I also have a suspicion that a lot of this apparent wage increase in the third world is just more accurate accounting for the costs of the same items they have available (i.e. food).
Impoverished economies utilize a lot of farming for personal consumption and barter. Simply having a more accurate representation in dollars how much some half starving family in Chad gets per day, would result in an apparent decrease of their poverty. Likewise, breakdown of local social structures would also result in more monetary exchange and less non monetary exchange, resulting in an illusion of improvement.
I feel like Pinker with his "Life has become better" stance has this wholesome image of a happy optimist. But the "[Life has become better](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_has_become_better), life has become happier..." is a direct quotation from Joseph Stalin, who uttered those words (in Russian) with that exact same deceptive purpose as USSR was heading into another famine, as Pinker does as the world is heading towards a climate catastrophe.
This is not to minimize how technological progress has improved agricultural efficiency and medical care; Stalin did
also attribute the fruits of technological progress to his political system.
Complacency is not harmless, and there is nothing cute what so ever about optimistic deception of this kind. To my cultural background, this is not new at all; now instead of serving a totalitarian communist state, it serves, frankly, a very awful world order with very limited freedom of enterprise and movement at the world level (me and you may have a very easy time receiving capital for some stupid juice squeezing startup, but majority of the world does not have this privilege). A world which is heading towards AGW driven habitat loss combined with prohibition on movement (i.e. national borders). It is as ugly as things like this get.
A lot of it also is moving people out of subsistence economies into the monetary economy. A forager makes no money and spends no money. A day laborer makes a shitty wage. But since the day laborer has a nonzero income, they seem like they're wealthier than the forager, from the perspective of a bean-counter, even though the forager has no job and no rent to pay.
>Pinker is how much scientific / medical / technological progress he assigns to neo-liberal economics
I consult psychologists for economic policy; for dental work, I prefer the auto mechanic.
While I agree that Steven Pinker is full of shit, the first point seems to me to be dangerously parochial: Privilegieng the experience of a few people in the west compared to much larger groups elsewhere. Especially when talking about global trends. He is wrong becuase people in the third world aren't actually getting richer.
>My second complaint about Pinker is how much scientific / medical / technological progress he assigns to neo-liberal economics. Human knowledge is cumulative, and scientists, engineers and tinkerers will go about their work without a care in the world for the latest "Free Trade" deal that's coming down the pipe, and they'll continue advancing human knowledge under liberal democracies, monarchies, feudalism, etc. Steven Pinker and his ilk are stealing the valor of the scientist and the engineer and assigning it to the businessman and the middle manager.
What really gets me is that he's also seen as a champion of science... as he's doing this? And this doesn't apply just to him, so much of this appears interchangeable.
COVID-19 is projected to push more than 70 million additional people
into extreme poverty, and hundreds of millions more into unemployment
and poverty.2More than 250 million people are at risk of acute
hunger.3
Much of this supports arguments already made by Jason Hickel and he’s
sneered at Pinks here.
Other great sneer-material on the topic is Mehdi Hassan’s interview with
Pinker. Hassan really has mastered the art of confrontational
questioning bringing out the best (or worst) in his guests.
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Scary covid news in there too:
Much of this supports arguments already made by Jason Hickel and he’s sneered at Pinks here.
Other great sneer-material on the topic is Mehdi Hassan’s interview with Pinker. Hassan really has mastered the art of confrontational questioning bringing out the best (or worst) in his guests.
Ah this is good, who asked a while back why pinker was bad? Hope they read this.
It turns out the Pink was the stink the entire time!
eww