For the first time ever, the number of poor people is declining everywhere
economist.com
economist.com
However, the 24/7 news cycle drums up everything that is negative and hence most of "feel" that it is getting worse.
When I learn of something terrible or even of a minor crime or injustice, the first thing that comes to my mind is along these lines: "There is obviously some ideal we're working towards, but the current system is inherently flawed; so what can I do to hack this system and make it better?"
Maybe someday we'll have the kinks worked out and will have managed to minimize the "bad" things happening throughout the world. And I believe the news will have ultimately played some role such improvements. The day we see more good news than bad will be a great day.
It also tends to focus on exceptional events rather than on broad trends (positive or negative).
The interesting part of the article is that the biggest benefit has been to those in abject poverty: "Most of the progress has been concentrated among the poorest of the poor—those who make less than $1.25 a day. The bank’s figures show only a small drop in the number of those who make less than $2 a day."
One interesting bit buried in the lede was that the article also highlights the benefits of counter-cyclical fiscal expansions among governments. Those that expanded government programmes held down the damage caused by the recession. I would be interested in seeing if those that tried austerity measures suffered more.
Update: changed last sentences to better reflect the point I wanted to make.
Enrichment would leave them -- well, enriched, and exploitation would leave them poorer. These possibilities are diametrically opposed, unless you change the referent of "them" midargument.
A country can be simultaneously enriched and exploited if the people in the country are not equally enriched and exploited, which is usually the case. It doesn't have to sum out.
Also you need to consider that you can be enriched by one factor and exploited in another. Say I pay you $10,000 for your kidney and you agree because your family is destitute. I have both enriched and exploited you.
Let's step back a moment: Let's say person A has a widget, which he values at $5. Person has $20, and would like a widget, which he values at $10. In a free market we would expect these people to negotiate and reach an agreement where A swaps the widget with B in exchange for between $5.01 and $9.99 of cash. The aggregate benefit of the transaction is $5 (that is, as a society, we are $5 better off after this transaction is made), and A and B are each somewhere between $0.01 and $4.99 better off.
In this simple model, clearly both sides are benefiting, or if you prefer, are being enriched. Question: Is anyone being exploited? Does it depend on the price? Or do we need to know more details about the transaction, and if so, what?
I think most people intuitively have one of two reactions:
1) "Unless fraud or force is being used, of course nobody is being exploited. Both sides enter into the transaction with open eyes, and both sides benefit. They can negotiate however they want to divy up the $5 in benefit - but as long as fraud or force aren't used, this can't be exploitation."
2) "Well, we need to know more. If one side has a lot more power than the other, they might drive the price unfairly far to one side or the other. If A is a large factory churning out widgets, a price of $5.10 might be a perfectly reasonable wholesale price; if A is peasant hand-crafting widgets and B is a multi-national widget trader, maybe anything less than $6 may represent the unfair exploitation of A. Conversely, a price of $9.90 might be fine if B is a collector of rare widgets, but even $8 might be exploitive if B is desperately trying to find a widget to repair his generator after an earthquake. We just can't know."
I don't think either response is inherently more correct - both definitions are valid. But, obviously, they conflict. :) Also, in my experience people rarely, if ever, will change their initial intuition. Either you think exploitation is only the result of fraud or force (ie, using slave labour to produce widgets), or you think exploitation is involved in any transaction with a price that seems "unfair" (to you, based on fuzzy and usually undefined metrics).
As a result, I'm not sure discussions of exploitation really make a lot of sense. Given the same objective and universally agreed facts about, e.g., Foxconn, a certain chunk of the population will say "that's obviously not exploitation" and a certain chunk will say "that's clearly exploitation", despite there being no real disagreement about what's actually taking place on the ground.
