75% of global poverty reduction has been due to China lifting over 800 million people. The real number is even higher if you account for Vietnam, Laos and Cuba. Then there are also many nations that don't classify themselves explicitly as government-planned economies where the public sector plays a huge role in providing a wide breadth of basic services to the people, rather than the private markets doing so.

So virtually all of the poverty alleviation has happened when governments have prioritized access to basics (housing, education, healthcare, public transport, pensions, wage regulations, utilities like power/water/sewerage, etc) to the common people rather than leave it up to "market forces".

Institutions that represent the interests of people using state budgets for inclusive policy have a much bigger role in poverty alleviation, by creating an environment of fair opportunity for the poor, than explicit deregulation/privatization.

Source: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...

>75% of global poverty reduction has been due to China lifting over 800 million people. The real number is even higher if you account for Vietnam, Laos and Cuba. Then there are also many nations that don't classify themselves explicitly as government-planned economies where the public sector plays a huge role in providing a wide breadth of basic services to the people, rather than the private markets doing so.

You can also make the opposite argument by pointing out China's growth only really got started with Deng's market liberalization reforms, which did the opposite of what you described.

The government guaranteed access to the basics to the masses. It made money via the market liberalization policies. I was talking about how governments using their budgets for inclusive policies can have a much more impactful role in poverty reduction.

In other nations where the governments don't take these proactive role, people are at the mercy of market forces for everything, including basics needed for survival.

Topic on how governments can make money via global trade is a different thread of discussion. This one pertains on how the public sector can/should use their power to empower the underprivileged.

Where did China get the money to do all of that? They're the poster child of benefiting from globalization and free-trade.

Money came from global trade. That trade could be possible there because the pre-Deng governments prepared a very skilled workforce. In order to have usable skills, one needs to be fed, clothed, educated, in relatively good health, housed and should be able to get to their workplace.

Governments investing on critical infrastructure, and basic services that give a foundation of opportunity is a precondition to growth led by industrialization/trade.

This thread is about how the governments can use their money and power to uplift the underprivileged, and not about mechanisms for the government to make money. It is a conversation on leaving the poor to "market forces" vs. governments ensuring basics to the impoverished.

> I think both absolute and relative poverty are important to consider

I would be interested to learn your (or others) thoughts on why relative poverty is important. I've thought frequently, but probably superficially, about this quite a bit over the years. Many people who are considered impoverished in the U.S. are: obese (AKA not hungry), housed, and have a smart phone and cable TV. It is very hard to wrap my mind around their "hardship" when we have real world examples of people in other places who lack all of these things. My mind, likely due to my own biases, tends to conclude that it is a function of a country that has become too wealthy and thus abstracted away from the resources and efforts that created and sustain that wealth–natural resources, rule of law and due process, hard work, training and experience, risk taking, innovation and creativity, etc etc.

Is relative poverty important simply as a system feature that elevates political risk? Or is there something more tangible in terms of human need that I miss?

That's really applying stereotypes to a huge swathe of people and I think you should seriously review your biases and stereotypes.

You are saying a lot of people are obese and not hungry; what about the ones that can only manage to afford shit like dry pasta?

Housed, what about the over half a million homeless? What about the ones that aren't technically homeless but live couch to couch, in a van, or with family even though they have a family of their own? And what about the ones that can hardly make rent every month, let alone never have a chance at home ownership?

The smartphone thing is moot; they can be cheap, and they cost a fraction of, say, a month of rent. The "you have a smartphone so you can't be poor" line is just dumb.

There's a lot of whataboutism as well, i.e. "what about these other people who have it worse"; it's not like it's one or the other. There's wealth inequality, and there's poverty in many forms - poverty that seems intentional and avoidable.

The solution? It's not easy, but raise the minimum wage, tackle the housing crisis; fix the health care system and make it affordable for everyone; tax the rich and do a Robin Hood, or at least fix the infrastructure, reduce the decades long exorbitant spending on the army in favor of health care, public health and education.

And I think all of these can be made to work together with this neoliberalism thing. It just requires some people to give up some of their privileges.

My greater point is about the definition of poverty and perceptions therof. In the past, poverty was defined as lack of access to the basic necessities of life: food, water, and shelter. That definition has expanded in scope quite dramatically. You say there are 500k in the U.S. that are unsheltered, and I would agree that, yes, those people most certainly fit the classic definition of poverty. But the U.S., according the U.S. Census Bureau, has 38 million people living under the poverty line.

> can only manage to afford shit like dry pasta

Go tell someone who is starving to death in Yemen or South Sudan how having access to dry pasta is the equivalent of real poverty. I'm sure they would correct you had they the energy.

> The smartphone thing is moot;

You only underscore my point. You take having a smartphone (a product of the Neoliberal system) so for granted that you believe it is "dumb" to point it out. A smartphone would have appeared as God's Real Magic 100 years ago. It is one of the most powerful tools ever built by mankind.

> There's a lot of whataboutism as well,

You literally "what about" multiple times in your own reply.

Raising the minimum wage will result in fewer people getting jobs. This is accepted as fact by economists.

As for your other prescriptions, they amount to, "Just do it." In other words, they are equally naive or uninformed. These are intractable problems in ultra complex systems that do not have easy or obvious solutions. For example, you write, "fix the health care system and make it affordable for everyone". Please do explain how to do this. But in your reply, please make sure to show your work. For instance, what are the trade-offs to a single payer healthcare system? Talk to any Briton over a pint and they will enumerate a long list of cons to their healthcare system, some of them very serious. When it comes to ultra complex systems, when one pulls one lever, a thousand others move, often in unexpected ways.

Yes, I think both are important.

On fixing absolute poverty - it means children and adults don't starve to death or die of treatable diseases. Hopefully it's self evident why it's important to solve.

On relative poverty - it means equal opportunity. The gap in life expectancy between the richest and the poorest is like 10 years. The lowest quartile has the least income mobility, and still struggles to have more access to quality food, health care, education. And that lack of mobility concentrates wealth and reduces generating wealth which leaves society as a whole poorer.

Are global averages meaningful to look at, though? You could have millions lifted out of poverty in countries that are becoming more developed, counterbalancing changes elsewhere, without neoliberal policies being correlated.

In Brazil, extreme poverty was reduced by 75% during a decade of a left-wing, welfare focused government, and then promptly went up again as soon as neoliberal (not exactly, but close enough for the purpose of this argument) politicians came back to power. And the averages didn’t improve either - quality of life has deteriorated for everyone else too.