What’s the right narrative about global poverty and progress? Link dump of a recent debate.
The two opposing views are:
(a) “New optimism:” [1] This is broadly the view that, over the last couple of hundred years, the world has been getting significantly better, and that’s great. [2] In particular, extreme poverty has declined dramatically, and most other welfare-relevant indicators have improved a lot. Often, these effects are largely attributed to economic growth.
Proponents in this debate were originally Bill Gates, Steven Pinker, and Max Roser. But my loose impression is that the view is shared much more widely.
In particular, it seems to be the orthodox view in EA; cf. e.g. Muehlhauser listing one of Pinker’s books in his My worldview in 5 books post, saying that “Almost everything has gotten dramatically better for humans over the past few centuries, likely substantially due to the spread and application of reason, science, and humanism.”
(b) Hickel’s critique: Anthropologist Jason Hickel has criticized new optimism on two grounds:
1. Hickel has questioned the validity of some of the core data used by new optimists, claiming e.g. that “real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981. Anything before that is extremely sketchy, and to go back as far as 1820 is meaningless.”
2. Hickel prefers to look at different indicators than the new optimists. For example, he has argued for different operationalizations of extreme poverty or inequality.
I’m largely unpersuaded by Hickel’s charge that historic poverty data is invalid. Sure, it’s way less good than contemporary data. But based on Hasell’s and Roser’s article, my impression is that the data is better than I would have thought, and its orthodox analysis and interpretation more sophisticated than I would have thought. I would be surprised if access to better data would qualitatively change the “new optimist” conclusion.
I think there is room for debate over which indicators to use, and that Hickel makes some interesting points here. I find it regrettable that the debate around this seems so adversarial.
Still, my sense is that there is an important, true, and widely underappreciated (particularly by people on the left, including my past self) core of the “new optimist” story. I’d expect looking at other indicators could qualify that story, or make it less simplistic, point to important exceptions etc. - but I’d probably consider a choice of indicators that painted an overall pessimistic picture as quite misleading and missing something important.
On the other hand, I would quite strongly want to resist the conclusion that everything in this debate is totally settled, and that the new optimists are clearly right about everything, in the same way in which orthodox climate science is right about climate change being anthropogenic, or orthodox medicine is right about homeopathy not being better than placebo. But I think the key uncertainties are not in historic poverty data, but in our understanding of wellbeing and its relationship to environmental factors. Some examples of why I think it’s more complicated
The unintuitive relationship between (i) subjective well-being in the sense of the momentary affective valence of our experience on one hand and (ii) reported life satisfaction. See e.g. Kahneman’s work on the “experiencing self” vs. “remembering self”.
On many views, the total value of the world is very sensitive to population ethics, which is notoriously counterintuitive. In particular, on many plausible views, the development of the total welfare of the world’s human population is dominated by its increasing population size.
Another key uncertainty is the implications of some of the discussed historic trends for the value of the world going forward, about which I think we’re largely clueless. For example, what are the effects of changing inequality on the long-term future?
[1] It’s not clear to me if “new optimism” is actually new. I’m using Hickel’s label just because it’s short and it’s being used in this debate anyway, not to endorse Hickel’s views or make any other claim.
[2] There is an obvious problem with new optimism, which is that it’s anthropocentric. In fact, on many plausible views, the total axiological value of the world at any time in the recent past may be dominated by the aggregate wellbeing of nonhuman animals; even more counterintuitively, it may well be dominated by things like the change in the total population size of invertebrates. But this debate is about human wellbeing, so I’ll ignore this problem.
In addition to the examples you mention, the world has become much more unequal over the past centuries, and I wonder how that impacts welfare. Relatedly, I wonder to what degree there is more loneliness and less purpose and belonging than in previous times, and how that impacts welfare (and whether it relates to the Easterlin paradox). EAs don’t seem to discuss these aspects of welfare often. (Somewhat related books: Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape and Junger’s Tribe.)
(Have not read through Max’ link dump yet, which seems very interesting, I also feel some skepticism of the ‘new optimism’ worldview.)
One major disappointment in Pinker’s book as well as in related writings for me has been that they do little to acknowledge that how much progress you think the world has seen depends a lot on your values. To name some examples, not everyone views the legalization of gay marriage and easier access to abortion as progress, and not everyone thinks that having plentiful access to consumer goods is a good thing.
