These three statistics will help you understand the world | Bill Gates
July 2, 2018 1:02 PM   Subscribe

One key reason why we struggle to see progress in the world today is that we do not know how very bad the past was. Both are true at the same time: The world is much better than in the past and it is still awful.
posted by cgc373 (33 comments total) 40 users marked this as a favorite
 
Poem Beginning with a Line of Wittgenstein
By Donald Hall

The world is everything that is the case.
Now stop your blubbering and wash your face.
posted by thelonius at 1:05 PM on July 2, 2018 [7 favorites]


I would have never have found this - thank you.
posted by dangerousdan at 1:20 PM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


There may be more people escaping extreme poverty, but they didn’t address regular old poverty. Has income increased for all? Or do we have a few getting über-rich, some getting out of extreme poverty into regular poverty, and everyone else moving down a step? Because that’s what it seems like. But I don’t have that data, nor know how to find it.
posted by greermahoney at 1:40 PM on July 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


A technologist tells us the past was bad, and the only way it can be better is through progress. Progress that consolidates power, and causes even more and bigger problems.

What's happening is that the distribution of wealth is changing shape. Yes, the very wealthy are becoming wealthier. Globally, the extremely poor are ... also becoming wealthier! Their kids aren't dying as much and so they can have smaller families, and it would be kinda ridiculous to not admit that this is a good thing. It's just that the middle of the distribution isn't faring as well in comparison.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 1:44 PM on July 2, 2018 [12 favorites]


do we have a few getting über-rich, some getting out of extreme poverty into regular poverty, and everyone else moving down a step?

The topic of Branko Milanović's famous "elephant curve" graph came up in a recent John Lanchester essay (FPP here):
The graph is the centrepiece of his brilliant book Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalisation.​ It’s called the ‘elephant curve’ because it looks like an elephant, going up from left to right like the elephant’s back, then sloping down as it gets towards its face, then going sharply upwards again when it reaches the end of its trunk. Most of the people between points A and B are the working classes and middle classes of the developed world. In other words, the global poor have been getting consistently better off over the last decades whereas the previous global middle class, most of whom are in the developed world, have seen relative decline. The elite at the top have of course been doing better than ever.

What if the governments of the developed world turned to their electorates and explicitly said this was the deal? The pitch might go something like this: we’re living in a competitive global system, there are billions of desperately poor people in the world, and in order for their standards of living to improve, ours will have to decline in relative terms. Perhaps we should accept that on moral grounds: we’ve been rich enough for long enough to be able to share some of the proceeds of prosperity with our brothers and sisters. I think I know what the answer would be. The answer would be OK, fine, but get rid of the trunk. Because if we are experiencing a relative decline why shouldn’t the rich – why shouldn’t the one per cent – be slightly worse off in the same way that we are slightly worse off?
posted by Iridic at 1:47 PM on July 2, 2018 [24 favorites]


Mod note: A few comments removed; if you've got a critical take with the analysis in the link, that's completely fine but please take the time to express it in a way that will setup conversation vs. feeling like a conversation-killing gotcha.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:48 PM on July 2, 2018 [9 favorites]


The human condition today is vastly superior for a significant percentage of the globe, and while it can never be perfect or utopian, I sure as hell will take 2018 living over 1918 living, and I suspect that many others would, too.
posted by tgrundke at 1:48 PM on July 2, 2018 [10 favorites]


Before lobbing your hot takes, please remember: not everywhere is the US. Not everywhere is even the First World.

The trends in this article are a huge quality of life improvement for literally billions of people. If you weren't aware of it, or can't quite believe it, then do some frigging research on the rest of the world.
posted by zompist at 1:52 PM on July 2, 2018 [32 favorites]


>But I don’t have that data, nor know how to find it.

OurWorldInData.org, which Gates cites, looks fascinating on first glance and has a section on income inequality among (many) other things.
posted by ourobouros at 1:54 PM on July 2, 2018 [7 favorites]


There's this way of expressing these trends that is thought-provoking:

If you were going to be born randomly somewhere on the globe, in which era would you choose to be born?

I think almost anyone would choose today. Does that mean things are perfect? Hell no. Good? Perhaps not. But for being randomly-born, I'd choose today.

