Right. So that gets me curious about how did they estimate the percentage of people living in "extreme poverty" in, say, 1850 China, and what are the error bars on that estimate.
Speaking qualitatively, if we take the "living on the edge of subsistence" meaning, the charts say that around 90% of the human population lived "on the edge of subsistence" in mid-XIX century. Is that so? I am not sure it matches my intuition well. Even if we look at Asia, at peasantry of Russia and China, say, these people weren't well-off, but I have doubts about the "edge of subsistence" for all of them. Of course, a great deal of their economy was non-trade local which makes estimating their consumption in something like 2009 US dollars... difficult.
Seems to be mostly Asia getting richer. Hans Rosling gives a very impressive talk with amazing visuals about that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w You can also play with the data for yourself http://www.gapminder.org/world
Well, the trend in the second chart is clearly unsustainable, so it's hardly something to get too excited about. I would be happy if the second chart showed poverty dropping off while total population stayed roughly flat.
The developments you highlight are impressive indeed. But you're making it sound as though everyone should agree with your normative judgments. You imply that doubling extreme poverty would be a good thing if it comes with a doubling of the rest of the population. This view is not uncontroversial and many EAs would disagree with it. Please respect that other people will disagree with your value judgments.
I think he's showing the opposite. The first graph does imply what you say. The second graph shows that EVEN if we look at number of people in extreme poverty as an absolute, rather than a ratio, we've been making steady progress since 1971 and are now below 1820 levels of poverty.
It's not judgement-free, as nothing on this topic can or should be. However, it's showing that the positive results are robust to multiple dimensions that people are likely to judge on.
To be specific: what normative judgement do you prefer for which this graph is misleading? Or are you saying "there are important things not covered in either graph", which is true of pretty much any such summary.
Wouldn't the addition of money into economies where it was previously a less-than-frequent enabler of the flow of goods and services cause this to be overstated?
Individual wealth has diminishing returns on investment. The marginal utility of each extra dollar of income is less. There's reason to believe that we'll have to slowly shift the focus of our efforts elseware, if we want to continue making equally huge strides forward.
We hit the UN's old goal of having extreme poverty level from 1990. We even did it 5 years ahead of the 2015 target date, which is fantastic. But if we want to hit the next set of goals, we'll need more than just more economic growth. For example, this TED talk indicates that all of the UN's...
The chart is flawed -- it doesn't contain numbers predating the Industrial Revolution, when many of the agricultural workers who lived off the land tended to be much happier than the overworked, depressed populations of today. What's the point of "productivity" if you don't have the free time to enjoy the fruits of your labor? Our current system is designed to benefit the people at the top, regardless of how much the exploited lower and middle class workers are paid.
That seems very different from my perception of science
Aren't both these views of science oversimplifications? I mean, in practice most of the people making use of the work scientists have done aren't really testing the scientists' work for themselves (they're kinda doing it implicitly by making use of that work, but the whole point is that they are confident it's not going to fail).
Reality certainly is the ultimate arbiter, but regrettably we don't get to ask Reality directly whether our theories are correct; all we can do is test them somewhat (in some cases it's not even clear how to begin doing that; I'm looking at you, string theory) and that testing is done by fallible people using fallible equipment, and in many cases it's very difficult to do in a way that actually lets you separate the signal from the noise, and most of us aren't well placed to evaluate how fallibly it's been done in any given case, and in practice usually we have to fall back on something like "scientific consensus" after all.
I think you and MattG are at cross purposes about the role he sees for calibration in science. The process by which actual primary scientific work becomes useful to people who aren't specialists in the field goes something like this:
Calibration (in the sense we're talking about here) isn't of much relevance to Alice when she's doing the primary research. She will report that the Daily Mail is positively associated with brain cancer in rats (RR=1.3, n=50, CI=[1.1,1.5], p=0.01, etc., etc., etc.) and that's more or less it. (I take it that's the point you've been making.)
But Bob's opinion about the carcenogenicity of the Daily Mail (having read Alice's papers) is an altogether slipperier thing; and the opinion to which he and Beth and the others converge is slipperier still. It'll depend on their assessment of how likely it is that Alice made a mistake, how likely it is that Aloysius's results are fraudulent given that he took a large grant from the DMG Media Propaganda Fund, etc.; and on how strongly Bob is influenced when he hears Bill say "... and of course we all know what a shoddy operation Alex's lab is."
It is in these later stages that better calibration could be valuable, and that I think Matt would like to see more explicit reference to it. He would like Bob and Bill and Beth and the rest to be explicit about what they think and why and how confidently, and he would like the consensus-generating process to involve weighing people's opinions more or less heavily when they are known to be better or worse at the sort of subjective judgement required to decide how completely to mistrust Aloysius because of his funding.
I'm not terribly convinced that that would actually help much, for what it's worth. But I don't think what Matt's saying is invalidated by pointing out that Alice's publications don't talk about (this kind of) calibration.
I mean, in practice most of the people making use of the work scientists have done aren't really testing the scientists' work for themselves (they're kinda doing it implicitly by making use of that work, but the whole point is that they are confident it's not going to fail).
First, I think the "implicitly" part is very important. That glowing gizmo with melted-sand innards in front of me works. By working it verifies, very directly, a whole lot of science.
And "working in practice" is what leads to confidence, not vice versa. When a sa...
Cross-posted from my blog here.
One of the greatest successes of mankind over the last few centuries has been the enormous amount of wealth that has been created. Once upon a time virtually everyone lived in grinding poverty; now, thanks to the forces of science, capitalism and total factor productivity, we produce enough to support a much larger population at a much higher standard of living.
EAs being a highly intellectual lot, our preferred form of ritual celebration is charts. The ordained chart for celebrating this triumph of our people is the Declining Share of People Living in Extreme Poverty Chart.
(Source)
However, as a heretic, I think this chart is a mistake. What is so great about reducing the share? We could achieve that by killing all the poor people, but that would not be a good thing! Life is good, and poverty is not death; it is simply better for it to be rich.
As such, I think this is a much better chart. Here we show the world population. Those in extreme poverty are in purple – not red, for their existence is not bad. Those who the wheels of progress have lifted into wealth unbeknownst to our ancestors, on the other hand, are depicted in blue, rising triumphantly.
Long may their rise continue.