The Triumph of Humanity Chart
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.


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Comments (77)
What is "extreme poverty"?
Per Google/the World Bank, "Extreme poverty is defined as average daily consumption of $1.25 or less and means living on the edge of subsistence."
I would assume (but don't know) that the value is reasonably well calibrated, and seems absolute enough.
At worst, it's still probably a decent proxy for the number of people living near absolute subsistence level, and is certainly more useful than the much more relative poverty measures generally used (which are often little more than restatements of the GINI coefficient - that is, measurements of inequality rather than actual material need).
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.
From the LW slack: http://www.measuringworth.com/
That site isn't going to help me with XIX century China.
I understand interest rates, and inflation, and purchasing power parity, and all that. That all works fine for more or less developed economies where people buy with money the great majority of what they consume.
The charts posted claim to reflect the entire world and they go back to early XIX century. Whole-world data at that point is nothing but a collection of guesstimates.
Yeah. My understanding is you basically get a bunch of economists in the room to break down the problem into relevant parts, then get a bunch of historians in the room, calibrate them, get them to give credible intervals for the relevant data, and plug it all in to the model.
Is this how you think it works or is this how you think it should work?
In particular, I am curious about the "calibrating historians" part. You're going to calibrate experts against what?
It's how I think it works.
Known historical data (which they don't know).
The problem is that you want to use the best experts you have. If you are going to try to calibrate them in their field, they know it (and might have written the textbook you're calibrating them against), and if you're trying to calibrate them in the field they haven't studied, I'm not sure it's relevant to the quality of their studies.
As to "how it works", I'm pretty sure no one is actually trying to calibrate historians. I suspect the process actually works by looking up published papers and grabbing the estimates from them without any further thought -- at best. At worst you have numbers invented out of thin air, straight extrapolation of available curves, etc. etc.
Resolution and calibration are separate. They may have lower resolution in other fields but they shouldn't have lower calibration.
Edit: Thought about the previous comment, but it's not true. One thing they talk about in superforecasting is that people tend to be overconfident in their own fields while better calibrated in others.
I spent a month in a farming village in China about 15 years ago. Farmhands there made about $8 a day during the growing season, and little during the winter. They would be supporting a family of 4 or more, so that would be under $2 a day on average. Yet prices for rent and food were so low that, if you considered only the essentials, they were making better wages than many people in America. They were poor if they wanted to buy manufactured goods, and poor in that certain standards (clean air, quiet neighbors, reliable electricity) were unavailable even for the rich. Most of them had indoor toilets (with nasty open sewers) and television (the true necessity). I don't know about the price of fuel or electricity.
My point is that using the exchange rate to compute how many dollars a day someone makes in a country in which the exchange rate is only used to price things that the locals don't buy is very misleading.
I believe the World Bank defines poverty in terms of PPP-adjusted incomes for that reason.
What happened in 1970 that poverty started sharply declining?
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
I can think of a couple things that might have contributed. In the second half of the 1960s Chinese government policy switched from encouraging maximally large families to encouraging family planning and control of population growth. In 1970 the 2-child policy was implemented. Since lots of Chinese babies born in that period would have been in extreme poverty it seems likely that played a part. Interestingly 1970 also roughly marks the end of the Great Compression and beginning of the Great Stagnation in the US and many other developed economies. The obvious explanation is that this was the inflection point for a new phase of globalization and labor arbitrage, resulting in stagnant incomes for 1st world workers and higher earnings for 3rd worlders.
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.
What aspect do you think is unsustainable? The population growth or the reduction in absolute poverty? Over what time period?
@Daniel_Burfoot's second sentence was "I would be happy if the second chart showed poverty dropping off while total population stayed roughly flat." so I think it's pretty clear he meant the population growth.
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 Global Goals can be expressed roughly as an increase in global Social Progress Index from 61 to ~75. However, if we rely entirely on continued economic growth and don't have any social change, then he claims we will only move from 61 to ~62.4.
As an asside, I find the Social Progress Index to be an interesting metric. It's an equally weighted composit of "Basic Human Needs" (such as nutrition and basic medicine), "Foundations of Wellbeing" (such as access to education and information), and "Opportunit" (such as personal rights and tollerence).
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.
I'm referring to the text, not the graph(s). The two paragraphs between the graphs imply
He does not preface any of it by saying "I think", he just presents it as obvious. Well, I know for a fact that there are many people who self-identify as rationalists to whom this is not obvious at all. It also alienates me that people here, according to the karma distributions, don't seem to get my point.
And does that oblige anyone to do anything?
I sympathize with the feeling of alienation and confusion when something valuable gets downvoted.I try not to learn too much from small karma amounts - there's enough inconsistency in what different groups of readers seem to want that it's easier to post mostly for my own amusement.
I don't agree that it's all that controversial that "copy an overall-positive-value population distribution" is positive. The second half of the repugnant conclusion (that adjusting satisfaction toward the average is non-negative) is somewhat disputed, but wasn't suggested here.
I also don't think that was the post's main point, so even if I disagreed, I'd be sure to call out that I agree with his main point and only want to clarify this side-implication.
Reading "implyed" claims into an article and then disagreeing with the claims you believe are implied is frequently not something that's good karma wise.
I also see no disrespect by Dias that warrents to call him to "please respect..."
Kind of? The point of the second plot is to show that we didn't get where we are in fractional terms by murdering the poor, which would be bad, I think, regardless of whether one holds that doubling the overall population is good or bad. And if we got where we are in fractional terms by adding rich people without actually cutting into the number of poor people, that would be bad too, though not as bad as murdering them.
Of course, the plots can't show that we didn't grow the rich population while also killing the poor, but, well, that's not what happened either.
I at one point phrased it "comes with a doubling of the (larger) rest of the population" to make it more clear, but deleted it for a reason I have no introspective access to.
It would, obviously, if there are better alternatives. In consequentialism, everything where you have better viable alternatives is bad to some extent. What I meant is: If the only way to double the rest of the population is by also doubling the part that's in extreme poverty, then the OP's values implies that it would be a good thing. I'm not saying this view is crazy, I'm just saying that creating the impression that it's some sort of LW-consensus is mistaken. And in a latter point I added that it makes me, and probably also other people with different values, feel unwelcome. It's bad for an open dialogue on values.
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.
[Citation needed]
The overworked, depressed workers of the industrial factory don't have much to envy the overworked, depressed farmers of feudal society.