Comment on History Channel

• Keeponstalin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Given these issues, it is clear that the standard public narrative about the history of extreme poverty needs reassessment. In this paper we assess this narrative against three indicators of welfare (real wages, human height, and mortality) for five world regions (Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and China) from roughly the 16th century onward. These datasets point to three conclusions:

  First, it is unlikely that 90% of the global population lived in extreme poverty prior to the rise of capitalism. Historically, unskilled urban labourers in all regions tended to have wages high enough to support a family of four above the poverty line by working 250 days or 12 months a year. Extreme poverty seems to arise predominantly in periods of severe social and economic distress, like famines, wars and institutionalized dispossession, particularly under colonialism. Rather than being the natural condition of humanity, extreme poverty is a symptom of social dislocation and displacement. It is important to emphasize that the data here focuses on extreme poverty, as it is defined in the relevant literature, not the higher consumption thresholds that are required to achieve “decent living” today (e.g., Edward, 2006, Kikstra et al., 2021).

  The second conclusion is that the rise of capitalism coincided with a deterioration in human welfare. In every region studied here, incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and a marked upturn in premature mortality. In parts of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, key welfare metrics have still not recovered.

  Our third conclusion is that in those regions where progress has occurred (as opposed to recovery from an earlier period of immiseration), it began much later than the Ravallion/Pinker graph suggests. In the core regions of Northwest Europe, welfare standards began to improve in the 1880s, four centuries after the emergence of capitalism. In the periphery and semi-periphery, progress began in the mid-20th century. Further research is needed to establish the causal drivers of these improvements, but existing data indicates that progress was achieved with the rise of organized labour, the anti-colonial movement, and other progressive social movements, which organized production around meeting human needs, redistributed wealth, and invested in public provisioning systems

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  • anachrohack@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    To be frank, I don’t take anything economic commentary by “An Independent Socialist Magazine” seriously lol. Socialism has been so thoroughly discredited that anybody who willingly accepts such a label is inherently not a serious person

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    • Keeponstalin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      ScienceDirect is ‘an independent socialist magazine’? Lmao, that’s hilarious. That’s where those latest quotes were from. Monthly Review publishes articles from many credited economists, sociologists, and historians. You’re reactionary (lack of) understanding of what socialism is doesn’t change that reality. You’re responses make you seem incapable of reading more than a single sentence, missing the rest of the entire paragraph, let alone paper.

      Dylan Sullivan is an Adjunct Fellow and PhD candidate in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University, where he teaches politics, sociology, and anthropology.

      Jason Hickel is an author and Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science & Technology (ICTA-UAB) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is also a Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, the Rodney Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice, and the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Health.

      Richard Wolff, another economist, explains socialism in a very clear and comprehensive way. If you’re not intellectually curious to entertain Richard Wolff, I’m done responding. On the other hand, I’m happy to engage with someone interested in learning and discussion.

      Economic Update: 3 Basic Kinds of Socialism

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      • anachrohack@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Did you read your own link? The one you yourself even quoted? It calls itself an independent socialist magazine.

        Dylan Sullivan is an Adjunct Fellow and PhD candidate in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University, where he teaches politics, sociology, and anthropology.

        Which is why I don’t value his economics paper very highly

        Richard Wolff, another economist, explains socialism in a very clear and comprehensive way. If you’re not intellectually curious enough to entertain Richard Wolff, I’m done responding. On the other hand, I’m happy to engage with someone interested in learning and discussion.

        No serious economist refers to themself as a Marxian. A “marxian economist” is like saying “a psychic physicist”. Right off the bat, anyone who commits themselves to a pseudoscientific view should not have their scientific views taken very seriously at all.

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    • sugarfoot00@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Boy, you coulda just said that you don’t subscribe to any philosophy that doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.

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      • anachrohack@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I don’t subscribe to any philosophy which advocates for the murder of its enemies

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