The common narrative of progress relies on an economic sleight of statistical hand and a selective historical analysis that sanitizes capitalism's brutal human toll
1) There's no need to quibble about the poverty line, which is fundamentally arbitrary. The neolib “line go up, world get gooder” applies to tangibles, line literacy rates, child mortality, life expectancy, etc. The material condition of the human species has massively improved since the industrial revolution and it's borderline insane to deny this.
2) A relative decline in poverty, even if not absolute is still Very Good regardless of whether one is a total or average utilitarian and reflects well on the economic order under which it occurs.
3) Arguing about whether capitalism began with colonialism, the industrial revolution, or something in between seems like a word game. People aren't posting the line go up graphs and saying “See? This is why we should do the Scramble for Africa 2.0.” People are advocating for the market economy as it has existed ~since the end of WW2.
4) Comparing wealth inequality to pre-captialist eras is extremely fraught because making 1:1 comparisons of asset values potentially flattens a lot of historical economic and social distinctions.
5) Yes, China and other developing countries that succeeded had industrial policies, tariffs, etc. But (a) a Marxist would still call these systems “capitalist” and (b) that's not necessarily *why* they succeeded. In pairwise comparisons of like counties, the more laissez-faire ones generally do better (South vs North Korea, Botswana vs Zimbabwe, West vs East Germany, etc. You can accuse me of cherry-picking, but I honestly am not aware of any plausible pairwise comparison where the results are the opposite)
***
I say this as a liberal and a supporter of the market economy, but I'm not really trying to “dunk” on any socialist alternative. I think people who use “line go up” as a slam-dunk argument against any socialist alternative are being intellectually lazy. But it's annoying when socialists pretend, for ideological reasons, that the massive improvement in material conditions over the past century and a half has nothing to do with markets or just isn't real. There are plausible socialist alternatives to capitalism, and plausible arguments for their desirability, that aren't cancelled out by the above facts.
There are no plausible socialist alternatives to capitalism. This just amounts to saying "real socialism has never been tried". In regards to China, they are the poorest of the east asian countries (other than North Korea), and they are also the least capitalist. Coincidence?
I would also point out that Capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions of Europeans (and people living in former European colonies) out of poverty. It did so for about 100 million Japanese people and about 50 million Koreans, too. How many hundreds of millions living outside of poverty in a global capitalist economy would you have to see before you believed the claim, “Capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty”?
This piece commands of its readers, “don’t believe your lying eyes.”
On China, the transformation in living standards as a result of Deng’s “Reform and Opening Up” was both widely celebrated and readily apparent when I visited in 2018 (when I say, “widely celebrated”, it was the 40th anniversary and there were huge block printed banners all over the place). Everyone that had lived through it could tell you just how fantastically things had changed, and their children could tell of it just as well. It could be seen in all the new buildings and infrastructure built, and those being built yet. Much of old China was still present, too—the nation’s development is still ongoing—and this ability to directly compare its past and present only made the change in economic fortune all the more apparent. China’s economic liberalization permeates everything over there, which is why I reacted as I did to your essay. To say that capitalism has _not_ lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty felt to me like a denial of China’s national experience, let alone the rest of the world’s.
I would just like to quickly note, you can easily enter no-true-Scotsman territory when describing both Capitalism and Communism, particularly with regard to China. Really, China is both and neither. “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, as they say. I personally question the fitness of a 19th century ideological binary to describe the immense complexity of human economic systems in the first place, but I digress…
In any case, it is my belief that the cause of China’s modern prosperity lies largely (though not wholly) with the liberal economic reforms initiated by Deng. In other words, to traditionally capitalist practices. I would wager the vast majority of Chinese citizens and party cadres share my opinion, too.
I guess my overarching point is you can theorize about these things all you want, but these are actual people’s lives we are talking about. Better to just ask them what they think or go and bear witness.
This is perhaps the most wrong anyone has ever been about anything - isn’t it an awfully great coincidence that the Industrial Revolution begins after the age of finance capital in Europe? Isn’t it a coincidence that as soon as free marketeer Deng Xiaoping takes control of China, it becomes middle income and abolished extreme poverty? Almost as if capitalism works or something
Yeah, the degree of motivated reasoning that Ryan Ward shows here is beyond comprehension. 30 million people died of famine during China's socialist experiment. I would like him to ask literaly any random Chinese person who was alive at the time if they think they are materially better off now or not.
Very helpful, thanks. I guess the lingering question is: if capitalism was the solution to world hunger then why would we even need the UN pledges, world summits, and such like? If free markets automatically solve societies problems then funded initiatives to end world hunger or other forms of gross inequality would not be needed.