Sure. But that's how it works. If I pay a photographer to take my portrait then I am exploiting as well as enriching him, it's a 2 way street of trading things the other person wants. In an unequal relationship such as between the developed and developing world then sometimes the exploitation can seem a bit much compared to the level of enrichment. However, at present there is no known better way to enrich the developing world. In the short term it may seem like it's only exploitation but in the long run the overwhelming likelihood is that it pulls people out of poverty. And this has been true not just in recent times in the countries I've listed, and others, but also farther back in countries like Japan and the US.
However, I should make clear to differentiate trade from other kinds of work. It is very possible to make use of labor in the 3rd world without enriching the people there. There are certainly a good number of examples from the history of colonialism where that was the case. But manufacturing seems to be fundamentally different.
(http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94721/AFRICA-High-cost-of-chi...)
(http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94939/ZIMBABWE-Child-labour-o...)
(http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94822/KENYA-Gold-mining-beats...)
Lewis Lapham said something brilliant and hilarious about this in a Google talk: people who wonder why the news is always so negative haven't noticed what the positive news is: it's the commercials! Crime, war, and terror, but Tide washes the dirt right out of your clothes!
But yeah, choice, and its cousin perspective: If a bad day involves not eating or your brother dying from preventable disease, it's not hard to see how a meal every day of the week and good health can translate into happiness.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9cebd444-cd9c-11de-8162-00144feabd...
i went to iceland and only found nice, cheerful people. i am from austria, so did blend in a bit. if you're nordic and visiting uganda your appearance alone makes you something special and easily recognized (and potentially wealthy, so treating you nice might pay off).
that's why being a short-term visitor teaches you practically nothing about a culture. you need to live and work there to actually see the true nature of everyday people, you're novelty needs to wear off.
exceptions to this exist, some cultures simply treat foreigners/tourists badly. classic viennese coffee houses have some of the most irritating waiters on earth, embodying the anti-thesis to the US-services-smile. try getting a cheque in under 5min, i dare you :)
So, in general, the empirical evidence points to 'more money = more happiness'.
The literature on this spans decades, a 'popular' paper of the last few years that references much of the historical papers and as such can serve as a starting point is [Stevenson & Wolfers, 2008] (http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/papers/Happiness.pdf).
(a quote in the 'community' on this topic nowadays is (although I haven't been able to verify a source for it): "the average Togolese man would be hospitalised for depression in Denmark.").
Often people in the West just see people in Africa as victims, based on what they see in the media. Start seeing them as humans.
The average Togolese man would be hospitalised for depression in Denmark.
That sounds a bit odd to me, though. How come the suicide rate in Africa is much lower (close to zero) than in Europe?
Well sorry to sound like a grumpy grandpa, but if anything, this site needs less posts of higher quality, not more empty posts with the explicit goal of provoking replies.
"How come the suicide rate in Africa is much lower (close to zero) than in Europe?"
First, correlation between depression and suicide is not linear as you seem to imply. While I don't have the expertise to have an authoritative opinion on this matter, depression is much more complex than 'my life sucks'. It's just as much (more?) about 'I feel my life sucks'. Japan has a very high suicide rate, yet ranks high in various happiness indexes, and has first world GDP.
Secondly, your claim that suicide rates in Africa are close to zero is flat out wrong, as even a cursory google search would have revealed to you. To start there is the objective problem with getting data - many African countries keep little to no statistics on this. Then there is a cultural issue, which incentivises all involved actors to mask or under-report actual causes of death (this is Greenspan talk for: families report suicides as accidents to avoid the social stigma). Furthermore, even the data that is available and at least somewhat reliable, points to African suicide rates that are not substantially different from countries worldwide. For example, the only African country on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra... (Zimbabwe) is somewhere in the middle, just above (meaning: slightly worse than) Luxemburg, the most prosperous country in the EU. While Wikipedia isn't the end and all of data, I found that WHO data paints a similar picture when I looked into it a while ago when I had the same discussion, but that data is a lot harder to distill and I don't have time right now to do so.
