Comment by zeroname | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeroname | Hacker News Reader

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This is Bill Gates' infographic:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DxSZ58_XQAAoxM8.jpg:large

It does show a 75% in extreme poverty. That happens to be a straight down trend. Nobody even disputes this. It also shows a number of other things, such that "democracy" is actually stagnating. Bill Gates' actual remark on it is that people underestimate how much things have improved over the last two hundred years.

Hickel picks that one graph and turns it into the "Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing, he couldn't be more wrong" headline:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...

That's dishonest. First of all, extreme poverty is decreasing. That's the actual claim and it is true. Secondly, poverty even by Hickel's standards is also decreasing. It may not have been decreasing consistently over every single past decade, but indeed is decreasing today and for the past decade. Hickel then goes on to say that "the number of people living in poverty" has increased. Indeed it has, as has the number of people living. The actual percentage of people living in poverty has gone down.

So what exactly is the problem with what Bill Gates actually said? He never claimed that poverty is solved, nor did he endorse "neoliberalism" as the solution.

I don't care to litigate Hickel's argument, and I don't even necessarily agree with him. It just seems like you're ignoring the actual points Hickel made. The questions you're asking here are all answered in article, so maybe read it again?

The main argument is one of degree. Hickel isn't contradicting whether the trend is down or up, and indeed it's somewhat irrelevant whether the trend is down. What he's pointing out is that the infographic is quite misleading in the impression that it gives to the lay person. Extreme poverty has a specific definition that isn't very useful when trying to understand the big picture, because "extreme poverty" is below the line where you get enough food to live, and it's very far below the line where you can expect a reasonable life. The high level message that the infographic conveys is that poverty in general is nearly gone, where the reality of global poverty is quite different, and not going away as fast as "extreme poverty". Saying that Gates & Pinker never claimed poverty is solved is hiding behind a technicality. The social media they're sharing has a very clear implication, and most people aren't digging into the details and minutiae of this argument.

It would settle this whole thing to put all the trend lines for extreme poverty vs regular poverty vs lower class vs middle class vs upper class all on one graph. No matter what your opinion is here, it's true that using only extreme poverty on a single graph is cherry-picking and likely to not convey an accurate impression of the overall situation.

> The questions you're asking here are all answered in article, so maybe read it again?

I've only asked a single question: What is wrong with what Bill Gates actually said? Hickel doesn't deal with what Bill Gates actually said, he talks a great deal about things that he didn't say. Indeed I am ignoring a lot of these points because they are irrelevant to whether "poverty" or "extreme poverty" is actually going down.

> Hickel isn't contradicting whether the trend is down or up, and indeed it's somewhat irrelevant whether the trend is down.

It isn't irrelevant at all! The title of Hickel's article is "Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong."

There really are only three possibilities here: Poverty is decreasing, increasing, or stagnating. The data says poverty is decreasing. So how can Bill Gates possibly be wrong? Answer: He isn't wrong, Hickel just wants to talk about how neoliberalism and globalization is bad, i.e. not actually anything that either Gates nor Pinker claimed.

I don't know that Hickel's title was a great choice of words, and I do expect he's being intentionally inflammatory, but it seems like you're getting completely hung up on very literal, possibly pedantic, interpretation of only a few of the exact words written, and ignoring the primary broad implications being made.

> The data says poverty is decreasing.

The data show "extreme poverty" decreasing. It's a lot less clear that poverty in general is decreasing... stagnating would be more appropriate to describe overall global poverty. If you can ignore the specific claims and accept the argument as a whole, Hickel's thrust is simply that global poverty is not declining like the graph of extreme poverty would have you believe, so it's not doing justice to the issue of poverty to tweet around charts of extreme poverty in rapid decline, it gives the wrong impression.

> So how can Bill Gates possibly be wrong?

Again, Hickel's article covers this in quite some depth, with many reasons. If you don't like it, that's fine. If you disagree with it, that's understandable. But your incredulity here is misplaced.

> Hickel just wants to talk about how neoliberalism and globalization is bad, i.e. not actually anything that either Gates nor Pinker claimed.

You're probably right that Hickel wants to talk about how neoliberalism is bad. Tweeting to the masses a picture of extreme poverty in rapid decline, however, is a claim and is part of what Gates and Pinker "said".

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