Comment by zeroname | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeroname | Hacker News Reader

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> 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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