The World’s 2,153 Billionaires Are Richer Than 4.6B People, Says Oxfam

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-population-living-i...

India has also seen a large reduction in poverty over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India#/media/File:I...

Subsaharan Africa, however, is showing a rising level of poverty.

200 yrs ago I'd guess most people had to do back breaking labor most of the time just scrape by enough to eat. Hans Rosling has that video that claims washing machines as one of the best inventions ever because it relieved women of being forced to watch clothes for 6-8 hours a day. Saying the people didn't used to need money means almost nothing. Food and shelter were not free. They required labor.

I think I prefer the current world where I need money to the previous world where maybe I didn't but my actual lifestyle was horrible.

As for the 1981 quote, what's special about 1981. If we pick 1941? 1881?. I have no clue about poor countries but my first guess as to why poor places have stayed poor would not be "because the top 2000 rich people in the world"

My family left Bangladesh in 1989. In that time, purchasing power adjusted per capita GDP has tripled. Infant mortality has been cut in half, and life expectancy is up by more than a decade. Malnutrition is down by more than half. The brain drain is even slowing down. While my family left, many bright young people are staying to work in burgeoning industries. It’s a goddamn miracle. Unsurprisingly Bangladeshis are among the most supportive of free markets of any country in the world. This is true all over Asia, where there is a combination of people who have developed the institutions to support capitalism, but haven’t yet become jaded by all the wealth capitalism has brought them.

People who major in degrees like anthropology and use terms like “the global south” are dangerous. They’re selling snake oil. They’re anti-vaxxers or the people telling you to go on a fruit diet to treat your cancer. The gist of their pitch is this: “Ignore how all of the developed world got wealthy. Also, ignore how South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, etc. got rich. Also, ignore how Malaysia, Thailand, etc. are well on their way to getting rich. Capitalists don’t have any answers for you. We, the anthropologists, political scientists, etc., we have the answers.”

Complaining about “enclosure” of farming land? Really? They want us to go back to communal farming? Using “indigenous technology?” It’s like they fetishize our poverty. How about, instead, we do the same thing Europeans and Americans did to get rich? Empirical science, rule of law, stable government, property and economic rights, individual freedom, and free markets.

(Regarding the claim that poverty has actually gone up if you use higher income thresholds. Your article doesn’t cite sources. But World Bank data shows that even at higher extreme poverty thresholds, rates have declined dramatically: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/3....

Using $5.50 as the benchmark, it’s declined by 21 points since 1990. In South Asia (which excludes China), its down by 14 points. In Latin America it has been cut in half. The only place that it’s not moved is sub Saharan Africa, and that’s because those societies lack the societal institutions to support democracy and capitalism. Which is unfortunate, but anthropologists aren’t going to be able to do anything to fix that.)

That doesn't mean socialism or anything like it, nor does it mean basic income.

Socialists always seem to reach for brute force policy blunt instruments to bash economies into the shape they desire, which never work and do huge damage in the process. I am becoming more and more convinced that there's a heavy squeeze crushing the middle class in the west though, and similar forces are trapping a lot of people in developing countries in an economic no-man's land just above the most miserable levels of poverty but below anything we would consider acceptable.

Capitalism is a fantastic engine for growth, it's the best tool for improving people's lives we have, but we'll always need to make calibration adjustments to suit the circumstances. I think the right criteria for policy should be a balance between fairness and effectiveness. An equitable distribution of political and economic power and opportunity, consistent with a well functioning economy.

I did not suggest that both could not happen at the same time. You should expect people who have large assets to get rich faster than those who have virtually none.

Consider, the global economy produces $80 trillion A YEAR, and all the billionaires combined accumulated, total, over the course of MANY YEARS AND DECADES a current trove of $8.7 trillion.