If anyone knows the attribution for this thought exercise, I'd appreciate it. I sure can't remember where I heard it.
posted by Betelgeuse at 1:56 PM on July 2, 2018 [8 favorites]


My framing misleads people on this, sorry: It's not an article by Bill Gates, it's an article Gates cites. The piece itself is by Max Roser.
posted by cgc373 at 1:58 PM on July 2, 2018 [3 favorites]


Betelgeuse, that sounds a lot like John Rawls' veil of ignorance.
posted by ourobouros at 1:58 PM on July 2, 2018 [14 favorites]


When you ask people whether the world is making progress against extreme poverty, the majority of us believe things are getting worse—that the number of people in extreme poverty in the world is rising.

The author makes the same fallacy that his audience makes. "The majority of us" live in these countries where extreme poverty is being alleviated, and see things improving for the better. "We" (the intended audience) are Americans with Internet access. But "we" aren't the majority of us.
posted by explosion at 2:00 PM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


I was about to bring the link that Iridic provided into the conversation. It is in fact true that a lot of actions of the super-rich, financial class have brought people out of poverty, and improved living conditions in impoverished areas of the world. However, an analysis such as the one in the FPP is directed specifically at killing further discussion of how that shift of wealth happened. It was largely not a shift from the financial class to the world's poor, but rather a shift from the middle class to either side, who have lost jobs through outsourcing (shifting some scraps to the bottom end) and who have not seen increased wages from increased productivity (shifting the meat to the top). In short: the elephant graph.

To say that life is better for the poor than it was 100 years ago is a facile and intentionally-point-missing bit of commentary, because with our vast leaps in technology, medicine, productivity, and social progress, we should ALL be living much, much better. The financial class would have it that the middle should never ask for more, since it makes them seem ungrateful that their wealth was shifted to the poor instead of the wealth of the super rich. This article has a funny little hand-wave (oh, of course things can be bad, too!) but it's much more pre-occupied with that first move of shaming middle class calls for equity. It's really not that new of a strategy - it's pitting two lower classes against one another to protect predatory, inexcusable wealth at the top. Bill Gates' foundation work, while hugely important and useful for people in the developing world, isn't much different from Carnegie's Library initiatives (notable that that is also where the Gates Foundation started out, making sure that libraries bought permanently into Windows ecosystems with all their philanthropy).

The analysis in this article is thin - I'd imagine purposefully so. It leaves out two important factors, both related to global stability. The first is global warming. If wealth in the developing world is created through predatory capitalism that is going to make our planet unlivable, then these very important improvements in quality of life are transitory at best. The developing world will be hit first, and hardest by a changing climate, and relating to that second point... Middle Class reactionary movements in the developed world will be fueled by increased climate instability and refugee crises. This is inarguably already happening. If the effects of the hollowing out of the middle are to give power to nationalists, supremacists, and reactionaries, then (again) those important gains in the developing world are going to be short lived.

So, in short, this is propaganda, which is masquerading as a balanced approach to global improvement. It's a cudgel to hit progressives in the developed world for not being grateful for improved conditions in the developing world. A smoke screen tactic to encourage us to ignore the fact that wages for the western middle class have been stagnating and falling due to the obscene greed of the global, financial elite, of which Gates (in spite of his nominally American Democratic views, and admittedly generous philanthropy) is an emblematic part. At least it was shorter than a Steven Pinker article.
posted by codacorolla at 2:02 PM on July 2, 2018 [65 favorites]


One of the author's three points is hardly indisputable.
Point one is indeed a global trend that has to do I assume with the advances in preventive medicine, public hygiene, improved drugs, the increase in the number of city-dwellers, a lower number of children overall (which is point two, again indisputable and driven probably by necessity more than planning - except in China's case) etc. The third point is debatable whether it is a statistical artifact or not.
I would also point out that by the WB's standards, since the thresholds are in PPP dollars, someone living on 60$ a month in the US, or with a similar buying capacity anywhere in the world would not be in "extreme poverty" by those standards.
posted by talos at 2:10 PM on July 2, 2018


I have to say, the kneejerk dismissal of the idea that the world is getting better in important was because billionaires strikes me as a very myopic perspective. Inequality is a real and growing problem - but it's not the only problem.