Access to capital is the biggest driver of growth in capitalism. Without it, growth is virtually impossible. If you can get a bank loan to buy livestock, the livestock will more than make enough money to pay off the loan. Access to global capital will massively reduce the time it takes to industrialize.
Sorry, no. I'm frustrated to read this, but for the sake of those who came across this as I did in their feed and are not familiar with the debate:
This post is a rewritten version of Jason Hickel's article in the Guardian from 2019, which was shared extensively on social media at the time, in which he sought to debunk and discredit Max Roser's work at Our World in Data, which shows that global poverty has declined since 1820.
There has been a lot of debate on the methodology and arguments since then, and I'd recommend this https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/against-hickelism as a useful overview of why the points made by Jason Hickel and in this post are, mostly (but not at all) wrong.
To highlight the key points:
- The issue is not about the where you exactly draw the line for what constitutes global poverty, but about whether poverty overall is decreasing.
- It is bizarre to exclude China from an overall picture of global poverty reduction, and in any case, privatisation was a critical part of the Chinese economic policy.
- Reasonable to note that the data pre-1820 isn't shown here, but prior to this point, most of the world was living on subsistence farming. (Note that Jason Hickel has claimed elsewhere that pre-1820 data doesn't account for subsistence farming, and is incorrect). Colonisation shackled nations and extracted resources; the end of colonisation freed nations to grow. Since that time, poverty has reduced. This is not a 'bouncing back' to some mythical pre-colonisation/pre-industrial glory days: this is economic growth, with corresponding poverty reduction. Capitalism is not the preserve of colonialists and it is not the role of the moralistic west to supposedly try to 'free' the rest of the world from it.
Thanks for your comments. I think Hickel has done a great service in highlighting the suspect nature of the poverty line used by the World Bank to promote the general narrative. Based on going through some of Roser's posts and story, Hickel does seem like a bad actor in some ways. His recent work on China and pre-1820 poverty metrics seems much more robust to me and less polemical, but I can see that I could not have chosen a more controversial person to base a post on.
I think for me, the narrative that free market capitalism has lifted people out of poverty is so pervasive that anyone calling attention to historical and methodological flaws in that narrative is doing all of us a favor (and Hickel is far from the only person doing this, probably just the most famous). I had hoped to maintain a mostly objective tone in the post, but relying on Hickel probably will set a lot of people off right away.
I should have done more to differentiate what I mean by capitalism vs a market economy.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, I'm glad you are less obstinate than Hickel and various others in this space. I don't think he is watertight on the pre 1820 work either (see my points on subsistence farming) but perhaps that has less holes than the rest of his work which seems at best bad and at worst dangerous.
You have generated some interesting discussion. Perhaps you might consider an amended foreword updating on some of the facts and your reviewed position? You are at risk of encouraging more bad takes on this subject but you could actually move things forward in an interesting way.
Yes there seems be a lot of lazy conflation of capitalism and free market economy in a lot of the debate. I'd be interested to see what you had to write about it.
I have been considering writing a foreword this morning. My goal has never been to put forward a dogmatic and ideological opinion. I have been of the opinion for a long time that the facts speak well enough against capitalism without having to resort to polemics and exaggeration. But I am learning that, as with everything, the picture is much more nuanced.
Sure, it adds a lot of important context. I generally think it's more important to debunk arguments not people, and I'm not entirely sure from the foreword if you're saying the issue is about definitions of the global poverty line (you do talk about this) or about whether it was capitalism that led to the reduction of poverty (you don't really mention this but it is the title of the article). Either way, appreciate the engagement :)
Ryan Ward and Jason Hickel should move to China, Cuba, Lao or Vietnam for 10 years and then come back and try and convince us that life is better there
Capitalism is two properties: property rights + freedom of association.
(Property rights is a fact of life due to scarcity, for example you cannot share the food you have consumed. Ergo, that’s your property. We abstract it out from there.)
Anything else is violence. To place the blame on capitalism is to say that the moral and voluntary is the bad, and the flip side, violent monopolistic government, is the good.
Violence does not lead to prosperity. It never has, it never will.
To place the blame on the idea of property, or on freedom, is morally retarded and is to argue for tyranny.
You do this sleight of hand where you try to swap the government and capitalism:
> “economic system that allows a minority of people to extract and hoard wealth from the majority.”
This exactly and precisely describes modern governments across the world.
There is no larger monopoly than government.
It steals and wastes societies life force relentlessly, and all of that energy gets sucked up by parasitic politicians and government enforced market monopolies.
(Free market monopoly is a myth, all monopolies are installed and maintained through government intervention in the market to prevent competition.)
