I’ve said before that world poverty isn’t reducing, but let’s say it again.
The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of $1.90 (£1.44) per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US in 2011. It’s obscenely low by any standard, and we now have piles of evidence that people living just above this line have terrible levels of malnutrition and mortality. Earning $2 per day doesn’t mean that you’re somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty. Not by a long shot.
Scholars have been calling for a more reasonable poverty line for many years. Most agree that people need a minimum of about $7.40 per day to achieve basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy…
…So what happens if we measure global poverty at the low end of this more realistic spectrum – $7.40 per day, to be extra conservative? Well, we see that the number of people living under this line has increased dramatically since measurements began in 1981, reaching some 4.2 billion people today.
We also know, for example, that Indians have been eating less calories than 30 years ago (and having traveled in India in the 80s, I can tell you they weren’t overfed.)
As Hickel also points out about the earlier parts of the graph, and as I have pointed out previously, most of the “people are making more money” comes from “people were forced off their subsistence farms so that they had to use money to buy what they got from their own labor before.”
So, for example, when NAFTA went into place, millions of Mexican susbsistence farmers were forced off their land. This lead, directly, to the massive increases in immigration to the US that occurred in the 90s and early 2000s, by the way.
People miss the essential point: it’s not how much money you have. It’s whether or not you have enough food, shelter, clothes and so on. It’s whether you have what you need and some of what you want.
Only a moron (or someone as disconnected from the realities of life like Bill Gates) could think that being able to buy as much as $1.90 a day, in the United States of 2011, would qualify as enough money. I have been poor. I have been very poor, by first world standards. I can tell you that even back in the late 80s, $1.90 wasn’t enough (I could have barely eaten on that, I could not have saved up and paid rent.) Today it is completely inadequate, and the diet it would barely allow is basically starch and sugar.
(Which, again, anyone who actually has tried to shop cheaply would know. That won’t include Bill Gates.)
These people who say with certainty how poverty is massively decreasing make me sick. They are either ignorant, very stupid and disconnected from reality, or they are very evil.
Essentially all of the poverty reduction of the past 30 years comes from one source, and one source only. China. Which industrialized by classic protectionist policies which the IMF, World Bank and poverty ghouls do their best to make impossible.
And as for China, what is also clear from their experience, and in the data, is that the Chinese who moved to the cities to get those great new jobs are less happy than the people who stayed in the villages. Further, great amounts of force have had to be used to move peasants off the land, because they know the new factory jobs suck even worse than being a peasant. (As they did in Britain during the Industrial revolution.)
What made some parts of the world better wasn’t capitalism, per se. It was steam power and oil power. Those parts of the world then used that power, along with gunpowder and whatnot, to conquer most of the world and take what they wanted.
Today we do it different ways, but the bottom line is simple enough: measured by any semi-reasonable standard (would you want to try to live on $7.40 a day, including paying your rent?), poverty is not getting better. It is getting worse.
If you say poverty is decreasing, what you are saying is “it is ok to keep doing what we’re doing.”
If you’re wrong, you’re a monster, because you’re saying “we don’t really need to do more.”
And you’re wrong.
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Billikin
“People miss the essential point: it’s now how much money you have. It’s whether or not you have enough food, shelter, clothes and so on. It’s whether you have what you need and some of what you want.”
Well worth repeating. Hear, hear!
As for the world’s poorest making $2 per day instead of $1 per day. I assumed that neither figure was expected to provide subsistence levels of food, shelter, and clothing, but that those people were farmers, nomads, or hunter gatherers who did not rely upon money to survive.
Thanks for this post!
Ian Welsh
The problem is that the subsistence farmers, nomads etc… are being forced off their land. That has actually made income numbers go up.
jonst
I believe this is impacting Mexico small farmers particularly so,post NAFTA. Another gem created purposefully by Neoliberalism in my take.
D
Essentially all of the poverty reduction of the past 30 years comes from one source, and one source only. China. Which industrialized by classic protectionist policies which the IMF, World Bank and poverty ghouls do their best to make impossible.
The utterly infuriating thing about the Guardian article is that it makes the former point but omits the latter one, and umpteen commenters over there are demending to know why China can\’t be used as an example of the success of the neoliberal programme.
No-one seems to have responded to them with the relevant information, but from past experience I certainly wouldn\’t put it past The Guardian to block all such comments.
Stirling S Newberry
Whippings will continue until morale improves.