A statistic like this reflects a major change for families in the developing world:

>Fact #1: Since 1960, child deaths have plummeted from 20 million a year to 6 million a year.

And that's with increased population.

Imagine going from expecting at least one of your children to die of a common illness like malaria, to expecting all of your children to live because you have access to prevention and treatment. Not everybody does. But so many more do.

Look at this chart of the under-5 mortality rate for children in Burkina Faso from 1960-present Compare it to this chart of the under-5 mortality rate for children in the US. Both countries have seen a decline - but the difference is much more extreme for Burkina Faso.

That's not something that should be dismissed as meaningless. That's not something that should be weighed against the growth of financial inequality and judged to be less important.

It's a statistic that can be used in propogandistic ways against the middle class, but it's not all about the middle class - especially not the American middle class.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 2:11 PM on July 2, 2018 [29 favorites]


Modern medicine has allowed me to live at least once when I would not have otherwise. Vaccines have saved gajillions of lives.

There is a lot more wealth, so even with wealth aggregating at the top, there is more food, more access to health care in many places, etc. The issues of hunger in America, which may not apply broadly, have a lot to do with lack of access to nutritious food, not lack of calories, and that's no small thing, but lack of calories used to be fairly typical. In many parts of the world, there is more access to information and education. In the US, we got better about cleaning air and water and keeping them cleaner. There are fewer wars; cold comfort to those at war, but a good thing.

Yeah, but. A bunch of countries have powerful nuclear weapons that could make an unholy mess to varying degrees. The wealthiest have over-consumed in a manner that is threatening the survival of the human and other species. All our technology, that has brought us to this point, may be what dooms us. I'm in my small home, which is nicer than probably 70% of homes on the planet, using a computer to connect to a global network. I'm literally poor by US standards, and my life is actually pretty good (except for the cost of health insurance and health care, and even so, I made it this far). Wouldn't have missed this technology for anything, but I hate seeing us screw the world up so very badly right now.
posted by theora55 at 2:20 PM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


If this is propaganda for anything, it's propaganda for the Gates Foundation's key article of faith: that the economic empowerment of women (via improvements in health, sanitation, education, etc) will drive down fertility rates in time to avert a Malthusian crisis.

For the sake of the world, we have to hope that this is correct.
posted by verstegan at 2:29 PM on July 2, 2018 [19 favorites]


So, the assumption here is that People = Good. While infant mortality and crushing poverty are two critical issues of the day (as they have been ever since humankind started tracking this data, and as they will continue to be forever), I disagree that a downtick in population growth is necessarily a bad thing. People are living longer, so we don't need to keep re-upping. The last thing the Earth needs is double today's population growth coupled with everybody living until they they are 70 or 80.

Of course...it's easy for me to say that when I am a) not in poverty, b) have no children and c) live in a country where life expectancy is some of the highest in the world. Would I shave off 20 years of my expected lifespan if it meant two or three or fifty people were lifted from poverty? I really don't know until I get there.
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:58 PM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


Also, when you publish a shitty, six paragraph press release to your foundation's website talking about how great rich people are, then guess who the audience for that is - that's right!

I've read through the main link twice and watched the video - where, precisely, does it talk about "how great rich people are"? These trends in many cases go back half a century, I don't see anything claiming that the Gates Foundation, or rich people generally, were responsible for any of it. Max Roser, who is the featured academic, doesn't seem at first glance to be a shill for Big Optimism.

The analysis in this article is thin - I'd imagine purposefully so. It leaves out two important factors, both related to global stability. The first is global warming.

Roser seems quite aware that climate change is a thing. Nor does he seem interested in hiding growing wealth disparities in the USA. He even cites the Elephant Curve there.

Maybe - wild idea here, but just maybe - the article's just a decent short piece, meant to encourage digging further into the data he and his team have taken so much time and effort to put together and visualize. Which I'd encourage folk to do.

