We read, often, today, about how wonderful the world is. It’s the best time to be alive, and it’s just getting better!
The usual way this is “proven” is by saying that dire poverty is decreasing in the world. There’s a lot of problems with that, and the biggest one is that the definition of extreme poverty is too low.
According to Peter Edwards of Newcastle University, if people are to achieve normal life expectancy, they need roughly double the current IPL, or a minimum of $2.50 per day. But adopting this higher standard would seriously undermine the poverty reduction narrative. An IPL of $2.50 shows a poverty headcount of around 3.1 billion, almost triple what the World Bank and the Millennium Campaign would have us believe. It also shows that poverty is getting worse, not better, with nearly 353 million more people impoverished today than in 1981. With China taken out of the equation, that number shoots up to 852 million.
I’ve felt for a long time that his narrative was, to put it gently, bullshit. The full article is worth reading, because it goes into the way tiny statistical changes move the number in poverty by hundreds of millions of people. But the bottom line is that earning $1.25 a day isn’t enough, and anyone with common sense knows it isn’t enough.
Meanwhile, in India, we know that over the last 20 years, despite increased is GDP per capita, the average amount of calories being eaten is going down. And it’s not as if Indians, as a group, were overfed 20 years ago.
The truth is that neoliberal policies have been very bad for the developing world. Actual poverty decreased faster from 1945 to the mid 70s than it has since, and, although it’s not as important, GDP rose faster too.
The exception, of course, is China. But China did not implement the policies that the IMF and World Bank force on countries: The “Washington Consensus.” They did not open their markets wide, unpeg their currency, and move to cash crops and commodities. Instead, they, like all but maybe three countries larger than city states who have ever industrialized, pursued mercantile policies, managed trade, and moved steadily up the value chain.
This is the model Britain used. It is the model the US used. It is the model Japan used. It is the model South Korea used. Etc…nations only become free traders when they are mature industrially. And in most cases, when they do so, it is a mistake, though this goes profoundly against the current consensus ideology, which claims that free trade and monetary flows are virtually always a good thing.
Even before climate change, the world was getting worse for a lot of people. Not just for people in the developed world (though there is no question that Millennials in most first world countries are worse off than GenXers, who are worse off than Boomers were), but for people in most of the developed world.
You cannot wash the sins of the neoliberal consensus by adding in China’s numbers, when China didn’t follow it. And statistical games over a few cents are pathetic.
Things are bad now. They are going to get worse for more people than they get better, until we significantly change how we run our economies, and given the realities of climate change, maybe not even then.
Getting punch drunk on oil and coal for two centuries is all very nice. But all parties come to an end, and for a lot of people, this party included getting trashed by what amounted to home invaders.
It’d be nice if we figured this stuff out, and if we stopped lying to ourselves.
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Zac
Even ignoring material conditions and wealth/income levels, you have to acknowledge the mental health crisis in the 1st world, which is somewhat terrifying in its scope. Depression and anxiety are slowly becoming universal conditions. If people are suffering inside, it doesn’t really matter how many calories a day over the minimum they get, or if they get a 2% raise. One thing that actually isn’t that bad for Americans right now is that we don’t want for cheap calories anywhere, but Americans are miserable.
Zac
Following up, I think it has to do with the fact that the psychological/social realities of our societies have become so complex, and so cumbersome, that they create far more punishment than reward. It’s badly out of balance. I often think about an old Freddie deBoer essay called “Planet Loser,” where he says that America offers people only a very narrow and almost impossible-to-achieve version of success, but a nearly infinite array of ways to be a total, detestable failure. It was very sharp. A “successful life” is purely aspiration for most Americans, a sense of satisfaction and enjoyment of life is only for the people on TV. All other potential avenues for fulfillment have been foreclosed.
Hugh
It always comes back to what kind of a society do you want to live in, more specifically what kind of a society would you want others to want for you. Currently, the world’s political paradigm is kleptocracy playing out against the apocalyptic backdrop of overpopulation and climate change. Problems aren’t solved. They’re exploited. So the outlook isn’t good.
Willy
Current business models appear to have no limits for achieving profitability. I think of the American health care industry’s embrace of rent-seeking concepts – extracting ever more revenue while returning little of actual value in return for their consumers. But if medical reviews are any indication (never seen so many angry one star reviews for my own once beloved, fair and balanced, highly rated clinic), people are figuring this out. Next comes what to do about it.