Stop promoting a system of coercion and violence, and stop blaming the idea of property and freedom for its ills.
Do you have any evidence to back up your ideological screed? I'm open to evidence.
But to your point about property and scarcity. There are enough resources in the world for everyone, but they are not distributed equally according to everyone's needs, mostly because much has been appropriated as private property. The modern idea of private property was invented to justify the colonial and enclosure movements.
I can't be bothered to address your other inaccuracies.
This is basic philosophy, we’re mostly in the realm of logic, so you don’t need evidence for the meat of what I said.
The various assertions you can find evidence for if you want, but I’m not writing a cited essay as a simple reply. Attacking me on that is pointless, since you are interested in research and know how to look things up. To say that I haven’t cited anything here is just a distraction.
None of this is ideological that’s just low-brow adhom. I can simply retort that you are being ideological (ideologs cite facts all the time), and were left adrift nowhere. Adds nothing to the conversation.
Colonialism is the exact opposite of property rights and the free market; as violence and coercion are the opposite of property rights and freedom. This doesn’t need evidence, it’s philosophy.
Governments exist to violate property rights, not uphold them.
To the degree that empires have used “property” it hasn’t been truly property, but merely power disguised as something moral and benign. Governments do this all the time, to this day. They give money a bad name by force us to use their shitty fiat “money” that they debase to steal from us via inflation. Money isn’t bad, it’s essential, government is bad.
Property and price are invented like math is invented. That is, it’s a fundamental concept manifested in reality.
When there is scarcity we use property to portion it and we use the price mechanism to quantify how scarce it is.
By the way, the mycelial network (fungus in the ground) uses price to distribute resources between trees. Trees will pay more if they are desperate and the price is higher if that tree is far away. This ensures efficient resource distribution.
People like you have an ideology called “the only thing that is actually free and voluntary (property rights and markets) is the bad, and coercion violence and government redistribution is good”.
You are necessarily saying that, because if you strip away property rights, how will you have resources distributed? Well you’re more than likely going to suggest a system of coercion, eg some government structure like socialism or communism or maybe even AI like the zeitgeist movement.
My advice to you, if you truly aren’t ideological as you imply, think about property from first principles, rather than mired in what empires and coercive structures have done with “property”. Coercive structures corrupt everything they touch, that is the nature of violence.
To be fair, the US government has grown (in wastefulness) with both Republicans and Democrats in charge.
Is DOGE going to cut welfare? Pensions? No, it’s political suicide. The system is incapable of truly removing waste because it’s fundamentally a corrupt system.
But it’s good to see that attitude shift in that direction. Well, unless you’re an accelerationist.
It could be said that food aid has caused much poverty and hunger and led to people fleeing the countryside for the shanty towns. Floods of cheap agribusiness surplus grain has impoverished what once were resilient rural societies . Who benefits in the end..the capitalists,and now all over the world good land is abandoned and villages deserted so that the industrial complex has a supply of cheap labour.
The 19th C. Corn Laws come to mind. Do you keep prices high in order to keep a rural population in place, or let cheap imports flood in so industrial workers can survive on a pitiful wage? The exodus from the countryside then gives capital an ever cheaper source of slave labour.
Perhaps the true effects of industrial scale food aid could be a subject worthy of investigation.
This is idiotic. Pre-capitalist agrarian societies suffered severe periodic famines on a regular basis. Why do you think the world population barely grew in pre-capitalist times?
This is a straw man paper. “Capitalism” is a Marxian term and also one notably undefined by the author.
The real point is that objective living standards did not change from ancient agricultural societies until the early 1800s. An Englishman in 1790 had roughly the same amount of food, clothing and living space, and health and life expectancy, as Roman Briton 1700 years earlier.
The fact that Britain in 1790 was far more technologically advanced dis not change this equivalency, due to the “Iron Law of Wages”.
The miracle is that at a certain point, industrial production was able to reach a scale where production growth could exceed population growth.
Since no “socialist” economy existed until 1917, one can see this really has nothing to do with Socialism or Marxism. Socialist economies CAN also grow, but without any doubt their growth is much, much slower than non-Marxist/non-command/free-market economies, however one wishes to define that.
This ranks with vaccine denial and flat earthism. Capitalism has obviously substantially increased the share of people around the world who can easily afford food, healthcare and shelter. Arbitrary measures of "poverty" don't matter.
The frequency of peacetime famines in capitalist countries has collapsed. This is well documented. England hasn't had one since the enclosure movement brought widespread capitalism to agriculture in 1750,
You are clearly not open to data. You ignore any data that goes against your predetermined conclusion and cherry-pick "studies" that seemingly support your argument. This is what you sound like "I'm open to data that the world is round, but so far the studies I've seen are unconvincing".