Anyway, a good reminder that change is both possible and necessary - it's always nice to see pushback against the twinned ideas of a) everything is awful and b) there's nothing you can do about it.
posted by AdamCSnider at 2:58 PM on July 2, 2018 [28 favorites]


I'm trained as a historian of social structure and living conditions.

This really is the best of all times to be living, if you're thinking about access to food, housing, the necessities of life. And global inequality is reducing (after having increased during the colonial period).

That doesn't mean it's not ridiculous that local inequality is increasing, or that global inequality isn't decreasing faster. Our productivity is utterly ridiculous compared to premodern times. We should have NO poverty, based on our productivity. But we have some terrible distribution systems.

This is why I'm for active economic development in poor countries, with an emphasis on local downstream multipliers (eg in country processing), and I'm also in favour of high taxes and redistribution.
posted by jb at 3:03 PM on July 2, 2018 [23 favorites]


also, while it sucks to be poor in a developed country now (which I have been), it's still way better than being poor or even just a labourer in the same places in the 17th or 18th centuries.

And I laugh when people talk about how hard it must be to raise a family in a 3-bedroom apartment - try a one-room cottage!

/history, always good for comparisons.
posted by jb at 3:05 PM on July 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


"The majority of us" live in these countries where extreme poverty is being alleviated, and see things improving for the better. "We" (the intended audience) are Americans with Internet access. But "we" aren't the majority of us.
Why do you think that Americans are the intended audience? It would never have occurred to me that I would not be among the intended audience. The author is German and lives in the UK. The website itself is by an American of course, but Gates is one of the most famous people in the world. It's really kind of strange to me that someone would think that the intended audience for this blog is Americans.

There's also a link to "the majority of us" that shows that they asked people from different countries, like the UK, Germany, China and India.
posted by blub at 3:17 PM on July 2, 2018 [6 favorites]


So, the assumption here is that People = Good.

The second statistic in the article is about the fertility rate declining, and it's pretty clearly noted as a good thing.
posted by queensissy at 3:17 PM on July 2, 2018 [8 favorites]


And I laugh when people talk about how hard it must be to raise a family in a 3-bedroom apartment - try a one-room cottage!

This hews a bit too close to the Republican talking point about how welfare recipients aren't really poor because they have TVs and cell phones.
posted by Atom Eyes at 3:18 PM on July 2, 2018 [6 favorites]


So, the assumption here is that People = Good.

The article assumes that fewer children dying is good, but it doesn't say that increasing population is good. In fact, it says the opposite, when it discusses declining fertility.

I don't think that you're proposing that global population control through the deaths in massive numbers of third world children is a good thing, but honestly, that leaves me a bit confused about your point. The only reduction in population that the article assumes is bad is the reduction due to less children dying.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:45 PM on July 2, 2018 [10 favorites]


This hews a bit too close to the Republican talking point about how welfare recipients aren't really poor because they have TVs and cell phones.

Which is ridiculous, because those are consumer goods and a fraction of the cost of housing, food, etc. Having been on welfare - and studied the history of poverty and social welfare from 1601 to 1996 - I'm fully aware of all the groundless arguments against relative poverty.

The overall point is: yes, our lives can be better than the past, but still be shitty. And if you are a good policy maker, you should be asking questions like: how did we make our lives better? what is making them shitty today? (some answers: commercial agriculture totally increased production; unionized workforces increased labourers wages so that they could partake in some of that productive growth - basically market-oriented production with good regulation and a strong social safety net).

But very few people in power are interested being good policy makers.
posted by jb at 4:09 PM on July 2, 2018 [7 favorites]


Some of the discussion here feels like the old Onion headline: "Man Who Understands 8% Of Obamacare Vigorously Defends It From Man Who Understands 5%."

I don't think the pain Western European and American middle classes have experienced in the past 35-40 years is caused by the rise of India, China and the rest of the developing world 'taking our jobs' (though my understanding of macroeconomics is maybe 8% optimistically). Branko Milanovich does not argue for this. Here's a quote from the publishers description of his newest book:

The recent surge of inequality in the West has been driven by the revolution in technology, just as the Industrial Revolution drove inequality 150 years ago. But even as inequality has soared within nations, it has fallen dramatically among nations, as middle-class incomes in China and India have drawn closer to the stagnating incomes of the middle classes in the developed world. A more open migration policy would reduce global inequality even further.

