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Comment by allworknoplay | Hacker News Reader

Most people here seem to be missing the point: it’s not that poverty hasn’t been moderately improved over the past 30 years, but rather that Pinker’s work has had an incredibly outsized impact on policy and influence on media narratives.

Simply put, Pinker and Gates have tricked much of the world into thinking neoliberalism is the best thing ever, even though the data actually shows that the majority of the improvement comes from other brands of economic policy and that most of the wins overall are going to a small number of extremely wealthy people. It’s not abjectly terrible but also not great, and when our capacity to improve poverty has improved so much, isn’t there a moral imperative to do better?

Here’s an episode of one of my favorite podcasts that features Hickel as a guest:

https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-58-the-neolib...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/citations-needed/id12585...

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"even though the data actually shows that the majority of the improvement comes from other brands of economic policy"

Can you expand on this? Genuinely interested.

They are referring to Chinese and other Southeast Asian policies, as Hickels said in his post.

What they won't say is that those policies are fundamentally capitalist in nature. China's economy is capitalist at its core, with a super powerful state (that happens to be remarkably repressive to its citizens, an inconvenient fact Hickels simply ignores) that engages in protectionism for specific national industries.

Hickels is trying to get us to implicitly assume that Chinese policies are socialist and that non-capitalist policy is responsible for their gains, but he won't say it directly because he knows that would be an outright lie.

I didn’t say markets are a bad way to value goods, man, I said china’s state planned and financed approach to the market has produced the gains Pinker is saying neoliberalism should get credit for. What we’re talking about here is the false idea that America’s approach to capitalism is responsible for very much of the global reduction in poverty, and whether we should consider other modes instead.

The statistics Hinkel cites are fairly clear: the bulk of the reduction in poverty (which he disputes in overall effect but agrees has happened at some scale) has been from economies like China that operate with very different economic strategies than the neoliberalism Pinker and Gates advocate.

Read the article or listen to he podcast, they’re both good! :)

And: apologies if I’m not being clear about something, unlike the below commenter seems to think I’m happy to expand on what I’m saying.

I just happened to listen to that episode yesterday, it's a good one. I didn't know Hickel before, but he's one of the best guests they've had.

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