Bill H
Thirty years ago we actually bragged in this nation about being 5% of the world’s population which consumed 25% of the world’s resources. We though we were very cool. I was saying even then that we were profoundly wrong to be doing that.
Everyone said not to worry, that the rest of the world would someday enjoy the same standard of living that we had. I said, no, do the math. That would require 500 times more resources than the planet has. For the standard of living to become equal, our’s has to be reduced, and reduced substantially.
That process is beginning, and we are profoundly unhappy about that. It hasn’t really dawned on the stupid people of this nation what is happening, but when it finally gets through to us our reaction is likely to be violent.
Peter
OOps, I hit the wrong key.
While these numbers are accurate this study cleverly leaves out the fact that the world population has grown from 4.4 billion in 1980 to 7.3 billion today which means that the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has been reduced dramatically over this time span.
someofparts
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/07/24/29672642/survey-of-seattle-landlords-shows-surprise-theyre-pissed
https://medium.com/matter/the-shut-in-economy-ec3ec1294816
Heliopause
One of the weird things about the world-is-slowly-getting-better-under-neoliberalism hypothesis is its irrelevance. Even if true the plain fact remains that there is an enormous amount of wealth in the world kept away from billions who need it. Right now, not three or four generations down the road. And the elites just keep puzzling over why everybody is so angry.
StewartM
But the bottom line is that earning $1.25 a day isn’t enough, and anyone with common sense knows it isn’t enough.
It goes beyond that.
My former college landlady, who grew up during the Great Depression, in contrast the stereotypes of ‘old-timers’, would always say “poor people today have it much rougher than we did”. That’s because she grew up on a farm, and she said that being poor then was not unlike the TV show “The Waltons”–you owned your own home, and grew your own food, so that not having money meant you couldn’t go into town to buy things–you had to fix things that broke, borrow them from someone else, or similarly improvise. (She did say the urban poor during the Depression had it rough; but then again, when many were poor people were more sympathetic because they saw the reality that poverty was a social problem and not an individual failing). By contrast, she said “poor people today own nothing, and not having an income stream means that they’re homeless and without food, something we never had to deal with.” During the Depression a common saying that reflected the reality she described was “we don’t have much but we have plenty”.
And what, if nothing else, the effect of the neoliberal order has had on the developing world but to take ‘poor’ farmers who may have lacked money but who had their own homes and could grow their own food, and make them “richer” in terms of monetary income but drive them off their land and deny them access to having home and food, and the increase in monetary income is not nearly enough to compensate for the loss, resulting in true poverty and misery, not less?
The whole exercise is nothing but a lie. And those who promote it (I’m looking at you, Steven Pinker) are nothing but liars, deluded in the best case, self-interested in the worst:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/02/steven-pinker-argues-the-world-is-a-safer-healthier-place-in-his-new-book-enlightenment-now.html
Neoliberalism’s trashing of human lives in the name of capitalism and profit is not limited to the developing world. A similar lie in the developing world is being promoted. Inflation is almost certainly running higher than the official numbers (even the BLS admits that heuristics may result in a 0.3 % underreporting) an the things you need (like housing and health care) outpace the official numbers. but it goes beyond even that. We’ve allowed rentier capitalism to rip off people at every step of their lives. TVs may have cost more in the old days per unit but once you bought them access to TV was free; now you have to pay a constant stream of money to get TV service. Internet access you now need to be gouged for (compared to prices in other countries) even to apply for a job at MacDonald’s. Lack of regulation has allowed corporate collusion like Microsoft/Intel and Apple to force people to purchase unnecessary upgrades (deliberate ‘obsolescence’ for equipment that should not be obsolete) and more.
Given all this, income for most people in the developed world hasn’t just “stayed flat” it’s actually DECLINED. Moreover, what it also says that all that wonderful wealth supposedly created by the neoliberal world order doesn’t exist–already growth rates compared to the 1947-1973 is anemic by even *their* accounting methods, and once you take into account the underreporting of inflation plus the fact that much of the wealth supposedly created isn’t real wealth (as in having real, new, things) but due to the inflation of paper assets only, then you conclude that neoliberalism isn’t about wealth creation at all, it’s just a massive paper asset transfer from everyone to the rich. At the same time, it makes life worse because it actually destroys the capability to make real things and to make them better; it cannibalizes the wealth created by industries that still do make real things upwards to into the more profitable business of financial ponzi schemes and fraud instead of allowing these companies to spend their profits on ways to make their real products more efficiently and better.