Among the macro-economists that I have read, the description above seems uncontroversial, but I may be reading the wrong people. In short there's bad news (technology has been depressing wages for everyone other than the top 10% in the United States and Western Europe) and good news (global poverty has been declining consistently and rapidly since 1980), but those two pieces of news aren't cause and effect.

Why is it important to delink these two facts? Because Trumpism, which relies on a narrative of job loss to other, poorer countries, is a complete misdiagnosis of the disease; it is not just wrong in its prescription.

As a separate matter, the improvement in global health has been extraordinary over the past 40, 30 and 20 years. Isn't it worth celebrating that? Even in the United States, public health has improved markedly from 1990. Look at the right portion of this chart in Scientific American. For every State, average life expectancy has improved. Some places (Washington D.C. and California) have improved massively, others (the Southeast, for example) more moderately, but the trendline goes up, regardless of the state.

Anyway, that's my 8% (or 5%).
posted by ferdydurke at 5:10 PM on July 2, 2018 [13 favorites]


Regardless of Bill Gates endorsing it, Max Roser's article does not seem to want to imply at all that all these are signs of the triumph of neoliberal capitalism.
In fact all three of the measures mentioned were improving under pretty much all types of regimes and governments, more impressively so in fact under non-capitalist countries after the war. For example: "China's growth in life expectancy at birth from 35–40 years in 1949 to 65.5 years in 1980 is among the most rapid sustained increases in documented global history", as is its enforced drop in fertility rates, and of course the decline of poverty over the past 30 years. Cuban decreases in child mortality are an example of health outcomes from its health service system that the UN hails as a model to other developing countries.
Furthermore, if one believes the official sources used at Index Mundi (which I find hard to), it seems that Afghan under-5 child mortality rates have been dropping for 56 years, pretty much consistently, despite the fact that the country has been a war zone for the past 40 years and/ or governed by goat-herding fundamentalists whose priorities most definitely did not include propping-up the health system, especially for mothers.
posted by talos at 6:11 PM on July 2, 2018 [3 favorites]


I was about to bring the link that Iridic provided into the conversation. It is in fact true that a lot of actions of the super-rich, financial class have brought people out of poverty, and improved living conditions in impoverished areas of the world. However, an analysis such as the one in the FPP is directed specifically at killing further discussion of how that shift of wealth happened.

Oh, rubbish, this is not propaganda. At no point in the FPP article, or the Lanchester article, or Milanović's "elephant graph," is it claimed that the 1% are the cause of the improvement in living conditions for the third-world poor. Nobody says that the elephant's trunk is the reason for the elephant's backside. (Although it's a nice thing when its raised trunk spurts a gush of water back to wash its butt, which is what the Gates Foundation does in this strained imagery. Block that metaphor!)

There exists a pernicious belief that thinking, caring people need to be kept angry all the time, constantly presented with the most negative evidence to keep the rage fires stoked. In this view, any good news is a kind of anaesthetic, a soporific to lull the "woke." Look back on MeFi threads like the one where Obama allowed trans people in the military; comments along the lines of "Yay! Obama's so awesome!" were met with "DRONE STRIKES, GUANTANAMO, SINGLE PAYER, NEVAR FORGET." My personal feeling is that a restricted diet of No Good News has the same effect as that experiment where a monkey got an electric shock no matter what it chose; eventually it huddled in a corner, permanently depressed.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 7:46 PM on July 2, 2018 [27 favorites]


As complex ideas go, "things are better than they ever have been, but things are still unacceptably bad" doesn't seem to be all that difficult. I'm surprised to find so much consternation with it.
posted by Errant at 9:35 PM on July 2, 2018 [12 favorites]


You can have plenty of good news and hopeful stories, just because they're not the same good news you choose to celebrate or the same angles on said news doesn't mean I'm living in a depressing hellscape.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 5:20 AM on July 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


So, the assumption here is that People = Good.

if you can't take reduced infant mortality as an indisputable good, you should probably fundamentally rethink your entire moral view of the world.
posted by bracems at 4:59 PM on July 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


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