Against Hickelism
noahpinion.substack.com
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https://www.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378730932308471809
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He wrote a scathing article falsely claiming that the poverty rate was increasing (contra to Pinker's claim), when according to his own data in that same article - it was actually steadily decreasing.
I've come to see him as a bad faith actor.
Roser also keeps constantly misrepresenting degrowth with a straw man that the global South needs growth. He has been told time and time again that every degrowth demand is only for the rich countries and everyone agrees the poorest countries needs growth, but still he makes the same claim over and over.
From this behavior, I've come to see Roser as a bad faith actor.
https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1376097068251541504?s...
If you think that someone has been operating in bad faith towards you for years, eventually you lose interest in engaging and choose the "block" option, which is what Roser did today.
Also, Hickel himself has engaged in uncivil rhetoric previously, e.g an unprovoked accusation of "mansplaining" in 2019.
However what I find very troubling is that the main point that Hickel raised in the blog post[1] – GDP data has the particular potentially crucial problems Allen has raised when used to assess historical poverty – Roser chooses to not actually address it, but instead throws blanket statements of there being continued discussion between academics of different datasets and their merits.
However this particular graph of historical extreme poverty is used by the most powerful people in the world to advocate for continuing with the status quo. That is why it caught Hickel's attention. It is therefore very important that the heading of the graph is very well justified.
As a layperson reading Allen's research, and knowing there is a discontinuation point in the graph 1981 when the dataset changes, I think the graph ought to be labelled very differently. Roser continuing to label it as "extreme poverty" knowing there is an ongoing debate about what data if any is a good proxy historical poverty, and not answering head on Allen's criticism, really makes me not trust Roser.
1: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-i...
Roser himself says that there could very well be valid criticisms that Hickel is correct on and he is incorrect on. The criticism that Hickel recently raised and that you mention here (regarding the validity of pre-1981 data) sounds like it could be one of these.
But productive dialogue between them was largely precluded by perceptions of bad faith and aggressive language ("mansplaining", etc) going back to before Allen's paper.
Now, regarding the specific criticism about pre-1981 data, I found this[1] and this[2] which seems to claim that the older data is adjusted for non-market income. Although, I haven't digged into it properly, so I can't comment on who is correct here.
"we want to emphasize is that those estimates of poverty do take into account non-market transactions such as subsistence farming.
"Yes, over the last two hundred years, there has been a major shift from people farming for their own consumption towards people working for a wage and purchasing goods in the market. But historians know about history and where non-market sources of income make up a substantial part of total income, it is very obvious that money would represent a rather silly indicator of welfare.
Just as we need to adjust for price inflation, accounting for non-market sources of income is an essential part of making meaningful welfare comparisons over time. Estimates of poverty and prosperity account for both market and non-market sources of income, including the value of food grown for own consumption or other goods and services that enriched the lives of households without being sold in a market."
I'm unable to relate an "uncivil" discussion on Twitter, Medium etc. to serious debate about politics and economics.
Except that the established colonies of Canada, Australia, NZ did exceedingly well, as did the long standing colony Hong Kong.
Japan and South Korea (to some extent Taiwan), rebuilt after the war(s) under Anglo-American protection and reformation, also did very well, far better than most.
Singapore? Continued it's colonial style operations.
Vietnam? No so good.
The more colonialism there 'was' the better they've done in recent years, unconditionally. Colonialism for the most part, was an early form of economic globalization, however unfair it was is a different issue.
It's only be controversial to ideologues.
To cherry-pick a few more points: Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, Pakistan. All of these were British colonies prior to Hong Kong (which was a British territory from 1841 to 1997). All of these have populations >150M (significantly greater than the UK itself!). All of these are in the bottom third of countries in terms of GDP per capita (and in fact worse off than Vietnam).
(Well, okay, India hovers right around that 33%ile depending on your choice of measure.)
Next on the list of Commonwealth of Nations by population are UK itself (wealthy, but wasn't a colony...), Tanzania (poor), South Africa (wealthy!), Kenya (poor), Uganda (very poor).
