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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.