Awesome post, thanks for sharing. How would you expand this argument to poverty in developed countries? I keep running into circular arguments where people say poverty in the US isn’t an issue because being poor in America still puts you in the top percentile of incomes globally. To borrow your wording, it’s a disingenuous and amoral line of reasoning, but I’d love to have some more context behind that top percentile stat and any associate statistical sleight of hand. Where should I go first to learn more?
> Those of us who have been hit with this one over and over (and it is the go-to for capitalist apologists) can sometimes feel a bit like a deer in the headlights. Something about it doesn’t quite feel right. After all, there are reams of data suggesting that many facets of human existence, wealth inequality for starters, have gotten much worse under capitalism.
You can't think of any way those two things could both be true?
Not a great start, especially combined with that first sentence, which strongly suggests a desire to get to a certain conclusion. Why would you feel like a deer in the headlights, except that you don't know how to respond to an inconvenient fact? If you were truly truth-seeking, wouldn't you be pleased to be confronted with information that contradicts your position?
Of course you feel like a deer in the headlights- because the fact is true, but you desperately don't *want* it to be true. Which is why you write long posts with silly arguments like 'it actually only lifted 500 million, not 800 million people, out of poverty. So... still hundreds of millions of people then, right?
Come on man, you're making us look bad. I'm a socialist, but I don't need to hide from inconvenient facts. I just believe that, while capitalism is excellent at growing economies and does have something of a "rising tide" effect, it results in inequities in distribution of the resulting wealth, negative externalities, and other flaws that cause great harm to people, and can therefore be improved upon by a more distributive system that retains some of the positive features of capitalism.
Thanks for your comment. Since writing this post, I've been forced to take stock of my biases. I think there are real problems with the calculation of poverty lines, but it does seem to be a bit sticking our heads in the sand to not admit that many people's lives have gotten better under capitalism. As you say, many have not, and the resulting inequality threatens many of the gains that have been made. As you say, things are more complex than saying capitalism is bad. But I think it worth highlighting the issues with the poverty line calculations. Perhaps I took too definitive of a position.
What do you think of Hickel's argument that most of the gains have been due to people's attempts to regulate capitalism appropriately? Seems to make sense, but would take more detailed analyses to substantiate.
this is a very well-written article. I'd like to see the people who say capitalism is working explain how so many people are still in inescapable poverty.
If the pro-capitalists are wrong that poverty fell in absolute terms, but right that it fell in relative terms as population rose, that would still be significant, since one would expect the proportion to remain constant or even to rise due to the immiseration of the working class.
You critique the evolving official measurements of poverty as both inadequate and as moving the goalposts. That’s a powerful argument. But It would be useful to estimate a corrected poverty rate and show how it has changed.
The question of the lives of the poorest people is very very important, and complicated. But if we bracket it and look at the economically average person, most of what I’ve read claims economic growth over 200 years has improved that person’s material quality of life a lot. Do you reject that?
It seems to me that the most undeniable critique of capitalism is soaring inequality, which has huge costs to society in all kinds of ways. Yet most poor and most average people would accept a deal that improved their material security even if it meant the rich became 100x relatively richer than before.
I think pro and anti-capitalists need to be serious about looking at what the data really say about capitalism and poverty. Both sides, and I'm guilty of this myself, caricature the positions of their opponents. I am seriously trying to evaluate my own biases regarding the relative good capitalism has done in the world. I think the criticisms about the poverty lines used to interpret the effects on poverty are very important and there need to be more factors besides income taken into account. But it's hard to argue that at least at the aggregate level, poverty hasn't decreased. I think rather than taking a hard line on either side (capitalism has decreased/increased poverty) we should be looking at the combinations of factors that have led to the decrease and the different ways that decrease has been materially felt (or not) in the lives of the poor. I think, as controversial as Hickel's work is, he's got the right idea by trying to look more expansively at proxy measures of poverty as a way to get at the historical trajectory. Capitalism doesn't operate in a social, geographical, or historical vacuum, and our narratives should not treat it as if it does.
A few points:
1) There's no need to quibble about the poverty line, which is fundamentally arbitrary. The neolib “line go up, world get gooder” applies to tangibles, line literacy rates, child mortality, life expectancy, etc. The material condition of the human species has massively improved since the industrial revolution and it's borderline insane to deny this.
2) A relative decline in poverty, even if not absolute is still Very Good regardless of whether one is a total or average utilitarian and reflects well on the economic order under which it occurs.
