Jordan Peterson

[luiz]

Our civilization seems to be working

The people lacking imagination are those that cannot see the big picture. Inthesomeday and others like him would blow up a "system" that for the first time in human history is actually decreasing the number of people living in abject poverty to replace it by some unproven utopia ( a dystopia to most) that exists only in their minds. I'll give inthesomeday the benefit of being extremely young (I'm guessing 12-17 range), but it's just sad when adults have these sorts of viewpoints.

Yes, a lot of things can be improved. Yes, in the rich world standards of living have largely stagnated. But the "pillars of civilization" don't need overthrowing, for crying out loud. We need gradual change that can be reversed if it doesn't work.

 

[Traitorfish]

Capitalism is slowly undoing the poverty which it has spent the last three centuries creating. Good job, capitalism. You really nailed it.



Anyway, hot take, people routinely imagine something beyond the "pillars of civilisation", they only imagine it applying to them. Breaking away from the rat-race of wage-labour and achieving a life of independence and luxury is practically the default day-dream of modern life. It seems a conservative dream because it applies only to the individual, because while they leave the system behind, the system is left standing. But what happens if everyone realises that dream at once? The whole system comes apart.

The rejection of the existing mode of production is almost universal. What is absent is the collective political agency to do something about it. We confront capital as feeble individuals, and we imagine alternatives as feeble individuals. We don't like "the pillars of civilisation", it's simply that they are very big, and we are very small, and we do not seriously believe that we can do anything about it. But, history doesn't support the assumption that this is an unchanging state of affairs.

 

[Ryika]

What makes you think it's the fault of capitalism, and not just a result of the world population boom?

 

[luiz]

Even in absolute terms the number of people living in extreme poverty is smaller today than it was in 1820. This is a monumental feat when we consider the demographic explosion since then! Capitalism has actually decreased poverty very fast. Also, places like China and India were not even really capitalist until a few decades ago - exactly when global poverty started collapsing.

I do agree we can't all live lives of luxury, but we can all live decent lives and we will get there without any bloody revolution or class war (which would only increase poverty, as the Russian or Chinese revolutions did). Yes, let's tweak the system where it needs tweaking, let's make an effort to not waste resources and etc. But let's not blow up a system that is largely working.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I'm mildly curious about the key word "extreme" there. I mean, it is really grand that we seem to have finally decided that letting people starve to death is a bad thing, but does that actually show any commitment to eliminating poverty generally, or that we've made even a single step of progress in that direction?

 

[Lexicus]

Our civilization seems to be working

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/o...reat-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html

Exposing the great 'poverty reduction' lie

According to Peter Edwards of Newcastle University, if people are to achieve normal life expectancy, they need roughly double the current IPL, or a minimum of $2.50 per day. But adopting this higher standard would seriously undermine the poverty reduction narrative. An IPL of $2.50 shows a poverty headcount of around 3.1 billion, almost triple what the World Bank and the Millennium Campaign would have us believe. It also shows that poverty is getting worse, not better, with nearly 353 million more people impoverished today than in 1981. With China taken out of the equation, that number shoots up to 852 million.

Some economists go further and advocate for an IPL of $5 or even $10 - the upper boundary suggested by the World Bank. At this standard, we see that some 5.1 billion people - nearly 80 percent of the world's population - are living in poverty today. And the number is rising.

These more accurate parameters suggest that the story of global poverty is much worse than the spin doctored versions we are accustomed to hearing. The $1.25 threshold is absurdly low, but it remains in favour because it is the only baseline that shows any progress in the fight against poverty, and therefore justifies the present economic order. Every other line tells the opposite story. In fact, even the $1.25 line shows that, without factoring China, the poverty headcount is worsening, with 108 million people added to the ranks of the poor since 1981. All of this calls the triumphalist narrative into question.

Even in absolute terms the number of people living in extreme poverty is smaller today than it was in 1820.

This is laughably false.

bloody revolution or class war (which would only increase poverty, as the Russian or Chinese revolutions did)

I'm neither a Leninist nor a Maoist, but this is also obviously false. The collapse of the USSR didn't merely cause poverty to increase in the countries that formerly comprised it, it caused a "demographic crisis" where most measures of human development plummeted.

 

[luiz]

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/o...reat-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html

Ah, so because one guy nobody ever heard about quoted by al-Jazeera says that poverty reduction is a lie, we must believe it. Sure, China and India lifting hundreds of millions from poverty had no grand effect on the welfare of the human race... They just account for what, 1/3 of us all? Yeah, no impact.

