Actually I just didn't share data because I forgot the name of the author who has best spoken to this critique, but I dug him up and it's Jason Hickel. He responded directly to Steven Pinker's rosy optimism about the world, in particular pointing out that our bar for what is extreme poverty is a made up number that is too low. If you use a more reasonable measure for extreme poverty, the situation looks a little different. It has improved in some areas and expanded in others. Notably, people like Pinker use their argument to say basically that capitalism is good. But Hickel points out that most of the gains were in China, where the economic system that led to all this growth was a very mixed system of capitalism combined with heavy state control. So under no circumstances can we conclude that free market capitalism is the main driver of reductions in extreme poverty.

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...