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Re:A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
by sullyj3 on Tuesday February 12, 2019 @01:56PM
(#19146342)
> What I am saying is that the global average getting better is a skewed and rather meaningless metric. The fact that 100_000 EU/USA citizes are slighly better off at the cost 1_000_000 asians -- random numbers to demonstrate how an imbalance can be evened out -- does not mean that humanity's economy is getting better. Not at all.
I'm pretty sure Pinker doesn't use average income as a metric. I'm not really sure where you're getting that from. The relevant metric is number of people living below the poverty line, which is a metric which doesn't have the same issue.
These two statements do not contradict each other, at all.
It is possible for two things to simultaneously be true: things are awful for many people, AND things overall are better than they used to be.
People seem to hate Pinker because they interpret his words as saying their suffering doesn't matter. There is absolutely nothing about his argument that suggests this. It is exactly because suffering is so terrible that it is a good thing that there is less suffering now than in the past.
Bill Gates gets lumped in with Pinker here, and Gates is literally putting his money where his mouth is on this. He wouldn't invest his massive fortune into improving the world if his position was "things are great now, stop complaining."