3) Arguing about whether capitalism began with colonialism, the industrial revolution, or something in between seems like a word game. People aren't posting the line go up graphs and saying “See? This is why we should do the Scramble for Africa 2.0.” People are advocating for the market economy as it has existed ~since the end of WW2.
4) Comparing wealth inequality to pre-captialist eras is extremely fraught because making 1:1 comparisons of asset values potentially flattens a lot of historical economic and social distinctions.
5) Yes, China and other developing countries that succeeded had industrial policies, tariffs, etc. But (a) a Marxist would still call these systems “capitalist” and (b) that's not necessarily *why* they succeeded. In pairwise comparisons of like counties, the more laissez-faire ones generally do better (South vs North Korea, Botswana vs Zimbabwe, West vs East Germany, etc. You can accuse me of cherry-picking, but I honestly am not aware of any plausible pairwise comparison where the results are the opposite)
***
I say this as a liberal and a supporter of the market economy, but I'm not really trying to “dunk” on any socialist alternative. I think people who use “line go up” as a slam-dunk argument against any socialist alternative are being intellectually lazy. But it's annoying when socialists pretend, for ideological reasons, that the massive improvement in material conditions over the past century and a half has nothing to do with markets or just isn't real. There are plausible socialist alternatives to capitalism, and plausible arguments for their desirability, that aren't cancelled out by the above facts.
There are no plausible socialist alternatives to capitalism. This just amounts to saying "real socialism has never been tried". In regards to China, they are the poorest of the east asian countries (other than North Korea), and they are also the least capitalist. Coincidence?
The author has clearly never been to China.
I would also point out that Capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions of Europeans (and people living in former European colonies) out of poverty. It did so for about 100 million Japanese people and about 50 million Koreans, too. How many hundreds of millions living outside of poverty in a global capitalist economy would you have to see before you believed the claim, “Capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty”?
This piece commands of its readers, “don’t believe your lying eyes.”
Care to elaborate?
On China, the transformation in living standards as a result of Deng’s “Reform and Opening Up” was both widely celebrated and readily apparent when I visited in 2018 (when I say, “widely celebrated”, it was the 40th anniversary and there were huge block printed banners all over the place). Everyone that had lived through it could tell you just how fantastically things had changed, and their children could tell of it just as well. It could be seen in all the new buildings and infrastructure built, and those being built yet. Much of old China was still present, too—the nation’s development is still ongoing—and this ability to directly compare its past and present only made the change in economic fortune all the more apparent. China’s economic liberalization permeates everything over there, which is why I reacted as I did to your essay. To say that capitalism has _not_ lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty felt to me like a denial of China’s national experience, let alone the rest of the world’s.
I would just like to quickly note, you can easily enter no-true-Scotsman territory when describing both Capitalism and Communism, particularly with regard to China. Really, China is both and neither. “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, as they say. I personally question the fitness of a 19th century ideological binary to describe the immense complexity of human economic systems in the first place, but I digress…
In any case, it is my belief that the cause of China’s modern prosperity lies largely (though not wholly) with the liberal economic reforms initiated by Deng. In other words, to traditionally capitalist practices. I would wager the vast majority of Chinese citizens and party cadres share my opinion, too.
I guess my overarching point is you can theorize about these things all you want, but these are actual people’s lives we are talking about. Better to just ask them what they think or go and bear witness.
I need to read up more on this. Thank you for your reply.
This is perhaps the most wrong anyone has ever been about anything - isn’t it an awfully great coincidence that the Industrial Revolution begins after the age of finance capital in Europe? Isn’t it a coincidence that as soon as free marketeer Deng Xiaoping takes control of China, it becomes middle income and abolished extreme poverty? Almost as if capitalism works or something
Yeah, the degree of motivated reasoning that Ryan Ward shows here is beyond comprehension. 30 million people died of famine during China's socialist experiment. I would like him to ask literaly any random Chinese person who was alive at the time if they think they are materially better off now or not.
The most idiotic “sleigh of hand” article written by some one who has never really lived in a non capitalistic society
“Capitalism is the worst form of governance except for all other alternatives”
Very helpful, thanks. I guess the lingering question is: if capitalism was the solution to world hunger then why would we even need the UN pledges, world summits, and such like? If free markets automatically solve societies problems then funded initiatives to end world hunger or other forms of gross inequality would not be needed.
Access to capital is the biggest driver of growth in capitalism. Without it, growth is virtually impossible. If you can get a bank loan to buy livestock, the livestock will more than make enough money to pay off the loan. Access to global capital will massively reduce the time it takes to industrialize.