I would be very interested in an analysis of ‘progress’ in light of the different moral foundations discussed by Haidt. I have the impression that Pinker exclusively focuses on the ‘care/harm’ foundation, while completely ignoring others like Sanctity/purity or Authority/respect and this might be where some part of the disconnect between the ‘New optimists’ and opponents is coming from.
Your point reminds me of the “history is written by the winners” adage – presumably, most civilizations would look back and think of their history as one of progress because they views their current values most favorably.
Perhaps this is one of the paths that would eventually contribute to a “desired dystopia” outcome, as outlined in Ord’s book: we fail to realize that our social structure is flawed and leads to suffering in a systematic manner that’s difficult to change.
I have relatively little exposure to Hickel, save for reading his guardian piece and a small part of the dialogue that followed from that, but I don’t get the impression he’s coming from a position of putting more weight on Sanctity/purity or Authority/respect; in general I’d guess that few people in left-wing social-science academia are big on those sorts of moral foundations, except indirectly via moral/cultural relativism.
Taking Haidt’s moral foundations theory as read for the moment, I’d guess that the Fairness foundation is doing a lot of the work in this disagreement. In general, leftists and liberals seem to differ a lot in what they consider culpable harm, and Fairness/exploitation seems like a big part of that.
Very interesting writeup, I wasn’t aware of Hickel’s critique but it seems reasonable.
Do you think it matters who’s right? I suppose it’s important to know whether poverty is increasing or decreasing if you want to evaluate the consequences of historical policies or events, and even for general interest. But does it have any specific bearing on what we should do going forwards?
I think it matters quite a lot when it comes to assessing where to go from here: in particular, how cautious and conservative to be, and how favourable towards untested radical change.
If things have gotten way better and are likely to continue to get way better in the foreseeable future, then we should probably broadly stick with what we’re doing – some tinkering around the edges to fix obvious abuses, but no root-and-branch restructuring unless something goes obviously and profoundly wrong.
Whereas if things are failing to get better, or are actively getting worse, then it might be worth taking big risks in order to get out of the hole.
I’ve often had conversations with people to my left where they seem way too willing to smash stuff in the process of getting to deep systemic change, which is potentially sensible if you think we’re in a very bad place and getting worse but madness if you think we’re in an extremely unusually good place and getting better.
Thanks, this is a good question. I don’t think it has specific bearing on future actions, but does have some broader relevance. For example, longtermists have sometimes discussed the total value of the long-term future: in this context, we may be interested in whether things have been getting better or worse in order to extrapolate this trend forward.
(Though this is not why I wrote this post. - That was more because I happened to find it interesting personally.)
Of course, this trend extrapolation would only be one among many considerations. In addition, ideally we’d want a trend on the world’s total value, not a trend on just poverty. So e.g. the anthropocentrism would be a problem here.
I agree that the world has gotten much better than it was.
There are two important reasons for this, the other improvements that we see mostly follow from them.
Energy consumption (is wealth)
The energy consumption per person has increased over the last 500 years and that increased consumption translates to welfare.
Education (knowledge)
The amount of knowledge that we as humanity posses has increased dramatically, and that knowledge is widely accessible. 75% of kids finishing 9th grade, 12.5% finishing 6th grade, 4.65% less than 6th grade unfortunately around 7-8% kids have never gone to school. Education increases translate to increase in health, wealth (actually energy consumption) more in countries with market economies than non-market economies.
The various -isms (capitalism, socialism, communism, neoliberalism, colonialism, fascism) have very little to do with human development, and in fact have been very negative for human development. (I am skipping theory about how the -isms are supposed to work, and jumping to the actual effects).
“Almost everything has gotten dramatically better for humans over the past few centuries, likely substantially due to the spread and application of reason, science, and humanism.”
Once the demographic transition happened, there are no young men willing to fight foreign wars and violence declined. i.e. outright occupation (colonialism) gave way to neocolonialism, and that is the world we find ourselves in today.
I find it hard to take any claims of “reason” and “humanism” seriously, while the world warms per capita consumption of fossil fuel is 10 times higher in USA than “developing” countries. Countries of the global south still have easily solvable problems like basic education and health that are under funded.
I just now saw this post, but I would guess that some readers wanted more justification for the use of the term “secondary”, which implies that you’re assigning value to both of (improvements in knowledge) and (tapping of fossil fuels) and saying that the negative value of the latter outweighs the value of the former. I’d guess that readers were curious how you weighed these things against each other.