James
A response from Pinker
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/is-the-world-really-getting-poorer-a-response-to-that-claim-by-steve-pinker/
Godfree Roberts
“And as for China, what is also clear from their experience, and in the data, is that the Chinese who moved to the cities to get those great new jobs are less happy than the people who stayed in the villages. Further, great amounts of force have had to be used to move peasants off the land, because they know the new factory jobs suck even worse than being a peasant. (As they did in Britain during the Industrial revolution.)”
Kindly favor us with the experience of those 800,000,000 Chinese who moved to the cities to get those great new jobs who are less happy than the people who stayed in the villages.
And while you’re up, give us proof that great amounts of force have had to be used to move peasants off the land,
And explain why the new factory jobs suck even worse than being a peasant.
Breezy, counterintuitive and counter-historical assertions about such an important topic are insufficient.
Eric Anderson
An absolute must watch video from Professor of Sociology Roland Paulsen, in which he crushes Hans Rosling’s “capitalism is great b/c it has eliminated poverty” argument:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=631&v=OoIcsj9ysvs
Enjoy 🙂
steeleweed
Exactly what Joe Bageant documented in ‘Rainbow Pie’ and elsewhere –
“When I was a boy on my grandparents’ farm in the 1950s the neighbors always banded together to make lard and apple butter, put up feed corn, bale hay, thresh wheat, pick apples, plow snow off roads. One neighbor cut hair, another mended shoes and welded. With so little money available in those days in rural America, there was no way to get by without neighbors. And besides, all the money in the world would not get the lard cooked down and the peaches put up for the winter. You needed neighbors and they needed you. From birth to the grave. I was very lucky to have seen that culture which showed me that a real community of shared labor is possible — or at least was at one time in this country.”
He wrote of a society based on labor, skills and community rather than money. People saw themselves as producers and were proud to be 90% self-sufficient. Now they seem to take pride in how much they can consume and self-sufficiency is ridiculed as the domain of those weird off-gridders, survivalists and hippie communes.
Herman
I agree that China is probably the only developmental success story of the last 30 years and even that story is not unqualified when you look deeper at the situation in that country. For example, there is evidence that the Chinese are less happy than they were in 1990 even though they are much wealthier now.
https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-happiness-hasnt-increased-2017-12
Some evidence that Chinese workers in the state sector, where there is still some form of “iron rice bowl” system of welfare benefits and job security, are happier than workers in the Chinese private sector.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4592128/
I won’t even get into the other negative aspects of the Chinese system like the creepy social credit program but it seems clear to me that not even China is an unqualified success. Is all of this new wealth worth it if people are less happy?
Hugh
Bill Gates and Steven Pinker should live on $1.90 a day and only $1.90 a day for 5 years. They can then, if they survive, get back to me on where the poverty line should be. Meanwhile billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Howard Schultz practically had on air heart attacks in response to Elizabeth Warren’s support of a wealth tax on their billions. People stealing THEIR money? It would mean the end of the world, “The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria.” No, no, no.
As I have said before, each of us gets 99.99% of who and what we are from our society, our life, language, and religion and/or ethics. People like Gates, Bloomberg, and Schultz may actually believe they made (and deserve) their billions, it is certainly convenient for them to do so, but mostly they were like insanely lucky lottery winners. Their wealth was built and depends on the rest of us. What they added, beside being at the right place at the right time, is microscopically small. People who substantially add to our society should be rewarded, but in our plutocratic, oligarchic kleptocracies the wealth these individuals accumulate is wildly disproportionate to what their individual contributions actually are.
There are two issues here. One, our societies need to be sustainable. We can not overpopulate our world, exhaust its resources, destroy its ecosystems, and fill it with pollution and greenhouse gases. Two, a society (that is us) needs to provide, not “minimums” but the basics for a good, decent, and meaningful life for each of its members. You can not do this second thing and have the crazy disproportion in wealth that the existence of billionaires represent.
Ian Welsh
Godfree,
since you had time to write a comment, but not do a 10 second Google, start here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/15/chinas-peasants-left-for-the-cities-to-seek-their-fortune-and-it-made-them-miserable/?utm_term=.8eba4d80b8d5
Force being used to remove peasants from their villages is such a common theme that it even shows up in Chinese movies (See Wolf Warrior II), with the pretense that it’s just private thugs.