I assume you mean more posts of higher quality. I agree with you in general, except that I know no site where the density of high quality posts is so high as here. If it was any higher, I would probably be afraid to post anything. However, social science works different than the topics the discussion is usually about on this site. The best university professors often start their courses by asking provocative questions, which make the students think for themselves. Sometimes the question is more interesting than the answer, if it provokes thought.
I guess we're going off topic here and into a not so interesting discussion, but with the advent of universal access to heaps of data, the old ways of thinking are becoming less relevant. What we need is data and evidence; facts, not talk. Now you and I are from a country where it is a high good to let everybody have an 'opinion' (I dislike that word and the concept because opinions are like assholes: everybody's got one and most of them stink) about everything, but luckily we're now beginning to realize the detrimental effects of the excesses of that, and are curbing it. Many scientific fields are moving the same direction: less vacuous talk, more substance.
It isn't. Africa is a large continent. Some areas have higher suicide rates. Other areas have lower suicide rate. I've already posted a supporting link. I'm not sure where you get the idea that the rate of suicide in Africa is near zero.
http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/09/07/the-perfect-salary-fo...
The link to the original source in your link is dead, so I'm not quite sure which paper they're talking about, but it sounds like the conclusions in the 'third phase' that I described. Issues are obviously much more complex than just 'make 1000 USD more to feel a lot happier', but I'd be surprised if the study would find a real plateau after 75K, rather than a tapered off increase per dollar amount. Some studies have plots that show relationships on a logarithmic scale (after a 'baseline' cutoff point, e.g. 30k or 50k), making it much move obvious that there is a continually rising correlation (or, to put it more bluntly, that yes, more money does make you 'happier', for certain definitions of 'happy'). Of course there are all sorts of methodological issues at that point, comparing between regions, across cultures, etc etc.
Let me put it this way. There are studies who conclude that e.g. people who own 5 million are happier than those who own 100k. This is easily explained: 5 million makes you 'independently wealthy', taking away the stress from having to hold a job to provide subsistence. Do people who make 75k a year typically have 5 million? No. Would it be reasonable to assume that somebody making top 1% in a community would have the same level of happiness than somebody else in that same community who makes double? Yes. So it's all in what you measure and compare. I'm sure the authors of the article referenced in your link acknowledge that, but that they just had a much more narrow research question; a question that lead to the magic number of 75k within the confines of their research. Those nuances get lost in the AP summary, then again in the WSJ summary, then even worse in the headline. I mean the WSJ blurb even acknowledges that happiness does continue to rise even after 75k.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, just that your link does describe an increasing effect after 75k and not a 'hard' plateau, so yes it's consistent with what I posted before.
No, Its probably Ignorance is bliss. Just take them around a trip across Europe and you will see that their happiness will vanish.
Peer comparisons are a major reason why many people loose their happiness.
The life expectancy at birth for someone in the Republic of Uganda is about 53 years. Only 2% of their population is over 65. (US: 78 years & 13%) So you're missing a bunch of old people who would be depressed, if they weren't dead.
Stigma means that you just don't see people with psychotic illness. People with mood disorders tend to self-isolate, so they're hidden too.
And mental illness isn't always recognised nor treated in Uganda.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine/2010/may/19/mental-health-u...)
> Mental illness does not receive the same attention as HIV/Aids or malaria, but is just as serious. A consultant psychiatrist at Butabika hospital, Uganda's national referral mental hospital, recently told The New Vision newspaper that 35% of Ugandans – about 11.5 million people – suffer from some form of mental illness, with depression being one of the most common. But barely half of these people seek medical attention from health centres in a country where people only associate mental illness with advanced and manic psychosis.
(I'm not sure that mental illness is as serious as HIV / AIDS. It is serious.)
But Uganda has made lots of good changes to their mental health treatment systems.
(http://www.ijmhs.com/content/4/1/1)
And there's a big "service user" group.
(http://www.mentalhealthuganda.org/)
This wikipedia list shows mixed results for developing world nations for rates of suicide. Suicide isn't a great indicator for rates of poor mental health, but it gives an indication.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...)