If the UK were to have been more deeply involved in India up until 1997 (i.e. a soft political distancing instead of sharp uprising) then India would be wealthier today than otherwise.
Empires are networks of interconnected components with different roles to play. Some places are integrated as sources of raw materials (in which case, all you need is a cheap workforce to extract the materials). Other places are trade routes, whose purpose is to host a garrison (eg. suez canal zone) so they need some level of infrastructure (ports, railways, air-strips, whatever). Other places are sources of markets required to stimulate industrial production, so there needs to be some level of disposable income to create demand for imports.
We did well when the "mother country" treated us and our exports as special. We pioneered frozen meat shipments as part of that. [1]
When the UK started treating us less favourably as it moved towards the EEC, (And because we were outcompeting the UK's own farmers), our economy was hit hard.
We had to pivot the entire structure of our economy, away from a government subsidised agricultural model (like the EU, UK, and US are still running) to a free market one in a manner rarely seen in so called free market countries - no tariffs, no subsidies.
It caused a lot of pain, bankruptcies, and suicides.
And once we no longer had preferential access to the UK market, we had to go out and find our own markets.
So while we initially succeeded because of colonialism, once the apron strings were cut to suit the needs of the colonial master, we succeeded in spite of colonialism.
Additionally it had been fully developed for hundreds of years so there can be no comparison.
It didn't get a choice in receiving them, unlike other countries.
But what's your point? That colonization doesn't always work? Sure.
It is widely understood that a you can be a slave or subject and be better off financially than a free man. A slave in the US South probably had better nutrition, food, technology, etc than many tribesmen in Africa, for example.
Is that an accurate description of your major point?
Doesn't mean it's also preferable, or that everything is about having more money...
Second, there weren't just field slaves, but also house slaves, eating quite well.
Third, their cooking is were a lot of "southern food" recipies originate from.
But all this is neither here, nor there. You're focusing on the wrong detail. The point I'm making is illustrative, it's not about whether all/most slaves where better fed.
It's about the opposite, that better fed/more wealth doesn't automatically equate to freedom/dignity etc.
They were still slaves.
In the same vein, "colonies were better off" is not the be-all end-all criterion.
Where do you get house slaves eating well from? One of owner female duties was to guard keys from food storage - due to a lot of stealing.
> Third, their cooking is were a lot of "southern food" recipies originate from.
Slaves cooking also required a lot of supervision and instruction. Due to them not being allowed to eat that, due to them not being assumed competent. They did a lot of work there, but that does not imply them eating all that great stuff.
> It's about the opposite, that better fed/more wealth doesn't automatically equate to freedom/dignity etc.
Yes. But material conditions really were not all that great. And also beyond abstract freedom, there were things like child being sold away from parents young, your loved one, brother, etc being sold to never been seen again.
Had much less focus on resource extraction than typical colonies. They were used more as a place for their own population to go and live.
> Japan and South Korea
Those weren't colonies. Those were more of puppet states used as buffers against nearby powers. The focus wasn't on extracting wealth it was focused on having a strong ally in the region.
South Korea, along with Manchuria, was a Japanese colony. The region had been developed, along Stalinist economic lines, by Shinzo Abe's grandfather "the devil of showa" making heavy use of forced labour (more so than Stalin himself, perhaps).
Korea (like much of Asia) faced the prospect of "decolonisation" after the atomic bombs were dropped, but instead the country fell in to an extremely destructive civil war. But their redevelopment did not happen until decades after the war. North Korea redeveloped rapidly due to Soviet assistance, by the 80's South Korea had caught up and by the 90's the soviet union had collapsed, terminating and even sharply reversing North Korea's growth, while the south had managed to work their own development plan with only the IMF crisis as a setback (which also served to totally discredit the Washington consensus in the political culture and has cemented the mixed model with effective state interventions as the South Korean model).