A few more 10 second googles will confirm everything else. I urge you to take the time to do so, so that you won’t accuse other people of ignorance. 10 minutes and you’ll know things that you don’t know now, but assume you do.
Z
$7.40/day is insane to expect anyone to live on. That’s less than $250/month.
Bill Gates is evil. You become evil when you become richer than anything imaginable due to opportunities that you had and then try to deny other people those opportunities in order to grow your wealth and power. He had a market opportunity and became filthy rich when he capitalized on it and then he did his damn best to deny others those same opportunities he had.
I also remember Bill Gates damn near in tears whining, and lying, to that Liar’s Den of a Congress back in the Clinton years that he couldn’t be competitive without foreign engineers Competitive? He had a quasi-monopoly. No, he just didn’t want to be forced by the market dynamics of the national labor supply of engineers to raise his wages, so he begged for more cheaper foreign engineers. Rich way, way beyond his means to ever spend, that piece of trash begged to push down American wages and make himself even richer. That’s why I am completely unimpressed by his foundation and what a “super efficient” charity they are and how much money he puts into it. It shouldn’t be his money in the first place, not anywhere near that much. It shouldn’t be in his power to decide what that much capital is used for.
A lot of people did without … and did with less … due his insatiable greed. They paid for it.
Z
rangoon78
Bill Gates and Mike Rowe: propagandists who work opposite ends of the population in service to the status quo. I recommend the podcast citations needed number 64, on Mike Rowe: “Hiding under his superficially appealing everyman shtick is dangerous ideology specifically tailored to pick off a certain constituency of Home Depot democrats while pushing political impotence, anti-union narratives and anti-intellectualism. With a clever combination of working class affectation and folksy charm — often exploiting real fears about a decline in industrialization — Rowe has cultivated an image that claims to be pro-worker, but primarily exists to line the pockets of their boss.”
https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-64-mike-rowes-koch-backed-working-man-affectation-fa52e0e8d2e3
John
I also suspect that the NAFTA destruction of subsistence farming in Mexico helped provide footsoldiers for the cartel drug wars. In a cash economy, crime is the payer of last resort. Same for gang bangers in Central America. And same for China that has to suppress its crime with ruthless capital punishment. China at least has no problem executing white collar criminals. They have executed a good number of their billionaires for corruption.
rangoon78
TEDtalk technocrats and Home Depot Democrats: Bill Gates and Mike Rowe, propagandists who work opposite ends of the population in service to the status quo.
https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-45-the-not-so-benevolent-billionaire-bill-gates-and-western-media-b1f8e0fe092f
Mandos
The unspoken issue here is the evaluation of “subsistence happiness”, the value of self-reported happiness as a measure of well-being, etc. The “Pinkerists” don’t genuinely believe that someone living in a subsistence environment can be happy, even if they report themselves as such or wish for it back after they’ve been proletarianized. Or if they do, it’s merely the happiness that one has before one knows that things could be different, so the issue here is a kind of loss of innocence caused by industrialization.
DC
Pity Pinker defendants doesn’t seem to acknowledge the fact that China wasn’t part of the Millennium Development Goal inception and, as such, shouldn’t count to it. It’s only after adding China that the goals are “met 5 years in advance” and “poverty was reduced”. I never tire of sharing this article:
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-great-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html
which is just a easily digestible version of this:
http://www.academia.edu/21593862/The_True_Extent_of_Global_Poverty_and_Hunger_Questioning_the_Good_News_Narrative_of_the_Millennium_Development_Goals
StewartM
Ian, thanks for reposting this. The official “happy-happy-joy-joy” line on world poverty is yet another neoliberal lie. The truth is that the numbers are cooked, Gates and Pinker are the proverbial drunks using statistics for support and not illumination. You can’t understand anything going on in the world today–Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, Orban, Duda, the upheavels in the Middle East, the rollbacks on minority rights in the US, as well as well as the rebirth of the “Old Left” in Sanders and Corbyn, unless you understand how neoliberal orthodoxy has absolutely hammered the economic fortunes of the majority of people on the planet for the benefit of a few. As Solzhenitsyn said quoting a Russian proverb in the Gulag Archipelago, ‘well-treated horses don’t rampage’.
Hugh, as Richard Stallman would readily point out, both Gates’ and Job’s wealth came from yet another example of capitalist ‘enclosure’. Previously algorithms (which is what software is) were considered a domain of mathematics, and therefore outside the possibility of any one person or firm claiming ownership. Gates and Jobs were able to ‘enclose’ yet again something that was once open to everyone using to something that they alone could ‘own’ and sell. Stallman’s objections to this form the basis for the Free Software Foundation.