In some part of the world $1.25 (after converting to local currency) per day can buy generous meals 3 times a day and still be left with amount to pay for transport, clothing and housing. But in some part even $10 per day would make you poor.
Also, a person earning more than $1.25 now compared to last year doesn't mean he crossed the poverty barrier. The ever increasing inflation would have reduced him to a worse than poverty condition.
The calculation should be based on some quantity of food (amount of rice / starch he can buy with his earnings) etc.
First, as I said, the World Bank uses a PPP measure of $1.25 per day. PPP stands for Purchasing Power Parity, which means that this is measure doesn't mean "has US $1.25 of local currency at current exchange rates", but instead means "has enough local currency to buy a basket of goods and services which could be purchased for $1.25 in the US". Or in more concrete terms, the World Bank is defining it as "can buy as much rice or flour as would cost $1.25 in the US", not "can buy $1.25 of rice or flour at local prices".
Second, the measure is in constant 2005 dollars, which means that it is indeed indexed for inflation.
And now you know. :) (Other poverty measures do focus directly on calories or food, but food isn't the only good or service the very poor need to purchase. That's why the World Bank uses a basket containing a mix of goods and services. Nothing's perfect, but the Bank's measure is pretty good at accurately tracking the condition of the poor both over time and between countries.)
Edit - Without the internet, the forums and the good people, i would have remained as ignorant as I was before.
They use figures from 2005 and 2008 so they can't legitimately try to relate the economic downturn to improvements in worldwide poverty.
First sentence:
"THE past four years have seen the worst economic crisis since the 1930s and the biggest food-price increases since the 1970s. That must surely have swollen the ranks of the poor."
I'd expect them to at least address the point they are trying to make but nothing in the article supports it. The source of the article (the data) ends in 2008 so that's way too short to make any conclusion on the impact of the economic downturn.
Economies have some level of inertia and I'd say that it's inversely proportional to the said economy's dynamism.
They admit it themselves:
"This implies that the long-term rate of poverty reduction—slightly over one percentage point a year—continued unabated in 2008-10, despite the dual crisis."
Same for 2011, I'd say poor countries have seen very little investment coming from Europe in late 2011 as most economic resources were shed in the debt crisis and protection plan.
"A lot of the credit goes to China"
Absolutely true. Outside China, I have personally witnessed huge changes happening thanks to China and its economic power and fearless investments. They literally blow in Laos' economies and are largely responsible for Myanmar current boom, spending money where their mouth is.
In the end, the article does a great job at showing one of China's good side but they certainly aren't proving their initial claim.
For people with short memories, China is doing what Europe and the North America was doing during the post-WWII era. I bet they are going to make the same mistakes and it's already common knowledge they have started (they bribe foreign officials easily and generously).
Why exactly? We might not be anywhere near "good enough", but it seems dismissive to ignore it couldn't have been even worse before.
Iraq is in far worst condition after US invasion and occupation than it was before.
In fact I believe things were far better under Saddam then they are now.
Otherwise, why are N billion people by and large better off than however many people there were 200 years ago?
Edit: status is relative - if everyone else has a Ferrari, and I only have a Fiat, I probably feel poorer. However, I still have a car that is better, faster, and safer than anything that existed 100 years ago.
Edit#2: the above is one reason that worrying about what you have in an objective sense is a lot healthier than worrying about status/relative wealth.
EDIT: prosperity -> wealth
Wealth is what you have, in absolute terms. Status is a relative ranking.
This line of reasoning is flawed but its the best weath got. If you we find out that choise make you unhappy then we have a problem and I don't know how to solve it.
If you and I can each grow 100kg of wheat and 2 pigs per year when we work solitary, but if you can grow 400 kg and I can grow 4 pigs if we specialize and trade wheat for pigs, then we are both objectively more wealthy in the second scenario.