I’ll also note that Pinker makes no claim that the world is perfect or has no problems, and that claiming that “reason” or “humanism” has made the world better does not entail that they’ve solved all the world’s problems or even that the world is improving in all important ways. You seem to be making different claims than Pinker does about the meaning of those terms, but you don’t explain how you define them differently. (I could be wrong about this, of course; that’s just what I picked up from a quick reading of the comment.)
Thanks Aaron for your response.
I am assigning positive value to both improvements in knowledge and increased energy use (via tapping of fossil fuel energy). I am not weighing them one vs the other. I am saying that without the increased energy from fossil fuels we would still be agricultural societies, with repeated rise and fall of empires. The indus valley civilization, ancient greeks, mayans all of the repeatedly crashed. At the peak of those civilizations I am sure art, culture and knowledge flourished. Eventually humans out ran their resources and crashed, the crash simplified art forms, culture, and knowledge was also lost.
The driver is energy, and the result is increased art, culture, knowledge and peace too.
Reason and humanism have very little to do with why our world is peaceful today (in the sense that outright murder, slavery, colonialism are no longer accepted).
I read the book by Pinker and his emphasis on Western thought and enlightenment was off putting. We are all human, there are no Western values or Eastern values.
Hans Rosling puts it beautifully
“There is no such thing as Swedish values. Those are modern values”
What’s the right narrative about global poverty and progress? Link dump of a recent debate.
The two opposing views are:
(a) “New optimism:” [1] This is broadly the view that, over the last couple of hundred years, the world has been getting significantly better, and that’s great. [2] In particular, extreme poverty has declined dramatically, and most other welfare-relevant indicators have improved a lot. Often, these effects are largely attributed to economic growth.
Proponents in this debate were originally Bill Gates, Steven Pinker, and Max Roser. But my loose impression is that the view is shared much more widely.
In particular, it seems to be the orthodox view in EA; cf. e.g. Muehlhauser listing one of Pinker’s books in his My worldview in 5 books post, saying that “Almost everything has gotten dramatically better for humans over the past few centuries, likely substantially due to the spread and application of reason, science, and humanism.”
(b) Hickel’s critique: Anthropologist Jason Hickel has criticized new optimism on two grounds:
1. Hickel has questioned the validity of some of the core data used by new optimists, claiming e.g. that “real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981. Anything before that is extremely sketchy, and to go back as far as 1820 is meaningless.”
2. Hickel prefers to look at different indicators than the new optimists. For example, he has argued for different operationalizations of extreme poverty or inequality.
Link dump (not necessarily comprehensive)
If you only read two things, I’d recommend (1) Hasell’s and Roser’s article explaining where the data on historic poverty comes from and (2) the take by economic historian Branko Milanovic.
By Hickel (i.e. against “new optimism”):
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/12/13/what-max-roser-gets-wrong-about-inequality
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/6/response-to-max-roser
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/19/response-to-vox-global-poverty
https://newint.org/features/2019/07/01/long-read-progress-and-its-discontents
By “new optimists”:
Joe Hasell and Max Roser: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-history-methods
Steven Pinker: https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/is-the-world-really-getting-poorer-a-response-to-that-claim-by-steve-pinker/
[ETA 2021-05-23:] Max Roser on Twitter on why he has “no respect at all for [Hickel] anymore”.
Commentary by others:
Branko Milanovic (a leading economic historian): https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/11/02/2019/global-poverty-over-long-term-legitimate-issues
Dylan Matthews: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/2/12/18215534/bill-gates-global-poverty-chart
LW user ErickBall: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eTMgL7Cx8TsA9nedn/is-the-world-getting-better-a-brief-summary-of-recent-debate
[ETA 2021-05-23:] Noah Smith, Against Hickelism. Poverty is falling, and it isn’t because of free-market capitalism
My view
I’m largely unpersuaded by Hickel’s charge that historic poverty data is invalid. Sure, it’s way less good than contemporary data. But based on Hasell’s and Roser’s article, my impression is that the data is better than I would have thought, and its orthodox analysis and interpretation more sophisticated than I would have thought. I would be surprised if access to better data would qualitatively change the “new optimist” conclusion.
I think there is room for debate over which indicators to use, and that Hickel makes some interesting points here. I find it regrettable that the debate around this seems so adversarial.