The explanation for the differences in outcomes across Asia probably has a lot more to do with what role each nation played in the British/French/Japanese/etc. systems. Colonisation looked a lot different in Hong Kong than it did in India. Hong Kong was a city-state trading hub peopled with privileged elites whose role was to oversee the Imperial trade network in the region. India was a vast source of indentured agricultural labour and raw materials.
Likewise in Korea, the north (and parts of Manchuria) were a manufacturing base in the Japanese system, linked in with nearby raw materials by railroads. South Korea was more a source of enslaved agricultural labour (concentrated in Jeolla province), with some exceptions like the strategically important port in Busan.
You seem to be replying to this with “well actually colonialism was good because blah blah blah blah blah blah.” This seems to be irrelevant to everything in scope but I guess you just wanted to get it out of your system. FWIW, I think the earlier inhabitants of the former colonies you claim as successful might not have such a rosy view of the consequences of colonialism, and while eg white farmers in Zimbabwe might have preferred colonial Rhodesia sticking around, the majority of the population are probably happier that the colony didn’t become more “established,” as you put it. Hong Kong is a pretty unique case as it was tiny, important, already somewhat developed when taken, and able to avoid taking part in the suffering of the communist revolution in China.
Hypothetically would India be in a better or worse position now if they never had the English language foisted upon them?
The British colonialists tried to end centuries of rampant violent slavery on the Malayan peninsular, this made them incredibly unpopular with the Sultans and resulted in the assassination of an administrator, a war and resulting cessation of the practice.
In certain cities like Melaka, slaves made up 30% of the population, were the British not to have intervened the use of slaves would have likely continued well into the 20th century.
The world is rarely black and white.
If the US had stayed in South Vietnam, they'd likely be living at the same standard of living as South Koreans, instead, they continue to live in a fairly oppressive system without rule of law, basic freedom of expression, high levels of corruption etc.
Thailand would have likely benefited as well.
Thailand is often cited as a 'special case' due to it's lack of direct colonization relative to the rest of the area.
Japan and South Korea were never American colonies, unless you're going to twist the term until it makes no sense. They're definitely not independent from the US (as they can't really ask the US to remove its military bases) but they're not "colonies" either.
> Canada, Australia, NZ
These were sparsely inhabited lands populated by un-industrialized societies that were mostly wiped out. Compare that to India or SE Asia, regions with well developed societies and economies, which were brutally subjugated, prevented from industrializing and whose economies were reduced to relying on primary and extractive sectors.
Colonialism absolutely hampered economic expansion in these societies.
Huh? India under the East India Company was the source of most of the world's manufactured cloth.
They're clearly talking about after the EIC under the British Raj. East India Company ended around the start of the industrial revolution.
> Real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981, by the World Bank. It is widely accepted among those who research global poverty that any data prior to 1981 is simply too sketchy to be useful, and going back to as early as 1820 is more or less meaningless.
> The data for 1820–1970 comes from a source (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002) that draws on the Maddison database on world GDP. That data was never intended to assess poverty, but rather the distribution of GDP — and that for only a limited range of countries. Data for the Global South is particularly thin, and there is very little that exists for prior to 1900. The data is not robust enough to draw meaningful conclusions about what was happening to people’s livelihoods during the colonial period.
> is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation
Concisely stated, these people are talking past one another about whether "extreme poverty" is a static or dynamic measure. Yes the UN tries to keep adjusting "extreme poverty" by inflation but as others have stated and common sense dictates, extreme poverty is a matter of lack-of-access. By that measure, the entire planetary population has slowly integrated, which makes Noah's view seem correct to him. This is heavily skewed by subsistence farming being counted as in the same kind of extreme poverty, which doesn't mean much sense to me. Not sure why anyone would care about this kind of finger-wagging.
1. We shouldn't use static, arbitrary lines. Going from $7.39 to $7.41 doesn't help much, whereas going from $1.50 to $7.00 helps immensely. An argument over where the single arbitrary static line should be drawn utterly misses the point.