The anger by those whose lives are directly affected by all this has led to things like Brexit, and to Trump, and to neofascists in Europe, and the Steven Pinkers are just clueless to fathom why all the unwashed illiterates should be so angry when “things are so good”.
Ian Welsh
Whether or not the percentage in dire poverty has gone up or down depends entirely on what you think the dire poverty number should be, so that isn’t a criticism of the article.
Herman
Ian,
What do you make of the argument that violence is declining and that this is important evidence of real progress? I often see this argument combined with the poverty reduction argument by figures such as Steven Pinker.
I think Pinker is probably correct to a certain extent but that it is not necessarily evidence of progress if, for example, violence is being reduced through the growth of the police/surveillance state. If we are reducing violent crime because we are incarcerating massive numbers of people as we have been doing in the U.S. for decades is that really progress?
Also, I have to agree with what @Zac wrote above in the first comment about the current mental health crisis. Having a lot of consumer goods and convenience doesn’t necessarily make you any happier or mentally healthy. Even the Chinese, who have seen real growth in wealth, are probably less happy now than they were in 1990 when they were much poorer but had a stronger social safety net, the famous “iron rice bowl.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-happiness-hasnt-increased-2017-12
Herman
I forgot to mention this in my last post but the progress argument also completely misses the issue of inequality. For example, life expectancy is not increasing across all demographic groups in the United States and it is actually decreasing among working-class whites who are dying from “deaths of despair” related to alcohol abuse, drug abuse and suicide. Inequality also has other negative implications like reducing trust and increasing stress and anger as Ian mentioned in his review of the book “The Spirit Level.”
https://www.ianwelsh.net/book-review-the-spirit-level/
Neoliberal apologists like Steven Pinker usually downplay the negative consequences of inequality by only focusing on absolute poverty and prosperity.
Hugh
“Steven Pinkers are just clueless to fathom why all the unwashed illiterates should be so angry”
Our elites justify their wealth and privilege on the basis that they know more and better than the rest of us. So cluelessness, especially cluelessness in the face of the obvious, doesn’t wash. They know, but they don’t care. The Steve Plinkers of this world are there, not to analyze but to propagandize.
Re violence, foreclosing on millions of families sold dicey mortgages by profiteering banks is violence. Bailing out banks and the rich instead of ordinary Americans is violence. Sending millions of jobs to Mexico and China to shore up stock prices is violence. Lack of real universal healthcare is violence. Underfunding public education and then using that as an excuse to privatize it are violence. Pricing higher education out of the reach of most Americans is violence. Waging a war on drugs while turning a blind eye to Big Pharma flooding communities with opioids is violence.
StewartM
Peter
While these numbers are accurate this study cleverly leaves out the fact that the world population has grown from 4.4 billion in 1980 to 7.3 billion today which means that the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has been reduced dramatically over this time span.
No it doesn’t.
1.2 billion in 1985 in ‘extreme poverty’ at the $1.02 per day — out of 4.8 billion, our 25 %.
3.1 billion today out of a population of 7.3 billion at the $2.50 per day line — 42 %.
(And yes, at least for the US, $1.02 US dollars in 1985 equals about $2.50 today).
But hey, we’uns got more corrupt billionaires like yer boy so all’s good, right?
someofparts
This article is a window into the ruling class solipsism that keeps the machinery of global immiseration humming.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/on-safari-in-trumps-america/543288/
“The researchers I rode with had dived into the heart of America with the best of intentions and the openest of minds. They believed that their only goal was to emerge with a better understanding of their country. And yet the conclusions they drew from what they heard corresponded only roughly to what I heard. Instead, they seemed to revert to their preconceptions, squeezing their findings into the same old mold. … If the aim of such tours is to find new ways to bring the country together, … the chances of success seem remote as long as even the sharpest researchers are only capable of seeing what they want to see.