Still, my sense is that there is an important, true, and widely underappreciated (particularly by people on the left, including my past self) core of the “new optimist” story. I’d expect looking at other indicators could qualify that story, or make it less simplistic, point to important exceptions etc. - but I’d probably consider a choice of indicators that painted an overall pessimistic picture as quite misleading and missing something important.
On the other hand, I would quite strongly want to resist the conclusion that everything in this debate is totally settled, and that the new optimists are clearly right about everything, in the same way in which orthodox climate science is right about climate change being anthropogenic, or orthodox medicine is right about homeopathy not being better than placebo. But I think the key uncertainties are not in historic poverty data, but in our understanding of wellbeing and its relationship to environmental factors. Some examples of why I think it’s more complicated
The Easterlin paradox
The unintuitive relationship between (i) subjective well-being in the sense of the momentary affective valence of our experience on one hand and (ii) reported life satisfaction. See e.g. Kahneman’s work on the “experiencing self” vs. “remembering self”.
On many views, the total value of the world is very sensitive to population ethics, which is notoriously counterintuitive. In particular, on many plausible views, the development of the total welfare of the world’s human population is dominated by its increasing population size.
Another key uncertainty is the implications of some of the discussed historic trends for the value of the world going forward, about which I think we’re largely clueless. For example, what are the effects of changing inequality on the long-term future?
[1] It’s not clear to me if “new optimism” is actually new. I’m using Hickel’s label just because it’s short and it’s being used in this debate anyway, not to endorse Hickel’s views or make any other claim.
[2] There is an obvious problem with new optimism, which is that it’s anthropocentric. In fact, on many plausible views, the total axiological value of the world at any time in the recent past may be dominated by the aggregate wellbeing of nonhuman animals; even more counterintuitively, it may well be dominated by things like the change in the total population size of invertebrates. But this debate is about human wellbeing, so I’ll ignore this problem.
In addition to the examples you mention, the world has become much more unequal over the past centuries, and I wonder how that impacts welfare. Relatedly, I wonder to what degree there is more loneliness and less purpose and belonging than in previous times, and how that impacts welfare (and whether it relates to the Easterlin paradox). EAs don’t seem to discuss these aspects of welfare often. (Somewhat related books: Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape and Junger’s Tribe.)
(Have not read through Max’ link dump yet, which seems very interesting, I also feel some skepticism of the ‘new optimism’ worldview.)
One major disappointment in Pinker’s book as well as in related writings for me has been that they do little to acknowledge that how much progress you think the world has seen depends a lot on your values. To name some examples, not everyone views the legalization of gay marriage and easier access to abortion as progress, and not everyone thinks that having plentiful access to consumer goods is a good thing.
I would be very interested in an analysis of ‘progress’ in light of the different moral foundations discussed by Haidt. I have the impression that Pinker exclusively focuses on the ‘care/harm’ foundation, while completely ignoring others like Sanctity/purity or Authority/respect and this might be where some part of the disconnect between the ‘New optimists’ and opponents is coming from.
Your point reminds me of the “history is written by the winners” adage – presumably, most civilizations would look back and think of their history as one of progress because they views their current values most favorably.
Perhaps this is one of the paths that would eventually contribute to a “desired dystopia” outcome, as outlined in Ord’s book: we fail to realize that our social structure is flawed and leads to suffering in a systematic manner that’s difficult to change.
(Also related: https://www.gwern.net/The-Narrowing-Circle )
I have relatively little exposure to Hickel, save for reading his guardian piece and a small part of the dialogue that followed from that, but I don’t get the impression he’s coming from a position of putting more weight on Sanctity/purity or Authority/respect; in general I’d guess that few people in left-wing social-science academia are big on those sorts of moral foundations, except indirectly via moral/cultural relativism.
Taking Haidt’s moral foundations theory as read for the moment, I’d guess that the Fairness foundation is doing a lot of the work in this disagreement. In general, leftists and liberals seem to differ a lot in what they consider culpable harm, and Fairness/exploitation seems like a big part of that.
Very interesting writeup, I wasn’t aware of Hickel’s critique but it seems reasonable.
Do you think it matters who’s right? I suppose it’s important to know whether poverty is increasing or decreasing if you want to evaluate the consequences of historical policies or events, and even for general interest. But does it have any specific bearing on what we should do going forwards?
I think it matters quite a lot when it comes to assessing where to go from here: in particular, how cautious and conservative to be, and how favourable towards untested radical change.
