[Kalium]

I know! You're incredibly right! It's seems impossible that so many smart, educated, talented, passionate, hard-working people could fail to solve any problem they put their minds to!

Yet, might it be worth considering that any individual human brain could potentially be less than infinitely malleable in all possible aspects? I have known blindingly brilliant artists who are utterly repulsed by basic arithmetic, and equally brilliant mathematicians who cannot even begin to grasp how any person could be concerned with things as minor as governance structure when there is math to be done. It might be possible to press those people into the service of what someone else deems social good, but I must admit I am experiencing some doubts that they would universally consider it socially good for them.

Beyond that, consider what selling trinkets and shipping things around the globe has done. It's helped lift billions of people out of abject poverty. It has made material well-being and food security possible on scales unimaginable only a few centuries ago. It has done so more successfully, and more quickly, than any effort explicitly directed at social good in human history. A critic would point to the price paid, and posit that there might have been a better option, but this critic is almost certainly making perfect the enemy of good in pursuit of an ideal.

I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the US education system who struggle to recognize so many things in life. You're absolutely right - what's lost by chasing money for its own sake is one such. It's just maybe worth considering that there could potentially be others.

[hasbroslasher]

As far as "the price paid" that you mention: the price is not paid in any way. The price is being put on a high-interest credit card and we're paying the minimum. Someday those cans we've kicked down the road (carbon emissions, pacific garbage patch, destruction of ocean ecosystems in general, deforestation, economic inequality, desertification, etc.) in order to sell more plastic trinkets will come back to collect on our outstanding balance.

[ryderm]

> but this critic is almost certainly making perfect the enemy of good in pursuit of an ideal.

Yes, because "good" means preventable poverty related deaths by the millions because it is not profitable to do anything about it \s. Good for you != good, but it is easy to look past that when it isn't right in your face

[Kalium]

You're right. It's incredibly easy to ignore things that aren't immediately in front of me. Like the human rights abuses ongoing in China, which aren't really part of my immediate daily life and I don't generally think about much.

With that said, is it possible that this passage could be interpreted more charitably? Perhaps some might read it as a comment on how demanding perfection can cause more negative effects while seeking to prevent negative effects.

For example, where might our technology be if our species had refused to extract or smelt metals until we had the ability to do so without any emissions of any sort?

It's not about what real preventable human tragedies can be averted, but aren't, because of the evils of human greed you wisely point to. It's about accepting that imperfect improvements to alleviate human pain and reducing human lives lost can, sometimes, be preferable to hoping for perfection at some future date.

[coolaliasbro]

But how would our species conceive of the idea of emissions and the effects thereof without first creating emissions and observing their effects?

I think the issue has more to do with the Cassandra effect and the tendencies of some to not consider or want to act on potentially catastrophic situations if they believe it imperils their own more immediate well-being or status.

[Kalium]

It's true. It's impossible to take seriously every warning. Every potentially catastrophic situation has to be evaluated on the risks and benefits.

And, well, sometimes the people making those choices are wrong. Or shortsighted. Or egotistical. Or afraid for their own comfort, power, and privilege.

At the same time, I still don't take the warnings of the flat-earthers particularly seriously, so perhaps not all warnings of potentially catastrophic situations are equally credible. As opposed to how seriously I take the warnings of climate scientists.

[ryanwaggoner]

Your comments are a beautiful example of how to dialogue and disagree constructively. I need to learn this skill :)

[Kalium]

Thank you.

I read How To Make Friends And Influence People. Then I threw out all the fluff about genuine connection, and realized that people only actually care that you make them feel like they've been understood. This is the implicit thesis of the book, once you realize that a decades-dead author cannot possibly have a genuine two-way emotional connection with you.

In practice, this tends to mean telling people they're right a lot. Then you imply they have the wonderful, glorious opportunity to become more right. Then you remind them of how right they are. If this sounds exhausting, well, it is. But it also matches the structure of my previous comment.

[coolaliasbro]

What do you believe to be the cause of that abject poverty?

[ucaetano]

Let me guess, well, maybe the fact that we're born poor?

Poverty is the absence of a lot of things. If you're born in a small isolated tribe in the middle of the Amazon, you're poor. Nobody took anything from you, there is almost no inequality, but you're still poor.

But I think I know where you're trying to get: "They're only poor because X took whatever from them". Probably where X is capitalism, Western countries, or whoever is the fashionable enemy.

Nope.