I'm neither a Leninist nor a Maoist, but this is also obviously false. The collapse of the USSR didn't merely cause poverty to increase in the countries that formerly comprised it, it caused a "demographic crisis" where most measures of human development plummeted.

Well yes, great turmoil is bad for most people. I don't see how you think that's an objection to what I said? I said the Russia and Chinese revolutions caused mass human suffering. I mean, it took Russia like 20 years to get back to the pre-revolution level of agricultural and industrial output. Recovery from WW2 and from the collapse of the Soviet union was actually faster than recovery from the revolution, which gives an idea of how awful it was.

As for Maoism, it caused what was probably the worst man-made mass starvation in the history of earth. No small feat.

 

[luiz]

I'm mildly curious about the key word "extreme" there. I mean, it is really grand that we seem to have finally decided that letting people starve to death is a bad thing, but does that actually show any commitment to eliminating poverty generally, or that we've made even a single step of progress in that direction?

Yes there is still a horrible number of very poor people, but the economic transformation in India and China alone (which were roughly as poor as Sub-Saharan Africa until the 70's) changed everything.

 

[Traitorfish]

How much bigger would the red section of the graph have been through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries if that section wasn't strongly associated with low life expectancy and high infant mortality?

I'd be wary of boasting of capitalism's achievements in limiting absolute poverty when that was achieved that by manufacturing the premature deaths of billions of human beings.

 

[luiz]

How much bigger would the red section of the graph have been through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries if that section wasn't strongly associated with low life expectancy and high infant mortality?

I'd be wary of boasting of capitalism's achievements in limiting absolute poverty when that was achieved that by manufacturing the premature deaths of billions of human beings.

Did life expectancy after get lower in the 19th century with capitalism? I highly doubt that. Maybe in a few places where attributes at large scale happened (like the Congo), but I would think that in capitalist economic life expectancy steadily improved. Not nearly as much as it did in the 20th century, but still.

 

[inthesomeday]

And anyways the pillars of civilization I was commenting on more were the ones Hygro referenced— things like the current gender binary.

Also do you really think I could be 12 years old? I mean I’d take the Souplantation discount but... I really don’t think I could pass for that

 

[Sommerswerd]

I'm mildly curious about the key word "extreme" there. I mean, it is really grand that we seem to have finally decided that letting people starve to death is a bad thing, but does that actually show any commitment to eliminating poverty generally, or that we've made even a single step of progress in that direction?

Agreed. According to the chart "extreme" seems to be clearly (and arbitrarily) defined as roughly $2/day. I just don't find that metric meaningful in any way. At $20 a day ($7,300/yr) a person in the US would be subletting a room from someone else who is likely renting an apartment, and either walking or riding a bus to work, leaving them with roughly $6 to $9 per day to eat... so about 1 meal per day. No cell phone, no sweet sweet internets, no car, no money to take your sweetie out to the movies... just pure subsistence living.

And that's on $20 a day. $2 (technically $1.90) a day is a meaningless figure. If you are getting two, three, five times that... you're no better off in real-life terms. I'd be more interested to see the figure for $30-50K/year.

 

[Lexicus]

Ah, so because one guy nobody ever heard about quoted by al-Jazeera says that poverty reduction is a lie, we must believe it.

TIL: luiz believes facts are a popularity contest

Sure, China and India lifting hundreds of millions from poverty had no grand effect on the welfare of the human race... They just account for what, 1/3 of us all? Yeah, no impact.

Saying that China is raising people out of poverty with "free market capitalism" is laughably false.

I mean, it took Russia like 20 years to get back to the pre-revolution level of agricultural and industrial output.

It wasn't the Revolution per se, it was the years of civil war that followed, not to mention World War I, which took a large chunk out of the output of every nation in Europe.

 

[Traitorfish]

Did life expectancy after get lower in the 19th century with capitalism? I highly doubt that.

So, any gains during the rise of capitalism are modest and inconsistent. The slow increase is mostly explained by increase security of food supply- the last real famine to occur in England is probably what that dip in the early 18th century represents- rather than by the benevolent hand of capitalism. A man born in 1900 could expect five to ten years over his great, great grandfather, and was still tossing a coin to see if he made fifty, not much to show for a century of glorious capitalist progress.