Tom
The first step to breaking the power of big business and the corruption it brings is to eliminate intellectual property laws.
This would force companies to keep innovating and investing in quality and ease of use/maintenance to stay competitive. First mover advantage gives one a 3 year head start anyway for a new product, so patents are unnecessary to begin with and hinder the economy by tying it up in lawsuits over patent violations and chilling newcomers from entering the field as they can’t afford the legal costs to fight patent trolls.
StewartM
Godfree:
Though it does not explicitly deal with peasantry per se, I offer a Chinese-produced film, “The Summer is Gone”, which depicts the beginning of the transition to a more neoliberal capitalist existence in the early 1990s and its toll on human happiness:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6118258/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl
It’s an illuminating film. In Xiaolei’s family, his father–who used to work in a state-owned film company, loses his job and becomes unemployed, causing strife in his family. Services that used to be free, like going to the movies, now become for-paying customers only (one scene has Xiaolei’s dad taking him to a Harrison Ford movie, only to be told “now you have to pay!”). People who used to be equals in work now become subordinates or superiors, people have to suck up to their former equals to get jobs, and the children of the more fortunate taunt the less fortunate with “my dad can fire your dad!!” You see the social disruption and discord going to a more capitalist economy induced, and you can see why it made a lot of people unhappy.
I have talked to some Chinese coworkers who lived this experience about this film, and they confirm “yes, this is the way it was”.
Willy
It’s odd to see supergenius Bill Gates favoring simple(minded) infographics, oblivious to greater truths. And then the great and mighty Howard Shultz’s freakout over a slight tax increase, oblivious to Eisenhower enforcing 90% back in the day “when America was great” and did all the great stuff.
It’s like something is seriously wrong with these people.
All the evidence suggests that humans were hardwired by evolution to cooperatively trade skills and labor on behalf of their tribe which sustained them individually. Enter variables strange to that evolution, such as money, subsistence competition on an individual level, high population impacting whole environments, and technology… and the potential for things to get wacky goes exponential.
Gates and Schultz didn’t actually invent anything indispensably new and exciting for “our tribe”. Aussies vastly prefer their own local coffee shops over Starbucks. And back in the day, WordPerfect was superior to Word (hell, there was shareware better than MS stuff). But those two took advantage of some human “wacky”, and here they are rich and powerful pretending to know everything else.
If I may be so bold, this behavior seems similar to that of some substance dependents I know. They’re oblivious to their impacts on others and constantly rationalize such just so they can maintain control over their substance which they believe is indispensable to their own survival.
Billionaires have far more money than anybody could possibly need for well-being and happiness. And it’s been proven time and again throughout world history that plutocracy doesn’t work. I think what’s going on in this regard could be categorized as a pathology.
Tom
Speaking of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, it is essential we understand that they produced evolved user-friendly computers, they did not revolutionized them or invent them.
Computers have been in use for thousands of years by humans, starting with the Ishango bone from 19000 BCE. This bone was used for arithmetic calculations and demonstrates that its user understood prime numbers.
Going forward from there it is fascinating how computers continued to develop as technology developed and just how much people keep underestimating our ancestors.
In 3500 BCE the Sumerians using clay pipes built the first Flush Toilets. They also introduced printing via cylinder seals.
The Romans moved more fresh water in a day at their height without carbon emissions than the Modern World is capable of and it powered a massive pre-industrial society which was on the verge of going industrial. If Rome had not gone capitalist and ran a huge trade deficit with China and India plus engaged in countless forever wars, it would still be around today thanks to its excellent infrastructural engineering which it threw away.
Everything we have is evolved forms of old technology that millions worked on and improved upon and would not be possible to have done so if the ancient world had had a patent system like today.
Stirling S Newberry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9KAd_nqINY
Eric Anderson
You a Georgist Stirling?
rangoon78
More evidence to refute Gates favorite infographic:
https://www.marxist.com/world-poverty-capitalism-s-crime-against-humanity.htm
http://www.academia.edu/21593862/The_True_Extent_of_Global_Poverty_and_Hunger_Questioning_the_Good_News_Narrative_of_the_Millennium_Development_Goals
bruce wilder
The Bill Gates infographic from Max Roser is about proportion and trend, not the first time these statistical shells have been used in a sleight of rhetorical hand to hide the pea. 4.2 billion is a big number. I hope Jason Hickel has done his sums correctly, because I am not checking his number, only marveling at it. The total global population in 1980 was only about 4.5 billion. So creating that many poor people since then is quite an accomplishment.
