A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
<i>The process of forcibly integrating colonized peoples into the capitalist labour system caused widespread dislocation (a history I cover in The Divide).  Remember, this is the period of the Belgian labour system in the Congo, which so upended local economies that 10 million people died – half the population.  This is the period of the Natives Land Act in South Africa, which dispossessed the country’s black population of 90% of the country.   This is the period of the famines in India, where 30 million died needlessly as a result of policies the British imposed on Indian agriculture.  This is the period of the Opium Wars in China and the unequal treaties that immiserated the population.  And don’t forget: all of this was conducted in the name of the “free market”.</i><p>This paragraph basically backs up all of Pinker&#x27;s criticisms. No one advocating for neoliberal capitalism would suggest that any of the evils of colonialization are the policies that most quickly brought prosperity to developing nations. Pinker is advocating that as economies become more free, they become more prosperous. There&#x27;s nothing free about forced labor or death marches.<p>The bit on &quot;absolute povery numbers&quot; is insane:<p><i>The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981, from 3.2 billion to 4.2 billion, according to World Bank data.</i><p>This willfully ignores the fact that the world population has gone from 4.5 billion to 7.5 billion, because of plummeting mortality rates and access to healthcare and infrastructure. 3 billion extra people survived in 30 years. That&#x27;s CRAZY! We should be having parades about that everyday.<p>And the main problem with his poverty metric is that he&#x27;s changing the numbers to obfuscate the progress. It doesn&#x27;t matter if you use $1.90&#x2F;day, $3.20&#x2F;day, $5.50&#x2F;day or $7.40&#x2F;day. What matters is that fewer people live on the wrong side of the line today than they did yesterday, and fewer people did yesterday than the day before, and that has happened every single day for the past 30 years.<p>Almost every example he uses of capitalism being bad are really colonialism enforced by state power. He rightly points out that some countries enjoyed increased prosperity when they freed themselves from their colonial powers, but that only enforces Pinker&#x27;s arguments.<p>Hickel spends most of this piece turning Pinker&#x27;s arguments into strawmen. It&#x27;s a marxist rant with cherry-icked stats that don&#x27;t actually support his position. He should rightfully be dismissed as a bad faith actor in the conversation.