[hasbroslasher]

I believe Western imperialism has something to do with it... While it's true that capitalism has improved outcomes for some nations, it's also true that capitalist exploitation in Africa and South America really messed up the way their world works. It's made it so that free markets had something to fix later on, not fixed a pre-existing problem with these countries.

People can choose what to believe and all, but it's pretty hard to look at things like the African slave trade or Diamond mining in Zimbabwe or Sierra Leone and find anything but capitalism and imperialism run amok.

[Nasrudith]

Look back further - while certainly not blameless they didn't start the fire - humanity in general did. In South America even the Conquistadors even with their vast advantages would have died if not for all of the other tribes sick of their flower wars and getting captured for sacrifice. They also had an army on their side. One they later betrayed and made an underclass but fifty men in an unfamiliar territory would die eventually to their might. Africa had its own warfare and ironically one of the most benign actions of trade helped set up a collapse - trade with others is how advancement is driven and they wound up benefiting from trade in more productive crops - some with precious metals and ivory and some through slaves. That lead to a population boom and that lead bloody wars of Shaka Zulu. The point being exploitation doesn't need any outside actors and is the true enemy. The true cause of poverty and backwardness is lack of growth.

This doesn't absolve the misdeeds of exploiters - indeed colonies end in independence usually specifically because of mercantilist mismanagement squanders the true potential of the country by seeing it only as a well of land resources instead of an extension to nurture for mutual good but it is important to recognize that getting out "the Imperialists" won't make things better automatically and the wrong replacement can ironically be even worse. As bad as the British were in Rwanda they never decided to genocide the Tutsis even though their manipulations lead to it indirectly. Evil comes from within and without "the tribe" and it is important to recognize that.

[Kalium]

A common response is "Capitalism". It's an easy, glib response. Unfortunately, it's not a good one, because abject poverty predates capitalism and exists without it.

Another response is "deprivation". Unfortunately, this response is effectively an appeal to the definition of poverty.

Since you asked what I believe, I don't believe there is a well-defined single cause of poverty.

[stcredzero]

A common response is "Capitalism". It's an easy, glib response. Unfortunately, it's not a good one

If anything, Capitalism has lifted 90% of the world's population out of poverty. It's a solution to absolute poverty, not a cause. It may, however, be a cause of relative poverty. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it's the worst system for eliminating poverty, after all the other ones we've ever tried.

[AnarchoYeasty]

The idea that Capitalism has raised billions out of poverty is simply not grounded in reality. What the world bank has done with their statistics should send up red flags for someone whos taken Stats 101. I mean first off, the idea that 1$ / day is the poverty line and being slightly above that is absurd. But what's worse in 2000 the world bank reported that the number Rose from 1.2 billion people who made less than 1$/day in 1987 to 1.5 billion in 2000. That obviously doesn't fit the narrative. So they changed the poverty line from 1.02 / day in 1985 to 1.08 in 1993. The number again changed to $1.25 in 2008. Overnight 316 million people were raised out of poverty.

Of course anyone who experienced life in the 90's can see the glaring problem with this. $1.08 in 1993 has the same purchasing power as $1.61 in 2008. Those hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty? They are all still there. The rate of inflation is greater than the rise of the ipl. They did glaringly bad math tricks to make it appear as if half a billion people were lifted out of poverty by neoliberalism and Capitalism. And yet that couldn't be further from the truth.

Now that doesn't even take into account the situation in "wealthier" countries, such as Sri Lanka. A survey of Sri Lanka found that 35% of the country fell underneath their poverty line. However the world bank using the international poverty line reported only 4% were lifted out of poverty that year!. A wave of the hand and suddenly 31% of the population didn't factor in to their feel good story of capitalistic success.

And again I want to point out these absurd arbitrary numbers. $1.25 a day? Are you kidding me? Have you ever lived on $1.25 a day? The UN reports that the average person in 2005 needed at least $4.50/day just to meet the minimum nutritional requirements. The minimum. In India, one of the harleded successes of the world bank, children living just above the ipl had a 60% chance of being malnourished.

New Castle University once calculated that if people we're to achieve a normal life expectancy they would need at least $2.50 / day as the new IPL. But if we adopted that as the new IPL it would mean that now 3.1 billion people are living in abject poverty.

I got these numbers from this video https://youtu.be/A6VqV1T4uYs but in the description they list out all of their sources.

When you stop making up numbers to hide actual real poverty, the picture becomes clear. Rather than lifting people out of poverty, neoliberal capitalist policies are responsible for plunging half a billion more people into poverty today than in 1980.