2. The overall income distribution is shifting right, as people become richer.
These things both seem to be entirely correct, and they are devastating to Hickel.
> Noah Smith never seems to address Jason Hickle's point that the evidence based poverty line should be $7.40.
I found his debunking of the idea that we should be drawing a line at all utterly convincing.
"we want to emphasize is that those estimates of poverty do take into account non-market transactions such as subsistence farming."
One of the points that Smith is making is simply that using a fixed threshold for deciding on whether there has been meaningful progress in alleviating poverty is somewhat meaningless and misses what is actually going on. In the article, he shows how the distribution of per-capita income has changed, with larger parts of the population having more income than before, which seems to indicate that we are making progress in alleviating poverty.
If you were to look at the fixed threshold, you would miss this "shift" in distribution and thus conclude that hardly any progress has been made.
I think this is a meaningful argument, in that it points to us that we are "doing something right".
> Smith says we need to recognize increases in income that happen below $7.40. Such increases improve the lives of the poor, he points out, and we shouldn’t let that get obscured. I absolutely agree. Once again, I have not argued that we shouldn’t pay attention to low-level increases in income.
> Except in all his later writings, he has relentlessly refused to pay attention to those increases.
No examples are given. The next claim about moving the goalposts also is unsubstantiated. It might be true but I don't see where Hickle had ever moved the goalpost from $7.40.
I don't have a dog in this race. If you feel like I am somehow mistaken then please point it out, preferably without attacking my character. Of course you are under no obligation.
What good is financial progress if most of it goes to a minority and much of the population can not make things better because they cannot even vote?
And Southern States before Civil War, were also doing great financially. Is that all that's worth discussing?
The author isn't arguing that we should ignore all of the issues afflicting people across the globe and only look at the poverty line. He's countering the claim that people have not been lifted out of poverty.
The answer is no, but then again nobody claimed that it was. This was just the one article about the poverty line, so discussing something other than the poverty line is off-topic (which I called "illogical" from a debate perspective, in perhaps too formal of a tone, in hindsight)
Some getting a job as a cleaner but paying someone else to cook their food, and paying for the commute, isn't a real improvement in quality of life and reduction in poverty. Specialization and economy of scale is great, but at the low end of labor skill, "dollarizing" work at the expense of home economics and barter, is a sham.
Hickel's research makes the argument that this hoovering is exactly what is happening, on a massive scale:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2021.18...
If Noah Smith wants to rebuke this argument, he can't just "as if" it away. He needs to do the research that proves otherwise.
In the very next paragraph:
> Rather than being drained dry, [the global south] are advancing, growing their share of the global pie even as they deliver better lives to their own poorest citizens.
Unfairness isn't good. They probably agree that things are unfair and should be better.
Hickel is saying ~you're wrong about poverty because the situation is unfair~
Noah Smith is saying ~OK. But I'm not wrong about the fact that poverty is decreasing and the situation is improving.~
Pumping up GDP is not a sustainable way to reduce poverty. Gates and other people who benefit the most from the status quo continuing to advertise for this graph gives a very false sense of optimism.
1: $1.90/d is lower than the consumption level of slaves in the US in the 19th century. Helping people get slightly above the level of slaves is of course better than not doing that, but it is hardly enough.
I'm new to this controversy, but after reading these comments for entirely too long it appears in this thread that Hickel is writing numerous scathing articles misrepresenting the views of Max Roser, Steven Pinker, and Noah Smith to make this point. It's unfortunate.
For all its horrors and atrocities, the Soviet economy grew, and worked. Oh, not very well. But better than 0% growth. In 1910 the average Russian was an illiterate peasant. In 1980 the average Russian was a literate urban dweller with electricity and indoor toilets on their floor with twice the life expectancy of their great-grandparents.
