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This thread is more personal than most of the things I share here, but I’m at my limit with Jason Hickel. I want to explain why I dislike him so much and how we got here. This is a personal story over several years so it’ll take a bit of time.
Jason Hickel is an anthropologist who wrote many articles and tweets about me, my motivations, and my work in the last couple of years. I’m sure there are good points among them, where he is right and I’m wrong. But some of his big claims against my work are false.
One such big claim he put forward in an article in The Guardian. It was about my work on global poverty and he claimed that it “couldn’t be more wrong” to say that global poverty has declined. It was shared tens of thousands of times. (<a target="_blank" href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal" color="blue">theguardian.com/commentisfree/…</a> ).
Just yesterday Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) wrote a long explanation of why Hickel is wrong. If you are interested in poverty, it is very much worth reading. <a target="_blank" href="https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/against-hickelism" color="blue">noahpinion.substack.com/p/against-hick…</a>
One of the most awful things that Hickel does is that he aims to portrait me as someone who is *legitimising colonialism*. In The Guardian he wrote that my work “takes the violence of colonisation and repackages it as a happy story of progress.”
In my view (and Noah Smith’s), the improvement of living conditions after the end of colonialism is actually an argument *against* colonial oppression. The large improvements in health and poverty happened once the oppression of the former colonies *ended*.
The other main point Hickel makes there is that the world should also rely on higher poverty lines (not just the extremely low $1.90 per day). I very much agree with him on this.
The world should rely on higher poverty lines as Hickel (and every other poverty researcher) says. On @OurWorldInData we've done this already for many years and I’ve often argued for it. Most recently here: <a target="_blank" href="https://ourworldindata.org/higher-poverty-global-line" color="blue">ourworldindata.org/higher-poverty…</a>
He also suggests that I blindly trust existing historical poverty data. I am not. All existing poverty data has problems – the historical data and the poverty data for the present as well. That’s the very reason I do research on this!
I’ve just written another paper on the history of poverty (not yet published). If I’d believe the existing data was perfect, I would not spend much of my energy criticizing existing data and trying to do better.
But I do believe that the existing, imperfect data on the history of poverty is informative. It is not – as Hickel claimed – “completely wrong”.
If you want to see the research on whether poverty has fallen over the last two centuries, read this new study here. It compares estimates from different sources and shows that they differ, but also shows that they agree that poverty has declined. <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1377595029443727362?s=20" color="blue">x.com/MaxCRoser/stat…</a>
If you want to look at how poverty has changed relative to higher poverty lines than $1.90, here is the latest data. Hickel’s big claim in The Guardian – it couldn’t be more wrong to say that poverty declined – is wrong.
I think, but am not sure, that Hickel now understands that he was in fact wrong. And I’m happy that he changed his mind (if so).
I also want to emphasize that to say that poverty has declined does not mean that the world is free of poverty. The world is extremely unequal and the huge majority of the world is very poor.
The reason that researchers study the decline of poverty is that they want to know how to achieve further reductions of poverty.
As I wrote here “It is because the world is terrible still that it’s so important to write about how in several important aspects the world became a better place.” <a target="_blank" href="https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better" color="blue">ourworldindata.org/much-better-aw…</a>
Hickel’s article in The Guardian hit me very hard personally. I was feeling awful for months and I had no idea how I could possibly speak about how I felt in public.
My only reaction at the time was that a colleague and I wrote an explanation of how historians know that poverty has declined (<a target="_blank" href="http://ourworldindata.org/extreme-history-methods" color="blue">ourworldindata.org/extreme-histor…</a>) and I wrote Hickel an email telling him that I find it awful what he does.
But I didn’t respond publicly. I just did not know what to do when one of the world’s largest newspapers publishes an article saying that I couldn’t be more wrong and that my work is “not science, but social media” as Hickel claimed.