Sorry, no. I'm frustrated to read this, but for the sake of those who came across this as I did in their feed and are not familiar with the debate:
This post is a rewritten version of Jason Hickel's article in the Guardian from 2019, which was shared extensively on social media at the time, in which he sought to debunk and discredit Max Roser's work at Our World in Data, which shows that global poverty has declined since 1820.
There has been a lot of debate on the methodology and arguments since then, and I'd recommend this https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/against-hickelism as a useful overview of why the points made by Jason Hickel and in this post are, mostly (but not at all) wrong.
To highlight the key points:
- The issue is not about the where you exactly draw the line for what constitutes global poverty, but about whether poverty overall is decreasing.
- It is bizarre to exclude China from an overall picture of global poverty reduction, and in any case, privatisation was a critical part of the Chinese economic policy.
- Reasonable to note that the data pre-1820 isn't shown here, but prior to this point, most of the world was living on subsistence farming. (Note that Jason Hickel has claimed elsewhere that pre-1820 data doesn't account for subsistence farming, and is incorrect). Colonisation shackled nations and extracted resources; the end of colonisation freed nations to grow. Since that time, poverty has reduced. This is not a 'bouncing back' to some mythical pre-colonisation/pre-industrial glory days: this is economic growth, with corresponding poverty reduction. Capitalism is not the preserve of colonialists and it is not the role of the moralistic west to supposedly try to 'free' the rest of the world from it.
Max Roser has also explained his position, both intellectual and personal, on the matter, here. https://x.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378735079481049100
Thanks for your comments. I think Hickel has done a great service in highlighting the suspect nature of the poverty line used by the World Bank to promote the general narrative. Based on going through some of Roser's posts and story, Hickel does seem like a bad actor in some ways. His recent work on China and pre-1820 poverty metrics seems much more robust to me and less polemical, but I can see that I could not have chosen a more controversial person to base a post on.
I think for me, the narrative that free market capitalism has lifted people out of poverty is so pervasive that anyone calling attention to historical and methodological flaws in that narrative is doing all of us a favor (and Hickel is far from the only person doing this, probably just the most famous). I had hoped to maintain a mostly objective tone in the post, but relying on Hickel probably will set a lot of people off right away.
I should have done more to differentiate what I mean by capitalism vs a market economy.
Thanks again.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, I'm glad you are less obstinate than Hickel and various others in this space. I don't think he is watertight on the pre 1820 work either (see my points on subsistence farming) but perhaps that has less holes than the rest of his work which seems at best bad and at worst dangerous.
You have generated some interesting discussion. Perhaps you might consider an amended foreword updating on some of the facts and your reviewed position? You are at risk of encouraging more bad takes on this subject but you could actually move things forward in an interesting way.
Yes there seems be a lot of lazy conflation of capitalism and free market economy in a lot of the debate. I'd be interested to see what you had to write about it.
I have been considering writing a foreword this morning. My goal has never been to put forward a dogmatic and ideological opinion. I have been of the opinion for a long time that the facts speak well enough against capitalism without having to resort to polemics and exaggeration. But I am learning that, as with everything, the picture is much more nuanced.
Thanks for engaging in good faith.
Sure, it adds a lot of important context. I generally think it's more important to debunk arguments not people, and I'm not entirely sure from the foreword if you're saying the issue is about definitions of the global poverty line (you do talk about this) or about whether it was capitalism that led to the reduction of poverty (you don't really mention this but it is the title of the article). Either way, appreciate the engagement :)
Check out the foreword. Is it clear enough and does it capture what it needs to?
Ryan Ward and Jason Hickel should move to China, Cuba, Lao or Vietnam for 10 years and then come back and try and convince us that life is better there
Bad fundamentals.
Capitalism is two properties: property rights + freedom of association.
(Property rights is a fact of life due to scarcity, for example you cannot share the food you have consumed. Ergo, that’s your property. We abstract it out from there.)
Anything else is violence. To place the blame on capitalism is to say that the moral and voluntary is the bad, and the flip side, violent monopolistic government, is the good.
Violence does not lead to prosperity. It never has, it never will.
To place the blame on the idea of property, or on freedom, is morally retarded and is to argue for tyranny.
You do this sleight of hand where you try to swap the government and capitalism:
> “economic system that allows a minority of people to extract and hoard wealth from the majority.”
This exactly and precisely describes modern governments across the world.
There is no larger monopoly than government.
It steals and wastes societies life force relentlessly, and all of that energy gets sucked up by parasitic politicians and government enforced market monopolies.
(Free market monopoly is a myth, all monopolies are installed and maintained through government intervention in the market to prevent competition.)