This is, again, not intended as a defence of that monstrous system. It can be condemned on purely moral grounds alone, in my opinion. And it was not as efficient by most analyses, either. Still, I bring it up because, as a counter-example, it complicates both of the commonly made assertions mentioned in the article: that poverty hasn't decreased in any meaningful sense, and that the capitalist system is the only means of greater than 0% growth in material production.
On the eve of World War I, Finland and Russia were on near parity in terms of GDP per capita. It's GDP per capita was only 12% higher than the rest of the Empire. By the end of the Soviet Union, Finland has nearly three times the GDP of the USSR.
If the Russian Revolution had installed a liberal democratic government (as it did in the case of Finland), Russia would most probably look like a Nordic country today.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...
I think it is not possible to state what most probably would have happened had Russia established a liberal democratic government. For one, without the forced industrialization instituted under communism would Russia have survived the Nazi invasion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Civil_War#Red_and_Whit...
"Together with the harsh prison-camp treatment of the Reds during 1918, the executions inflicted the deepest mental scars on the Finns, regardless of their political allegiance"
"The Civil War was a catastrophe for Finland: around 36,000 people – 1.2 percent of the population – perished. The war left approximately 15,000 children orphaned"
I'm not sure how you'd measure that. The Soviet Union was the aggressor against Finland, and Finland was able to defeat them at great cost. I suppose there's the old saying about one of them fighting for more land and the other fighting for their life.
> For one, without the forced industrialization instituted under communism would Russia have survived the Nazi invasion?
Without Stalin at the helm, would they have entered into the Hitler-Stalin pact? That is, without the Soviet Union's support for Nazi Germany, would the war have happened as it did? Somewhat unlikely.
The pact was just about gaining time, for both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Both sides knew war was inevitable, they just didn't know exactly when.
The war wouldn't have happened "as it did" -- that's a tautology: "if you changed something, things would have been different". But if your question is "would war have happened at all?" then the answer is "yes". The Nazi political system required war, couldn't function without it, and it was spelled out in Hitler's writings from way before the war. Lebensraum, reparations/vengeance for WWI, extermination of inferior races, all of that requires war. And given the conditions of the world at that time, almost inevitably a highly destructive war.
To your last point, maybe and maybe not. Who knows what the prevailing thought would have been in the alternate scenario. Would Russians have been more like the war weary French in this scenario?
One thing I think is for certain. The claims of OP are not justified.
The trick is to subject that system to democratic control in a sustainable way.
It feels like a lot of the core principles are so strongly bolted in place that any argument we can have is the equivalent of arguing about paint and the positioning of furniture, not the actual floor plan anymore.
Is there any place in the current Western system to meaningfully argue the paradigm of private property rights, or the freedom to contract?
A super banal version of this is stuff like Google's "moonshots" that exist basically to just burn ad dollars, or Amazon's Prime Video stuff, which is rumored to exist so that Bezos can hang out with actors. These are not really _problems_, but they're massive initiatives and projects that are based around the whims of a few people. Let's not get started on a certain Mars-facing person...
I agree that bias and corruption are general organizational ills. Since I assume fixing those innate human traits is not possible, the second best alternative is to encapuslate them at the smallest possible entity and let those entities fight each other.
Most scholars seem to agree that the Soviet system failed simply because when the people realized just how stark the difference were in the standard of living between themselves and the Western nations, they simply did not want to live in the same system anymore [0].
[0]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/06/20/everything-you-think-yo...
No. Not at all.
China was centrally controlled and planned by one man 1949-1976. That was maybe the worst regime in human history, and killed 50-100 million of its own citizens.
After some turmoil China moved to a decentralized market model for the economy, which has produced the biggest raise in living standard in history.
The success and the central planning model happen in different areas. You might be interested in https://www.viki.com/tv/36371c-like-a-flowing-river - it's a recent period drama about the economic reforms of the 1980s.
By the end of the 1980s, they were producing home computers, stereo equipment, and televisions. Much of it may have been low-quality and/or knock off of Western gear (see: the myriad ZX Spectrum clones) but they actually did develop the manufacturing base.