If things have gotten way better and are likely to continue to get way better in the foreseeable future, then we should probably broadly stick with what we’re doing – some tinkering around the edges to fix obvious abuses, but no root-and-branch restructuring unless something goes obviously and profoundly wrong.
Whereas if things are failing to get better, or are actively getting worse, then it might be worth taking big risks in order to get out of the hole.
I’ve often had conversations with people to my left where they seem way too willing to smash stuff in the process of getting to deep systemic change, which is potentially sensible if you think we’re in a very bad place and getting worse but madness if you think we’re in an extremely unusually good place and getting better.
Thanks, this is a good question. I don’t think it has specific bearing on future actions, but does have some broader relevance. For example, longtermists have sometimes discussed the total value of the long-term future: in this context, we may be interested in whether things have been getting better or worse in order to extrapolate this trend forward.
(Though this is not why I wrote this post. - That was more because I happened to find it interesting personally.)
Of course, this trend extrapolation would only be one among many considerations. In addition, ideally we’d want a trend on the world’s total value, not a trend on just poverty. So e.g. the anthropocentrism would be a problem here.
I agree that the world has gotten much better than it was.
There are two important reasons for this, the other improvements that we see mostly follow from them.
Energy consumption (is wealth) The energy consumption per person has increased over the last 500 years and that increased consumption translates to welfare.
Education (knowledge) The amount of knowledge that we as humanity posses has increased dramatically, and that knowledge is widely accessible. 75% of kids finishing 9th grade, 12.5% finishing 6th grade, 4.65% less than 6th grade unfortunately around 7-8% kids have never gone to school. Education increases translate to increase in health, wealth (actually energy consumption) more in countries with market economies than non-market economies.
The various -isms (capitalism, socialism, communism, neoliberalism, colonialism, fascism) have very little to do with human development, and in fact have been very negative for human development. (I am skipping theory about how the -isms are supposed to work, and jumping to the actual effects).
Pinker has his critics, a sample at https://isreview.org/issue/86/steven-pinker-alleged-decline-violence
The improvements in knowledge are secondary to the tapping of fossil fuels and the resulting energy consumption, which eventually caused the demographic transition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
Once the demographic transition happened, there are no young men willing to fight foreign wars and violence declined. i.e. outright occupation (colonialism) gave way to neocolonialism, and that is the world we find ourselves in today.
I find it hard to take any claims of “reason” and “humanism” seriously, while the world warms per capita consumption of fossil fuel is 10 times higher in USA than “developing” countries. Countries of the global south still have easily solvable problems like basic education and health that are under funded.
Richard A. Easterlin has a good understanding when he asks “Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed?” https://www.jstor.org/stable/2120886?seq=1
When downvoting please explain why
I just now saw this post, but I would guess that some readers wanted more justification for the use of the term “secondary”, which implies that you’re assigning value to both of (improvements in knowledge) and (tapping of fossil fuels) and saying that the negative value of the latter outweighs the value of the former. I’d guess that readers were curious how you weighed these things against each other.
I’ll also note that Pinker makes no claim that the world is perfect or has no problems, and that claiming that “reason” or “humanism” has made the world better does not entail that they’ve solved all the world’s problems or even that the world is improving in all important ways. You seem to be making different claims than Pinker does about the meaning of those terms, but you don’t explain how you define them differently. (I could be wrong about this, of course; that’s just what I picked up from a quick reading of the comment.)
Thanks Aaron for your response. I am assigning positive value to both improvements in knowledge and increased energy use (via tapping of fossil fuel energy). I am not weighing them one vs the other. I am saying that without the increased energy from fossil fuels we would still be agricultural societies, with repeated rise and fall of empires. The indus valley civilization, ancient greeks, mayans all of the repeatedly crashed. At the peak of those civilizations I am sure art, culture and knowledge flourished. Eventually humans out ran their resources and crashed, the crash simplified art forms, culture, and knowledge was also lost.
The driver is energy, and the result is increased art, culture, knowledge and peace too. Reason and humanism have very little to do with why our world is peaceful today (in the sense that outright murder, slavery, colonialism are no longer accepted).
I read the book by Pinker and his emphasis on Western thought and enlightenment was off putting. We are all human, there are no Western values or Eastern values.
Hans Rosling puts it beautifully “There is no such thing as Swedish values. Those are modern values”
https://www.thelocal.se/20150513/hans-rosling-im-an-ambassador-for-the-world-in-sweden-connectsweden-tlccu