We have not only NOT appreciably reduced the number of desperately poor, but by means of population growth, I think it may be that we have made it impossible to eliminate poverty in this century (short of simple extermination). There are insufficient resources on the planet to bear the weight of that many people. Only an industrial civilization could support such numbers, but the burdens of industrial production on the ecologies of the earth, with a couple billion living first world lives, are simply unsustainable.
I wonder about that attribution. It makes for an appealing narrative, but is it true that the poorest are producing all that much of anything?
I can see the argument to the effect that the poorest have been deprived / excluded from the resources necessary to produce.
Ché Pasa
Yet our billionaire betters will tell us over and over and over again how they’ve lifted so many bazillions of peasants out of poverty and saved so many of the rabble’s lives, educated so many girls and cured so many diseases. That none of this was altruistic escapes notice. That much of it is either false, mischaracterized or has led to enormous negative consequences is rarely discussed.
As has been pointed out “poverty” is usually relative. One is poor compared to the billionaire up on the ridge, or one is poor for lack of this or that amenity, service or goods that someone else has. Absolute poverty is when one has little or nothing necessary for survival and there are few or sometimes no options, such as the situation for the Lower Orders during the various famines we can cite in Africa, India, China, Ireland, and so on.
Of course.
But simply being in possession of limited material goods is not necessarily a bad thing. Many of us who have lived poor know that. The “minimalism” fashion among the well-off is a tacit acknowledgement of the same thing.
The cruelty and stupidity of our billionaire betters appears to be boundless. Whether the rest of us can find a path around or away from them remains to be seen….
CH
There’s even a term for it: The Neoliberal Optimism Industry: https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-58-the-neoliberal-optimism-industry-and-development-shaming-the-global-south-cf399e88510e
Much like the vast “Anti-SJW” industry, no? And with many of the same adherents (Pinker, Peterson, et. al.)
StewartM
Only a moron (or someone as disconnected from the realities of life like Bill Gates) could think that being able to buy as much as $1.90 a day, in the United States of 2011, would qualify as enough money.
Could we not define poverty buy a reasonable definition, which in my mind would be “to be lacking in resources to the extent that one’s health is at risk and one’s lifespan is likely to be significantly shortened?”
Then the lack of any universal health care system makes millions in the US poor.
marku52
Sweatshops improve people’s lives? Sociologists test the idea and find it false.
“To our surprise, most people who got an industrial job soon changed their minds. A majority quit within the first months. They ended up doing what those who had not gotten the job offers did — going back to the family farm, taking a construction job or selling goods at the market.”
“Serious injuries and disabilities were nearly double among those who took the factory jobs, rising to 7 percent from about 4 percent. This risk rose with every month they stayed. The people we interviewed told us about exposure to chemical fumes and repetitive stress injuries.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/opinion/do-sweatshops-lift-workers-out-of-poverty.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0
Hugh
Speaking of made-up numbers, the BLS January jobs report came out Friday. The NYT heralded 304,000 jobs created, the 100th consecutive month of job growth, and the government shutdown had no impact on all this good news.
Taking the government shutdown first, the reason it had no impact is because the BLS seemly ignored it. All those federal workers were simply treated as employed even as state and local education workers who can’t work due to the Christmas holidays were considered as job losses.
As for the other two points, the thing is net jobs are never created in January. Ever. This is also because of the Christmas sales season. Workers are hired going into the end of the year holiday season and they are cut loose when it is over. And this number is large. Like 2.481 million this year in the private sector. While this is 100,000 better than last year (2018), it is still at the high end of December-January job losses going back to my benchmark year of 2014.
Adding in the usual end of the year job losses I was talking about in state and local government and the January job loss number increases to 2.981 million, or just shy of 3 million.
The official number, the 304,000, is a trend line number. It does not exist in the real world. It is a projection based on assumptions about future economic activity that somewhere along the “line” those 304,000 jobs will be created, as in the usual February-June job build. But importantly, they do not exist now, and if economic conditions worsened, they would never exist at all.
