 a staggering 71% lived in poverty. Today it hovers at 58% (for 2013, the most recent data). Suddenly your grand story of progress seems tepid, mediocre, and – in a world that’s as fabulously rich as ours – completely obscene.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/29/opinion/the-politics-of-a...
> By comparison, Africa is already relatively flooded with aid. The continent as a whole receives development assistance worth almost 8 percent of its gross domestic product. Exclude South Africa and Nigeria, and aid jumps to more than 13 percent of GDP — or more than four times the Marshall Plan at its height — for the other 46 African countries.
???
Wealth is mostly a function of intelligent social organization.
Why are we so much more vastly wealthy than we were 100 years go? Just because we pump more gas? No - we're smarter.
Wealth is what a country generates, not what it has.
It's not like a 'pile of gold' that we have that magically turns into iPhones.
Most places that have extreme poverty are rife with systematic problems. Total lack of social organization on most levels, corruption, missing or 'never existed' institutions (education, justice, civic etc.). Lack of literacy, education. An absent, stupid or corrupt elite. Etc. etc.
Swedes don't have any real natural resources, not particularly fertile land. They are 'rich' because they are organized.
It's a very hard thing to 'pass on' to other places.
Natural Resources comprise of less than 1% of Sweden's GDP.
Here is a map [1] where you can see the % GDP comprising of Natural Resources by nation.
Notice that the wealthiest nations tend to derive almost no value from the export of natural resources. They are creating value added products and services, which is what intelligently organized people do.
[1] https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/NY.GDP.TOTL.RT.Z...
Doing otherwise would just result in the internal industry being bought out for pennies or being obliterated by advanced competitors.
Protectionism doesn't guarantee that a country will be successful at building cars, but they should at least bloody try to before giving up.
And yes, capitalism can improve a country's fortunes if applied judiciously. Merely opening the markets to a free for all wil just result in the vultures swooping in, getting rich and leaving some rests for the locals.
It's called absolute poverty for a reason. Just because you're above the absolute poverty threshold doesn't mean you're not poor anymore. It just means that you can minimally survive. Whether you're poor or not depends on the society around you, because poverty determines how well you can participate in society.
He even cites this data:
>Using the $1.90 line shows that only 700 million people live in poverty. But note that the UN’s FAO says that 815 million people do not have enough calories to sustain even “minimal” human activity.
I went to check the numbers and I'm not quite sure where he took the numbers from. They're not really wrong, but I didn't find either number in the reports. The numbers I found in the report are closer together.
According to the FAO 2018 report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition [1] the number of undernourished people is projected to be 820.8 million in 2017. In 2016 it was estimated to be 804.2 million. In 2015 it was estimated to be 784.4 million.
The World Bank's Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018 report [2] gives a figure for the number of people living in extreme poverty at 736 million, but the latest figure is from 2015.
The 784.4 million and 736 million figures are remarkably close for such fuzzy data.
>- Most economic successes have not been due to neoliberal markets but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation.
Yeah, it was just a coincidence that when China stated opening up their markets that their quality of life improved immensely and hundreds of millions are lifted out of extreme poverty. When you're talking about economic success in general then you can't forget the ex-Soviet states either. The ones that embraced free markets the most recovered the most.
>- Most quality of life improvements have not been due to neoliberal globalization but simple public interventions including free healthcare and education.
All of which requires enough economic success to support such policies and societies.
>- Progress is slowing relative to the resources available to tackle the problem.
Because the percentage of the population in extreme poverty is shrinking.
[1] http://www.fao.org/state-of-food-security-nutrition/en/
[2] http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/poverty-and-shared-p...
China is interesting because you can really use it both ways: Free market enthusiasts will argue that China took off after it embraced free market reforms. State intervention enthusiasts will argue that China has been so successful because it is still very far away from the "free market policies" which e.g. the IMF is pushing on poor countries. In particular it has totally not opened up its capital markets or many of its import markets.
And the same holds for the ex-Soviet economies, too: The ex-Soviet economies that have done best are those that have joined the European Union, which most people especially on the American right would not exactly call a free market paradise.
For me, the answer to this apparent contradiction is actually quite simple: as so often, the answer lies in the middle. Total deregulation and extremely opening up your markets probably is not a good strategy to quickly pull your country out of poverty. But too much state intervention is at least as big a recipe for disaster.
Also, I would add that the optimal level of state intervention probably also depends a lot on how corruption-free your government is: with a very well functioning, corrution-free bureaucracy, you can operate effectively at a higher level of state interventionism (e.g. Scandinavia, Singapore) than if you hand that power to corrupt and/or inept officials.
But they did well even before they joined the EU. Arguably they did even better in terms of growth before joining, but it's difficult to fault the EU on this, because the financial crisis will definitely take (some of) the blame.
On the topic of China you could also argue that IP theft is what helped China succeed. We'll never know, but that IP issue and them not opening up their markets will probably bite them soon. There's only so much the EU and US are going to take once China becomes even richer.
>Also, I would add that the optimal level of state intervention probably also depends a lot on how corruption-free your government is:
I definitely agree with this, but I would like to add that I think it's not just strict corruption that's the problem. Heavy lobbying by certain small groups of people (corporations) to the detriment of the general population also plays a role in this. The government officials don't have to be corrupt for this to have a negative impact on regulations.
Compared to the Soviet days, I think that most, even on the American right, would consider the EU to be quite free market.
It's not an absolute thing. The difference from "almost totally state planned" to "not as free as we think it should be" matters. It changes outcomes quite a bit. Some think that outcomes would be even better with more freedom, but I think most people - even on the American right - understand that the EU is vastly different from the Soviet economy.
From 1981 onward, I would summarize his argument as being that:
- While some measures have improved, the picture is no where near as good as it is represented.
- Using $1.90 as the baseline to beat is too low for what we would consider as being out of poverty.
- Most economic successes have not been due to neoliberal markets but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation.
- Most quality of life improvements have not been due to neoliberal globalization but simple public interventions including free healthcare and education.
- Progress is slowing relative to the resources available to tackle the problem.