Things only seriously improve from the mid-19th century onwards, which coincidences with the emergence of trade unionism and of "public health" as a thing that governments were expected to care about, and is only really consilidated in the mid-twentieth century, which coincides with the rise of trade unions as a serious political force and the mainstreaming of dirty, dirty, socialist policies, like pensions and publicly-funded healthcare. Whatever wealth capitalism generates, and it's indisputable that it does, it requires a bit of prodding to start spreading it around. General prosperity isn't a thing that just happens by itself.

 

[Chose]

Capitalism is slowly undoing the poverty which it has spent the last three centuries creating. Good job, capitalism. You really nailed it.

This just strikes me as so odd. The world was an absolutely dreadful place throughout all of human history, but yet today some people want to blame capitalism for almost every problem they see. I'm no big fan of capitalism, and I see a huge amount of inherent flaws in the system, but blaming problems on capitalism that have been a part of the human condition, and often much worse than they are today, for millennia, simply doesn't stand to reason.

How much bigger would the red section of the graph have been through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries if that section wasn't strongly associated with low life expectancy and high infant mortality?

Things only seriously improve from the mid-19th century onwards, which coincidences with the emergence of trade unionism and of "public health" as a thing that governments were expected to care about, and is only really consilidated in the mid-twentieth century, which coincides with the rise of trade unions as a serious political force and the mainstreaming of dirty, dirty, socialist policies, like pensions and publicly-funded healthcare. Whatever wealth capitalism generates, and it's indisputable that it does, it requires a bit of prodding to start spreading it around. General prosperity isn't a thing that just happens by itself.

It does strike me as a bit odd that the original claim was that the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was associated with low life expectancy and high infant mortality. If this was the case, you were completely happy to blame capitalism for it. When it turned out this was false, and in fact life expectancy went up by 25% in the 19th century and then up again by 63% in the 20th century, you oddly no longer wanted to blame capitalism for it, so you look elsewhere for the cause, and attributing it to the rise of "public health" and trade unionism, without evidence of a causal link. It's obvious what is happening here, and these types of cognitive biases are well understood. This is really a beautiful example of how motivated reasoning works.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

This just strikes me as so odd. The world was an absolutely dreadful place throughout all of human history, but yet today some people want to blame capitalism for almost every problem they see. I'm no big fan of capitalism, and I see a huge amount of inherent flaws in the system, but blaming problems on capitalism that have been a part of the human condition, and often much worse than they are today, for millennia, simply doesn't stand to reason.

I think the key to this is whether you consider technology and capitalism to be inextricably linked. If you do then your position makes perfect sense. If you don't then you can say that the rise of technology over the past few centuries could have, should have, and most likely would have, eliminated poverty altogether were it not for the concurrent rise of capitalism, and blaming capitalism becomes quite reasonable.

 

[inthesomeday]

It’s a unique poverty that capitalism provides— urban-industrial poverty in which you can access certain amenities but find yourself working something like 12-15 hours a day (or more) to access them. The degree of imperialism inflicted against your country causes a sort of variant proportion of horrific working and living conditions and access to amenities.

At least under feudalism you had free time... /s

 

[Ajidica]

When it turned out this was false, and in fact life expectancy went up by 25% in the 19th century and then up again by 63% in the 20th century, you oddly no longer wanted to blame capitalism for it, so you look elsewhere for the cause, and attributing it to the rise of "public health" and trade unionism, without evidence of a causal link.

It wasn't capitalism that brought about the National Health Service, universal free public education, or the cradle-to-grave welfare state. Unless, of course, you want to describe Aneurin Bevan or Harold Wilson as capitalists.

 

[Chose]

It wasn't capitalism that brought about the National Health Service, universal free public education, or the cradle-to-grave welfare state. Unless, of course, you want to describe Aneurin Bevan or Harold Wilson as capitalists.

They were working within a capitalist framework, were they not? I'm not too sure any of those things would exist in a counter factual world where capitalism never happened.

Edit: plus you are talking about policies from 1950+, after the majority of life expectancy gains had already been achieved.

 

[Chose]

I think the key to this is whether you consider technology and capitalism to be inextricably linked. If you do then your position makes perfect sense. If you don't then you can say that the rise of technology over the past few centuries could have, should have, and most likely would have, eliminated poverty altogether were it not for the concurrent rise of capitalism, and blaming capitalism becomes quite reasonable.

Fair point. But, I don't necessarily think they are inextricably linked. I'm just not so sure other paths would have yeilded any better results.