…
There was another way the tour had been valuable: As Third Way argued its preferred course for the Democratic Party, its on-the-ground research was already lending crucial credibility to its claims, she said. … “The fact that we now have this very direct experience that we can use to tell a story—we get listened to in a different way because we’ve figured out a better way to say it,” “
V
Violence in the U.S. is generally specified as being physical in nature directed at an individual or individuals.
Rarely is violence identified as coming from policies aimed at minorities, the poor, and general inequality. A lack of health care for all, is a form of violence, deadly in effect.
Given these attributes, the U.S. would surely rank as one of the most, if not the most, violent government/society on the planet.
b
> punch drunk on oil and coal
It’s nice that we are digging up previous civilizations and using them to progress ours.
Stirling Newberry
The Nationalist Economy is doing worse underneath Trump. Perhaps the neoliberal economy isn’t the problem – it is the holes that are not covered. The two largest are climate change, which gives use a property versus capital reversal. and not enough children, which is from the problem of living on a globe, but calculating by matrix. Matrices go on forever, globes run out.
peon
In the last 60 yrs the rural midwest has gone from small general farms with woods, fence rows, wild raspberries, large gardens, family milk cows and chicken flocks to large seas of corn and soybeans. Woods are cut (no one needs them for firewood on the family farm), fence rows bulldozed to make room for the large equipment that farms at this scale. Much food that rural people ate, fuel they used, recreation they had access to, that was not quantified in GDP numbers, or in any type of cash economy is gone.
I am sure this is true in every country that has undergone the neo-liberal push to produce exportable commodities for global trade.
Peter
@V
You’re being melodramatic and very unfair using this violence allusion. There are about 70 million people getting free Medicaid in the US and along with Medicare, VA, Obamacare, Indian Health Service and the often free or subsidised private health insurance which leaves about 10% of the population uninsured. This 10% are not the poor who get Medicaid but people who choose not to be insured. There are major problems with our system because of rising healthcare costs but that is also true in socialized systems.
Ten Bears
Globes run out – indeed. Seven billion on a planet that can barely sustain one, do the math. Were it not going Venus on us we would still be facing a crisis. It is a statistical inevitability.
Weather, “climate”, the atmosphere, the thin layer of potentially toxic gases we live in that envelopes the only ball of rock we know of we can live on, does not recognize the boundaries of “nation/states”. It’s already happening in Eurasia, where the “civil” wars are as much about water as religious idiocy, or oil. It may be beyond our comprehension. We are distracted by the politics, bloodshed and War, but the migrations out N Africa and the Middle East are drought related.
Ask the Neanderthal. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated. Or die.
We don’t have much time.
someofparts
FTC thread from Stoller, with action to take at #15 and #16:
https://mobile.twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1032996351800496128?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
“This is the heart of the political economy problem in America, using concentrated power to hurt workers, customers, businesses. It is what Facebook does. It is what Trump does. It is what a lot of elite Democrats made money from. This is why everyone’s mad.”0
All of the above is from Naked Capitalism this morning. The conversation is underway, so anyone here who wants to join the conversation and tell the FTC what you think is free to wander over and do that.
Willy
A lot of the common good is about regulating those few who are hardwired for dominance, and the far larger number hardwired to want to follow them. Theoretically, capitalism makes best use of the dominants by having them compete with each other while the supplicants happily work for improving their cause/tribe. Even more theoretically, common good comes from these efforts, at the end of the day.
But the dominants sure do seem to be pretty damned good at dominating by any means necessary, common good be damned, now don’t they?
XFR
I tend to fall back on life expectancy as the most reliable correlate of quality of life.
That “violence” is decreasing together with life expectancy suggests that either the definition of “violence” needs to be broadened from the merely physical sort or that “violence” needs to be seen as merely one part of a broader spectrum of outrages against personal dignity.
I think that in general any conduct toward an average person that might reasonably prompt violent retaliation on their part (absent societal deterrence) could be regarded as morally equivalent to violence against them in some real sense.
If violence decreases merely as the result of the powerful getting better at systematically suppressing retaliation of that sort, or because physical violence is systematically yielding to less obvious but equally (in the long run) deadly outrages, it would indeed seem rather fatuous to regard such a thing as an indicator of moral progress.