I useful reminder, when folks insist without any evidence that the 'neo-liberal' world order has obviously failed or whatever, that this is the global poverty trend graph since 1820:
I suppose you can argue these trends are *unrelated* but it's hard to argue liberalism ruined everything.
I suppose you can argue these trends are *unrelated* but it's hard to argue liberalism ruined everything.
Comments
between different poverty
thresholds, World, 1820 to 2018 (better graphic)
https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions
#Econsky
Neoliberalism prioritizes markets above all else, even at the expense of rights, fairness or democracy.
Obviously not: the term wouldn't exist if it were! It was ideologues' reaction to Keynesian mixed economies, which are the ones that actually succeeded.
2/
While "CITE PLZ" is an obnoxious ploy on social media—nobody's getting paid for this—it means that everybody is kinda talking right past each other.
I say this as someone who read your article on liberalism and found it shifted how I think about the US “founding principles” positively.
Terms are messy, but neo liberalism means something (and its rather more modern than actual liberalism)
Taking the median here, of course, largely removes the impact of very high income households, so don't tell me it is just the rich who benefit: so does the Average Joe.
So are the married women in those households, increasingly over the depicted time, which kinda makes this single metric more than a bit questionable.
(Also questionable: whether the "real" here leaves out changes in housing costs. Some do, some don't.)
So, really, the period that might actually be called a spike would be the 2010s. Which is more than a bit odd, as wages simply didn't spike like that over that period.
His claim is that the liberal *world order* made the world less poor. If liberal states become wealthy, any trade with less free states will make them better off
" idea becomes a movement then a business,before degenerating into a racket"
paradigm,Hoffer described.
It is now little more than a scam designed to funnel money to the rich.
But after decades of empirical study & hundreds of natural experiments, this isn’t merely an assertion that correlation = causation. There’s overwhelming evidence that liberalism has done more for human prosperity, rights, & living standards than any other political idea in human history.
But thanks for trying.
My guess is including a bunch of earlier years and factoring in shit like all the colonialist pillaging, genocides of the Americas, and transatlantic slave trade makes the graph look very different.
The global norm, everywhere at all times was poverty until the 1700s.
1820 is in a dip between 1800-1850 but even so from 1820 it shows an 80% reduction in conflict deaths from 5 per 100k to 0.5 (from 1800 or 1850 as a start year it'd show a 98% reduction from 30 per 100k to 0.5).
Conflict deaths are lower today than any year after 1400.
from the calculation of any of this data before 1950, to the semi-arbitrary nature of the 3 upper poverty lines.
But 'liberalism failed' - like, by what metric, mate? Compared to what?
https://acoup.blog/2024/07/05/collections-the-philosophy-of-liberty-on-liberalism/
I'm curious on your perspective in the 2025 version of this post 1 year on from the last.
Solitary is clearly wrong, but the rest is basically accurate.
But it'd be wrong to generalize a single institutional failure to indict the idea of institutions!
The 20th c. US built the power grid, highways (yes, yes, I very much know), etc.
Today's US can't build one HSR (not California, not Texas, not BosWash), or transmission lines (bottlenecking renewables!), or big-city housing...
This isn't a critique of liberalism in the 19th century. It's a critique of how it is falling the fuck apart right this second. How liberals seem to not be willing to fight any more against fascists.
It didn't benefit the Western middle class that much.
Neoliberalism—the market fundamentalist ideology that started in the eighties—sucked out loud and wrecked post-Soviet Russia so bad they went fash.
Neoliberalism was largely a reaction to Keynesianism, by people who thought that Keynesians' penchant to fiddle with the economy was Blasphemy Against Holy Markets instead of fixing Keynes' "magneto trouble"
Keynesians scored those victories.
What Neoliberals can mostly lay claim to is the absolute dog's breakfast they made of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and Russia's subsequent descent into outright fascism.
as well as https://ourworldindata.org/trade-and-globalization
We can argue about terms and range of causes, but it's hard to argue there's no connection between freer world trade (old fashioned liberalism) and better lives for most of the world's pop.
I can fully believe people are less poor, but this is lies, damn lies, and statistics.
I have some doubts about the sensibility of extending such estimates as far back as 1820, though.
China is a huge percentage of this and under a purely liberal system it would look more like India than the developed nation it is today
But if you are curious, the basic direction of the graph hardly changes post-1980.