Why would you want to avoid inflation? Money is only a measure for wealth at one point in time, for the rest it's just a tool to provide liquidity and efficiency to markets. What do you mean by 'scarcity being used as a yard stick for money creation'?
So perhaps comparing the wealth of people in 1800 to today isn't actually that productive, because the baseline has increased?
I think maybe my view of economics is flawed. My basic premise was that traditionally cost has traditionally been defined by scarcity of an item / service and consumer demand. In which case there's no limit to scarcity (say through sale of IP) how can the system work without bubbles developing / the economic system breaking down?
Likewise how can everyone be wealthy when wealth is measured relatively? (i.e. how wealthy you are is defined by how wealthy your neighbour is).
I think I need to read a bit about economics in general.
EDIT: prosperity -> wealth.
How do you conclude that a good with unlimited supply (which is I suppose what you mean by 'no limit to scarcity') would lead to bubbles or economic breakdown? It just means that in theory in a system with perfect substitutes for these goods, the cost would gravitate towards production cost.
The whole point is that prosperity isn't measured relatively. (well you could, but it doesn't make much sense in most cases). Prosperity is quality of life. Would my life be better if my neighbor doesn't have money to take his daughter to a doctor but I do? Only if I was a sociopath, which the majority of us aren't. When the tide rises, all boats go up. And yes there is evidence that in the margin, our feeling of well-being increases when we are higher on the social ladder, but that's a separate issue; "prosperity" and "feeling of well-being" are related but not the same.
If I can take an item of IP (a music download) and sell it indefinitely at fixed rate, and distribution costs are very low; what is the basis for pricing that item when it isn't linked to anything concrete in the physical world?
Could the attribution of money to virtual goods without any link to a physical resource lead to bubbles / economic breakdown, because there's no ceiling on the amount of wealth that can be generated from it?
> The whole point is that prosperity isn't measured relatively.
I'm (incorrectly) using 'prosperous nation' as a synonym of 'wealthy nation'.
The same basis that is used to price physical goods: demand, or rather, the maximum a consumer is willing to pay. Supply and demand are not a pricing strategy, they are macro concepts that gravitate towards equilibrium.
If I am Apple and I sell iPods, how do I set its price? Not by looking at how many I can produce, but by looking at what people will pay.
You are confusing two things: - limited supply: there are only a few items of something, and therefore they are valuable. - substitution options: people want to pay for this song because it's the one they want to hear, not some recording of my neighbor playing his ukelele.
"Could the attribution of money to virtual goods without any link to a physical resource lead to bubbles / economic breakdown, because there's no ceiling on the amount of wealth that can be generated from it?"
No, although I'm not quite sure how to argue because I don't understand the assumptions leading to this question. An economic 'bubble' is, generalized, a sociological phenomenon where people ascribe an unrealistic value (as in, real value) to a good (the 'irrational exuberance'), leading to a bidding war fueled by the prospect that this value will continue to rise. Then at some point, it becomes clear that the good is overvalued, and the people who at that point own the goods are left hanging, much like musical chairs. If they borrowed to pay for the goods, they're double screwed because now they can't pay on their debts, the effects of which can then ripple through the economy. Bubbles don't come from too much wealth being concentrated in one hand.
> No, although I'm not quite sure how to argue because I don't understand the assumptions leading to this question. An economic 'bubble' is, generalized, a sociological phenomenon where people ascribe an unrealistic value (as in, real value) to a good (the 'irrational exuberance'), leading to a bidding war fueled by the prospect that this value will continue to rise. Then at some point, it becomes clear that the good is overvalued, and the people who at that point own the goods are left hanging, much like musical chairs. If they borrowed to pay for the goods, they're double screwed because now they can't pay on their debts, the effects of which can then ripple through the economy. Bubbles don't come from too much wealth being concentrated in one hand.
So if the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay for a virtual good increased through un-realistic lending over a period, that could create a bubble.
I suppose the part of the equation that's open to 'interpretation' is the amount of money people are prepared to pay when there is no physical counterpart or cost associated with a sale. It does seem (at least to me) that DRM tries to introduce artificial scarcity specifically to maximise that amount.