Stop promoting a system of coercion and violence, and stop blaming the idea of property and freedom for its ills.
Do you have any evidence to back up your ideological screed? I'm open to evidence.
But to your point about property and scarcity. There are enough resources in the world for everyone, but they are not distributed equally according to everyone's needs, mostly because much has been appropriated as private property. The modern idea of private property was invented to justify the colonial and enclosure movements.
I can't be bothered to address your other inaccuracies.
Also, it's 2025, enough with the "r" word.
This is basic philosophy, we’re mostly in the realm of logic, so you don’t need evidence for the meat of what I said.
The various assertions you can find evidence for if you want, but I’m not writing a cited essay as a simple reply. Attacking me on that is pointless, since you are interested in research and know how to look things up. To say that I haven’t cited anything here is just a distraction.
None of this is ideological that’s just low-brow adhom. I can simply retort that you are being ideological (ideologs cite facts all the time), and were left adrift nowhere. Adds nothing to the conversation.
Colonialism is the exact opposite of property rights and the free market; as violence and coercion are the opposite of property rights and freedom. This doesn’t need evidence, it’s philosophy.
Governments exist to violate property rights, not uphold them.
To the degree that empires have used “property” it hasn’t been truly property, but merely power disguised as something moral and benign. Governments do this all the time, to this day. They give money a bad name by force us to use their shitty fiat “money” that they debase to steal from us via inflation. Money isn’t bad, it’s essential, government is bad.
Property and price are invented like math is invented. That is, it’s a fundamental concept manifested in reality.
When there is scarcity we use property to portion it and we use the price mechanism to quantify how scarce it is.
By the way, the mycelial network (fungus in the ground) uses price to distribute resources between trees. Trees will pay more if they are desperate and the price is higher if that tree is far away. This ensures efficient resource distribution.
People like you have an ideology called “the only thing that is actually free and voluntary (property rights and markets) is the bad, and coercion violence and government redistribution is good”.
You are necessarily saying that, because if you strip away property rights, how will you have resources distributed? Well you’re more than likely going to suggest a system of coercion, eg some government structure like socialism or communism or maybe even AI like the zeitgeist movement.
My advice to you, if you truly aren’t ideological as you imply, think about property from first principles, rather than mired in what empires and coercive structures have done with “property”. Coercive structures corrupt everything they touch, that is the nature of violence.
And the left wing governments are by far the biggest wasters and the biggest thieves. Just look at what DOGE has uncovered!
To be fair, the US government has grown (in wastefulness) with both Republicans and Democrats in charge.
Is DOGE going to cut welfare? Pensions? No, it’s political suicide. The system is incapable of truly removing waste because it’s fundamentally a corrupt system.
But it’s good to see that attitude shift in that direction. Well, unless you’re an accelerationist.
It could be said that food aid has caused much poverty and hunger and led to people fleeing the countryside for the shanty towns. Floods of cheap agribusiness surplus grain has impoverished what once were resilient rural societies . Who benefits in the end..the capitalists,and now all over the world good land is abandoned and villages deserted so that the industrial complex has a supply of cheap labour.
This is a great insight. I would love for you to elaborate on this. Thank you for engaging.
The 19th C. Corn Laws come to mind. Do you keep prices high in order to keep a rural population in place, or let cheap imports flood in so industrial workers can survive on a pitiful wage? The exodus from the countryside then gives capital an ever cheaper source of slave labour.
Perhaps the true effects of industrial scale food aid could be a subject worthy of investigation.
This is idiotic. Pre-capitalist agrarian societies suffered severe periodic famines on a regular basis. Why do you think the world population barely grew in pre-capitalist times?
This is a straw man paper. “Capitalism” is a Marxian term and also one notably undefined by the author.
The real point is that objective living standards did not change from ancient agricultural societies until the early 1800s. An Englishman in 1790 had roughly the same amount of food, clothing and living space, and health and life expectancy, as Roman Briton 1700 years earlier.
The fact that Britain in 1790 was far more technologically advanced dis not change this equivalency, due to the “Iron Law of Wages”.
The miracle is that at a certain point, industrial production was able to reach a scale where production growth could exceed population growth.
Since no “socialist” economy existed until 1917, one can see this really has nothing to do with Socialism or Marxism. Socialist economies CAN also grow, but without any doubt their growth is much, much slower than non-Marxist/non-command/free-market economies, however one wishes to define that.
Can you recommend some sources for reading for me to follow up?
This ranks with vaccine denial and flat earthism. Capitalism has obviously substantially increased the share of people around the world who can easily afford food, healthcare and shelter. Arbitrary measures of "poverty" don't matter.