None of this gets to the issue of the quality of any of these jobs. Of course, it is problematic to discuss the quality of jobs that do not exist yet. But quality is something the BLS does not measure anyway. For the BLS, a job is a job is a job.
Stirling S Newberry
Bill Gates got rich by offering rich guys the chance to hire cheap labor to write bad programs. The rich guy took it because they could hire far more native-born guys to look over foreign-born peons as supervisors. Bill Gates just understood the need better. The foreign-born guys wanted out, and better pay for their wives. They were coming no matter what.
There was no way that native-born engineers would gain money because relative advantage loses out the absolute advantage – many of the foreign-born engineers where better, and the rest were cheap. (law of trade eco 201)
Ergo, if Gates didn’t make the business guy rich, some else would have. (Such as Oracle and Larry Ellison were work the same side of the street.) Only poor states could maintain whites-only hiring patterns because they didn’t need to keep employees rich, just let them set up a warped and twisted society. New York City and Silicon Valley would look as they do now.
Populism is really a word for “Leftism for stupid people.” And it all over the world, because there are different flavours of stupid, but they are all stupid. Corbyn is one, though a gifted stupid person, he thinks that if he closes down the EU, that he’ll get socialism. JMK he ain’t.
ponderer
At some low income level, less legal, harder to track income takes on a significant importance. Coming from a modest familial background, that’s what I’ve noticed. Hunting out of season, barter, not to mention growing weed or moonshine, keeps people in Appalachia going even today. I’m leery of comparisons at that level, even minimum wage as what it takes to survive can be quite different for different people. Bare survival isn’t enough of course, but I’m glad you bring these numbers to our attention. It’s good to remember what the masters of the universe think we all deserve.
The only thing people like Bill Gates deserve is a 5 min head start,IMHO.
Sid Finster
Did not Dick Armey teach us that “you tell me who did the study, and I’ll tell what results they got!”?
Vsy
Isn\’t using figures that value a subsistence farmer\’s crops, fields, etc. at zero just pure and simple false accounting? I\’m pretty sure accountants don\’t value the assets a company creates and uses in-house at zero. Nobody says \”those assets were never traded on the open market so they don\’t count as having any real economic value\”.
What do the numbers look like if all self-directed economic activity, whether by individuals and families or corporate actors, is valued at market rates? And just why are such figures for non-corporate actors, when anyone does bother to calculate them, consistently regarded as somehow \”romantic\” rather than simply as more accurate?
different clue
@Sid Finster,
Dick Armey may well have taught us that. I do remember him saying ” I would never have seen it if I hadn’t believed it with my own mind.” That one too , cuts all ways.
Every time I heard Dick Armey speak, I always thought I heard a slight Texspanish accent. I have always wondered if his name began as Armijo or similar, and then got changed to Armey for bussiness and/or political reasons.
Willy
I used to think the Dick Armey was how the Log Cabin Republicans got started. But then I learned that the guy with that name helped pave the way for folks wanting to make serious bank doing lobbying after their “distinguished public service” career.
different clue
Dick Armey taught economics at Texas A & M , I believe; where he was denied tenure. He got bitter about that and took his bitterness into politics.
Hugh
Not sure how Armey got into this thread, but from his wiki:
“He graduated from Jamestown College (North Dakota) with a B.A. and then received an M.A. from the University of North Dakota and a PhD in economics from the University of Oklahoma.
Armey served on the economics faculty at the University of Montana from 1964 to 1965. He was an assistant professor of economics at West Texas State University from 1967 to 1968, at Austin College from 1968 to 1972, and at North Texas State (now the University of North Texas) from 1972 to 1977. He served as chairman of the economics department at North Texas State University from 1977 to 1983.”
He won a Congressional seat from Texas the following year, 1984. In his economics, he was a Friedmanite and follower of von Mises, so a typical whack libertarian.
different clue
So . . . not Texas A & M. Memory misfire.
Stirling S Newberry
> You a Georgist Stirling?
No, he got things wrong. Specifically, he did not get how the gig economy would work. (By butching workers.) Remember – every worker gift can be run as a rich man’s gift if you find a way to sell stock in it.
21oo is going to be a revolution. The rich will wonder what happen.
Hugh
Stirling, I think the revolution will come considerably earlier as the world destabilizes and global climate change destroys more regions of our country. I have been surprised that after having written for several years that billionaires do not earn their wealth but accumulate/loot it from the rest of us, I am seeing this idea show up even in the main stream media.