You're right - I was assuming that limited supply was the basis for pricing and, that not having a limited supply could upset the balance of economics.
Artificial scarcity is when monopolies control the supply of a good to maximize prices (this is an example where pricing is influenced by supply). For example, the De Beers company for years controlled the supply of diamonds to keep prices high. Similarly, OPEC controls oil prices by throttling oil production. As you see, artificial scarcity is not connected to whether a good is physical or not. Even stronger, artificial scarcity is meaningless for digital goods, precisely because the marginal cost of production (how much does it cost to produce one extra item) approaches zero.
I would argue that that some consumers are at loggerheads with the prospect of paying for IP simply because the cost of production is so marginal (due to the fact that a copy can be made for no cost).
The second or later copies can be made for virtually nothing. The first copy is often very expensive to make. Think about Toy Story or the SMiLE album or Stephenson's books.
Be careful: a lot of purveyors of "economics knowledge" on the web are trying to sell you an ideology along with it.
This is fairly neutral: http://www.introecon.com/
A good author is Tim Harford, who has some "popularized" economics books that are, once again, reasonably neutral.
In particular "The Undercover Economist" and "The Logic of Life".
That's some of the current worry with oil, that increased consumption by China et al will mean that oil is more expensive in real terms, and alternatives won't appear fast enough, meaning that Americans' overall standard of living will decrease, as they're forced to either make do with less oil (and stuff oil is an input to), or forego other luxuries to pay for the oil (and indirect-oil).
Past poverty levels, "wealth" becomes much more relative in that it involves wages, imo: a measure of whether you're "well off" is whether you can afford to pay people to do things for you, whether it's clean your house, serve you in a restaurant, tend to your cruise ship, design your website, or work for your company. That definitely depends on relative rather than absolute numbers, with a bigger differential meaning that you can buy more hours of other people's time.
I'm almost certain this is going to come off more Whiggish than I intend it to, but do you believe this was true in 1912/1812/1512/12AD? I'd be willing to bet it was.
In fact, I think I'd go further and be willing to guess that the further you go back, the more inconceivable equality of resource use becomes (again without the explicit implication this is an unbreakable line upwards).
And they aren't a very rich country now, after they lost all their colonies.
I don't wish to be harsh here, but how much of west's wealth is their own hard earned through their sweat is a question to ask.
It took me a bit to realise that you did answer the GP's "point".
There are also a lot of wealthy European countries that had a minimal presence abroad in the 19th century. There doesn't appear to any correlation between the modern wealth of western countries and their past colonialist ambitions.
(Some might argue that America is a de facto empire today, but even then most of its wealth is due to trade).
Very, very unlikely. The most relevant example of a modern fall from economic grace is the descent of Argentina, from the seventh-richest country in the world in 1900 to somewhere around 50th today. However, if anything, this had a large negative effect on the economy of South America (which stagnated as Argentina fell), and the modern economic rise of Chile and Brazil seems to be helping the countries surrounding them, or, in essence, prosperity is contagious, rather than conserved.
Trouble is, every one has an agenda and its really hard to ever know the truth. I have no idea if this is self serving fantasy or reality.
If you want to offer alternative interpretations of the data, or point out specific methodological flaws, or whatever, by all means do so - but now you're just saying 'meh I don't like this guy's ideas, he must be a shill, but I guess we'll never know because nobody can know these things anyway' - the most toxic nihilistic and intellectually dishonest 'reasoning' imaginable.
(The World Bank is hardly a neutral figure. Otherwise, how could the Bush administration move the neoconservative Wolfowitz from the Pentagon to head the World Bank? Did the world's population directly vote him in? It most certainly is a "special interest group", in the sense that it acts in the interests of a tiny minority.)
That said, in-depth dissections of the claims themselves are certainly good, like this critique: (http://www.stwr.org/globalization/world-bank-poverty-figures...)