A lot of Western countries of similarly low or developing economic position would just import American, European or Japanese goods. Interestingly, you did see something similar in places like Brazil where the import restrictions led to a fair amount of license-built and local manufacturing.
Still. The USSR produced about a billion tonnes of steel or so while it existed, with production exponentially increasing over time. That fact is a serious problem for a theory that claims this cannot happen under such a system. And many popular wonks do effectively make such claims.
I disagree with this assessment. For a transaction to produce wealth each counterparty gets more out of it than they put in. In many transactions this is true. The fruit of the agriculturist allows me to focus on computer typing. The things I type allow some people to make better decisions. At each step we each add value that produces wealth. Some transactions are entirely comprised of loss. Military spending is a form of insurance against catastrophic loss. While some industries capture the wealth from that sort of spending, they do not reciprocate with value. The value is turned into craters for training or worse and too often into decreasing the wealth cycles in other parts of the Earth.
These theories claim that free markets are better at generating wealth not that closed markets can't ever, under any circumstances work at all.
You are arguing with weakest possible form of argument, no surprise that you can show that it is low quality
When a nation is poor and backwards, due to, gosh, 50 years of 'Central Planning' inspired by Marx, well then it's not that hard for the state to do things like 'build roads'.
But factories in China, Tencent, DiDi etc. are not state creations. State supported, yes, and ultimately 'state controlled' (i.e. they state can do as they please with them), but it's considerably more 'free market' than otherwise.
It's ridiculous to split hairs by pointing out 'some of India's growth started in the 1980's' or that 'some things in China are state directed' when overwhelmingly the change was towards free markets, in some cases, with state oversight and control but not direction or planning by and large. China is one of the most 'free market' places on earth, lacking in all sorts of regulation - you just have to remember that 'for the important things', the CCP is in charge. (I should add that the banks are state owned and their loans are directed, however, they are backed by the Central Bank which is entirely politicized and is a primary driver of actual influence.)
The answer is 80% capitalism.
The Communist Manifesto starts with a chapter praising capitalism for bringing unheard of increases in productivity, growth. Even for trade serving as a "battering ram" that drives down xenophobia. Here's a quote praising capitalism:
> The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
He goes on to praise the advances brought by "free competition". Then he turns the tables and argues that the reason capitalism will eventually fail is that it is too efficient: That it will eventually bring crises of simultaneous over-production and under-employment; that it will automate away employment to the point that the proportion who can afford to buy their products will be unable to consume all that it can produce.
"Central Planning" has no basis in Marx.
Central planning is a largely Stalinist conception, developed out of ashes of "War communism" during the Russian Civil War. Lenin saw how it failed, hence New Economic Policy, which re-opened some markets and allowed for a softening of planning similar to what Deng later did in China. It was Stalin who undid most of those reforms again after Lenins death, and who went even further in making centralised planning a dogma, and it was based on his wilful misinterpretation of Lenins ideas, not on Marx.
Industrial government controlled policy based capitalism is how all Asian Tigers became rich. Big Chinese companies grow in in government controlled financial environment that supports them.
And it isn't so much that capitalism is a cause, as all the things that aren't capitalism absolutely scupper technological progress. Eg, in extreme cases bureaucrats literally ban technological progress because it is too disruptive (see, for example, encryption).
This is wildly wrong. Technological progress has literally existed for thousands of years before capitalism. Even under capitalism, technological progress often happens in universities with government money, often for military or claimed military purposes. For example, everything to do with the base of computer science has been created in academia and the military sector, before it was donated by government to private corporations.
And it moved veeeeeeeery slowly [0]. We had two ages named after a metal and one after rock. Post capitalism there have been Space ages, various revolutions, computers, etc, etc.
> For example, everything to do with the base of computer science has been created in academia and the military sector, before it was donated by government to private corporations.
And, again, if they hadn't handed it over to the capitalists there would still be all of a few tens of thousands of people using the internet to swap academic papers and no more. Everyone made the right decisions on that one.