I’m open to data if you have them. The point I’m trying to make is that most data claiming this are suspect and far from straightforward.
The frequency of peacetime famines in capitalist countries has collapsed. This is well documented. England hasn't had one since the enclosure movement brought widespread capitalism to agriculture in 1750,
You are clearly not open to data. You ignore any data that goes against your predetermined conclusion and cherry-pick "studies" that seemingly support your argument. This is what you sound like "I'm open to data that the world is round, but so far the studies I've seen are unconvincing".
Awesome post, thanks for sharing. How would you expand this argument to poverty in developed countries? I keep running into circular arguments where people say poverty in the US isn’t an issue because being poor in America still puts you in the top percentile of incomes globally. To borrow your wording, it’s a disingenuous and amoral line of reasoning, but I’d love to have some more context behind that top percentile stat and any associate statistical sleight of hand. Where should I go first to learn more?
Brilliantly written. Lies, damned lies and statistics.
Fascinating read!
> Those of us who have been hit with this one over and over (and it is the go-to for capitalist apologists) can sometimes feel a bit like a deer in the headlights. Something about it doesn’t quite feel right. After all, there are reams of data suggesting that many facets of human existence, wealth inequality for starters, have gotten much worse under capitalism.
You can't think of any way those two things could both be true?
Not a great start, especially combined with that first sentence, which strongly suggests a desire to get to a certain conclusion. Why would you feel like a deer in the headlights, except that you don't know how to respond to an inconvenient fact? If you were truly truth-seeking, wouldn't you be pleased to be confronted with information that contradicts your position?
Of course you feel like a deer in the headlights- because the fact is true, but you desperately don't *want* it to be true. Which is why you write long posts with silly arguments like 'it actually only lifted 500 million, not 800 million people, out of poverty. So... still hundreds of millions of people then, right?
Come on man, you're making us look bad. I'm a socialist, but I don't need to hide from inconvenient facts. I just believe that, while capitalism is excellent at growing economies and does have something of a "rising tide" effect, it results in inequities in distribution of the resulting wealth, negative externalities, and other flaws that cause great harm to people, and can therefore be improved upon by a more distributive system that retains some of the positive features of capitalism.
Thanks for your comment. Since writing this post, I've been forced to take stock of my biases. I think there are real problems with the calculation of poverty lines, but it does seem to be a bit sticking our heads in the sand to not admit that many people's lives have gotten better under capitalism. As you say, many have not, and the resulting inequality threatens many of the gains that have been made. As you say, things are more complex than saying capitalism is bad. But I think it worth highlighting the issues with the poverty line calculations. Perhaps I took too definitive of a position.
What do you think of Hickel's argument that most of the gains have been due to people's attempts to regulate capitalism appropriately? Seems to make sense, but would take more detailed analyses to substantiate.
this is a very well-written article. I'd like to see the people who say capitalism is working explain how so many people are still in inescapable poverty.
I appreciate this thoughtful argument.
If the pro-capitalists are wrong that poverty fell in absolute terms, but right that it fell in relative terms as population rose, that would still be significant, since one would expect the proportion to remain constant or even to rise due to the immiseration of the working class.
You critique the evolving official measurements of poverty as both inadequate and as moving the goalposts. That’s a powerful argument. But It would be useful to estimate a corrected poverty rate and show how it has changed.
The question of the lives of the poorest people is very very important, and complicated. But if we bracket it and look at the economically average person, most of what I’ve read claims economic growth over 200 years has improved that person’s material quality of life a lot. Do you reject that?
It seems to me that the most undeniable critique of capitalism is soaring inequality, which has huge costs to society in all kinds of ways. Yet most poor and most average people would accept a deal that improved their material security even if it meant the rich became 100x relatively richer than before.
I think pro and anti-capitalists need to be serious about looking at what the data really say about capitalism and poverty. Both sides, and I'm guilty of this myself, caricature the positions of their opponents. I am seriously trying to evaluate my own biases regarding the relative good capitalism has done in the world. I think the criticisms about the poverty lines used to interpret the effects on poverty are very important and there need to be more factors besides income taken into account. But it's hard to argue that at least at the aggregate level, poverty hasn't decreased. I think rather than taking a hard line on either side (capitalism has decreased/increased poverty) we should be looking at the combinations of factors that have led to the decrease and the different ways that decrease has been materially felt (or not) in the lives of the poor. I think, as controversial as Hickel's work is, he's got the right idea by trying to look more expansively at proxy measures of poverty as a way to get at the historical trajectory. Capitalism doesn't operate in a social, geographical, or historical vacuum, and our narratives should not treat it as if it does.