Seems full of questions rather than accusations, and I didn't see obscure mentioned anywhere.
This is pretty close to ad hominem. No substance, just casting aspersions on the Economist's character.
And a tortilla isn't a burrito. But if you put your Mexican fillings of choice in it and wrap it up it is.
An aspersion is in the eye of the beholder, of course. The poster says, don't trust them - they're capitalist. He then qualifies that by saying, well everyone has biases or agendas anyway. To me that doesn't really change the first part.
And, supposing you are serious, what would you replace it with?
He wants to replace it with what every anti-capitalist wants to replace it with: a government controlled economy with ridiculously high taxes.
Whip these together and you've just made yourself a mediocre high school essay thesis statement.
I truest in the basic market mechanism (people trie to make there own lifes better by joining the market) this has worked well for a long time.
Amazing that we can look at those statistics and think that there is significant progress or not be distressed by the inequality.
If you honestly assess this fact that almost half live for less than $2.00 per day versus the "first world" consumption then you will come to the conclusion, as I have, that civilization is a myth. This is incredibly unjust.
What is your time-scale? And what would constitute "significant progress"? For all the wars and all the Sudans that we still have left in the world, I still think we are in much better shape than the Romans. Or Feudal Japan. Or XVIII century France.
I remain optimistic.
Simply untrue. http://rs.resalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/worldin...
"Amazing that we can look at those statistics and think that there is significant progress"
http://www.gapminder.org/world/ (hit "Play")
"This is incredibly unjust."
"To help clarify the matter, get rid of everyone else and put our worker on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit. If he's bad at it he'll work very hard and not end up with much food. Is this unfair? Who is being unfair to him?"
You are entitled to your opinion, but your response doesn't even address the reason the poster referenced the article. Instead, you launched into some diatribe about evil rich folk. Reading the full article probably won't change your opinion, but it does address this "us vs. them" mindset you are in to some degree. It also contains well-reasoned arguments for variation in income, including the one the grandparent post mentioned.
From PGs article: But since for most of the world's history the main route to wealth was to steal it, we tend to be suspicious of rich people
Your jpeg link has a graph with an unlabled axis and no source for the data.
A commonly accepted figure for people living on less than $2 per day is between 2billion and 2.7billion.
But that ignores the people living very close to that, who are at risk of severe hardship if they have a failed harvest.
(http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/05/poor_econo...)
> "To help clarify the matter, get rid of everyone else and put our worker on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit. If he's bad at it he'll work very hard and not end up with much food. Is this unfair? Who is being unfair to him?"
Now introduce one other person, on a different island. This person alters the environment; more rain, less rain, hotter climate, different water temperatures and salinity etc. These all make it much harder for the first person to grow crop and catch food. Sometimes his home is destroyed in flooding. The second guy is okay, he's living comfortably. He's a bit annoyed about the cost of petrol. If he watches a lot of news he may see the first guy being flooded out of his home. Is this unfair?
We won't be able to fix the problem if we can't see it. Most people are living in a false reality, a matrix reality created by the propaganda machine. The truth is that the first world exploits the second and third world and hogs the resources. These 'tons' of money are pittance. The US alone uses more oil than the next three or four countries combined. The second world barely even figures in.
Its very simple: the distribution of things is just quite unfair, deliberately so. Many countries are actively repressed. The World Bank provides loans as a mechanism of economic warfare or modern-day colonization. Again, a major problem is that many of the citizens of the first world aren't even aware of this.
So people in every country need accurate holistic information and to have an egalitarian perspective. The first part is not happening, as I mentioned. The second part is not the case either -- most everyone in the first world subscribe to a type of Social Darwinism which is just the latest rationale for brutal primitive classism.
"Its very simple: the distribution of things is just quite unfair, deliberately so. Many countries are actively repressed. The World Bank provides loans as a mechanism of economic warfare or modern-day colonization. Again, a major problem is that many of the citizens of the first world aren't even aware of this."
