[hntrader]

Hickel did a similar thing to Steven Pinker.

He wrote a scathing article falsely claiming that the poverty rate was increasing (contra to Pinker's claim), when according to his own data in that same article - it was actually steadily decreasing.

I've come to see him as a bad faith actor.

[ttiurani]

If you look at the below thread by Hickel, Roser is very uncivil (for an academic), childish and misdirecting. He also does not answer Allen's criticism. Hickel on the other hand remains very composed and courteous.

Roser also keeps constantly misrepresenting degrowth with a straw man that the global South needs growth. He has been told time and time again that every degrowth demand is only for the rich countries and everyone agrees the poorest countries needs growth, but still he makes the same claim over and over.

From this behavior, I've come to see Roser as a bad faith actor.

https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1376097068251541504?s...

[hntrader]

The tone of these particular tweets should be parsed in context.

If you think that someone has been operating in bad faith towards you for years, eventually you lose interest in engaging and choose the "block" option, which is what Roser did today.

Also, Hickel himself has engaged in uncivil rhetoric previously, e.g an unprovoked accusation of "mansplaining" in 2019.

[ttiurani]

I understand that academics are just humans, and can lose their temper like the rest of us.

However what I find very troubling is that the main point that Hickel raised in the blog post[1] – GDP data has the particular potentially crucial problems Allen has raised when used to assess historical poverty – Roser chooses to not actually address it, but instead throws blanket statements of there being continued discussion between academics of different datasets and their merits.

However this particular graph of historical extreme poverty is used by the most powerful people in the world to advocate for continuing with the status quo. That is why it caught Hickel's attention. It is therefore very important that the heading of the graph is very well justified.

As a layperson reading Allen's research, and knowing there is a discontinuation point in the graph 1981 when the dataset changes, I think the graph ought to be labelled very differently. Roser continuing to label it as "extreme poverty" knowing there is an ongoing debate about what data if any is a good proxy historical poverty, and not answering head on Allen's criticism, really makes me not trust Roser.

1: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-i...

[hntrader]

Respectfully, I think this misses the point a bit.

Roser himself says that there could very well be valid criticisms that Hickel is correct on and he is incorrect on. The criticism that Hickel recently raised and that you mention here (regarding the validity of pre-1981 data) sounds like it could be one of these.

But productive dialogue between them was largely precluded by perceptions of bad faith and aggressive language ("mansplaining", etc) going back to before Allen's paper.

Now, regarding the specific criticism about pre-1981 data, I found this[1] and this[2] which seems to claim that the older data is adjusted for non-market income. Although, I haven't digged into it properly, so I can't comment on who is correct here.

  "we want to emphasize is that those estimates of poverty do take into account non-market transactions such as subsistence farming.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-home-production-and-consu...

  "Yes, over the last two hundred years, there has been a major shift from people farming for their own consumption towards people working for a wage and purchasing goods in the market. But historians know about history and where non-market sources of income make up a substantial part of total income, it is very obvious that money would represent a rather silly indicator of welfare.

  Just as we need to adjust for price inflation, accounting for non-market sources of income is an essential part of making meaningful welfare comparisons over time. Estimates of poverty and prosperity account for both market and non-market sources of income, including the value of food grown for own consumption or other goods and services that enriched the lives of households without being sold in a market."

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-history-methods

[HelloNurse]

> The tone of these particular tweets should be parsed in context

I'm unable to relate an "uncivil" discussion on Twitter, Medium etc. to serious debate about politics and economics.

[jhayward]

I don't see why a truth, expressed roughly and bluntly, is any less 'serious' than one cloaked in the trappings of wealth and class that are academia.

[virgilp]

Roser himself addresses that:

https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378992929465847809

[neolog]

Is Roser actually an academic? Wikipedia doesn't mention any degrees afaict.