This is true in a way. The problem is that these countries let them self get hooked.
- They overspend on stuff (mostly military but infrastructure too) witch the often buy from other countries instead of investing in (and thereby building) there own industries.
- Then the get hooked and let the controll of there resources slide to private industrie from outside the country (witch would be ok if the taxed them enougth)
All this is happening and it is bad I agree but these countries have to learn that if somebody comes and offers something its in the sellers intresst.
This is not really diffrent from telcos offering bad deals you have to look at that stuff befor you buy.
All this said I agree that the first world does really bad things they often act like the give a helping hand but its not really a helping hand. I agree that this needs to stop. The World Bank and the IMF do alot of bad things.
I do not think that they deserve what they get but I would say that it is in part there fault.
"So people in every country need accurate holistic information "
You cant expect everybody to know enougth about economics but you can expect the countrie leaders to do so. The problem is that building up everything from with the west is much faster then doing it on your own and if you have bad leaders (diktators/persidents/kings) who only care for there themself, accepting "aid" from the west is the fastes way to get rich (a hole other problem is that sometimes the west helps them to stay in power)
tl:dr:
- What is called "aid" from 1st world often isn't
- Developing countries don't look close on what they buy
- Developing countries often have bad leaders
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I just don't like the term economic warfare or modern-day colonization. Its a Free-Market there are just good players using bad players, but the bad players did not get forced to play or to play the way they did (Expet when the are actually forced like Iraq).
A sovereign nation can only be forced with arms ever thing else is just strong insentives. There is a diffrence.
The book however is on my readinglist, I have heard alot about it.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_ra... [1] http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-Data/population.htm
First world consumption isn't something that's done at the expense of the 3rd world, it's something that sends money and skilled jobs to the developing world to help them bootstrap their way to wealth. Look at china, south korea, taiwan, etc. these countries have climbed out of 3rd world poverty by being "exploited" by the 1st world and have become developed and increasingly affluent. South Korea, for example, is rapidly becoming a 1st world nation. Would that more countries followed those examples.
Look around yourself in your country. Are people good enough there and no "occupy wall street" actions taking place?
I know how the things are in the helped to be "developed" countries, and one from one of those.
But who wins the global world is yet to be seen.
Give me an example where one countrie does something bad to a nother where they have no choise.
Edit
Typical example: Greek was not forced to do Austerity they do so because they want to get money. The could, and should (in my opinion) have devolted long ago, like Island there much better of now.
There might be some few good cases but the greater part of history just serves my pessimistic view. All the empires claimed to help less developed nations to become "better". Only for some strange reason the latter didn't want this help until persuaded with military force.
Good news is all signs point to economics not being a zero-sum game, and thus most of the responses you are getting are likely correct - your premise is flawed.
There is a continuum between two extremes - at one extreme, you have a zero sum relationship, where the total output (as measured by some sensible metric) is capped and it gets divided up, through to a view where there are unlimited resources and no constraints on growth, and the activities of people are synergistic but not competitive.
Both ends of the continuum are easily shown to be fallacious, but your argument only holds if you assume the unlimited resource end of the continuum is true.
The reality is that there are finite resources, and physical, biological and sociological limits how fast and efficiently they can be sustainably exploited. That said, there is clearly a lot of room for improvement in how efficiently we use resources - as many Internet startups are doing - as well as how sustainably we use them.
Materials like gold, or minerals for tech, are often mined in ways that most people would find appalling.
People have a perception of "fairness" and a big tech company making millions, billions of dollars of profit while people are mining minerals in dangerous conditions for very little money is seen as unjust.
For someone getting $2 a small amount of money, just 50c, is a huge raise, and it would have little impact on the end price of the goods.
Quite small amounts of carefully targeted money could make a big difference to developing nations - better schools, clean water, better medicine, etc.
It would be really nice to see tech companies devoting a bit of time and smarts (and maybe even a bit of cash) to tackling those problems.