[James_K]

> Our current economic system has consistently lifted large numbers of people out of poverty historically, and is still doing it today.

I think you mean China's economic system, which was in turn based on the practices of the USSR. China's economic system is lifting millions out of poverty, but western systems are systematically dragging people into it. Poverty in the US has never been lower than it was in 1973. Since then, poverty in China decreased by about 85%.

[busyant]

> Between 1973 and 2013, the number of people in poverty in the US increased by ~60%.

You edited your comment. I believe it originally contained the text above.

I'm assuming the edit was due to the fact that the statistic was based on absolute numbers and was not corrected for US population growth.

I also think the US vs China comparison is basically apples to bowling balls. It's "easy" to lift a giant percentage of the population out of poverty when a large swath of your population is in poverty.

Not saying the US doesn't deserve some criticism here, but your comparison was not apt.

[James_K]

> It's "easy" to lift a giant percentage of the population out of poverty when a large swath of your population is in poverty

Not entirely true. When you look at the decrease of China's extreme poverty, it is almost linear up until the numbers got to essentially 0. Even if this were true, it should be easy for the US to lift people out of poverty, given that there is a huge number of poor people in America.

> Not saying the US doesn't deserve some criticism here, but your comparison was not apt.

My point more broadly is that China has spent 40 years going in the right direction and the west has spent 40 years stagnating and deteriorating. At any rate, my main qualm was with the text "and [our economic system] is still doing it [lifting people out of poverty] today". This is not true by any metric.

[smegger001]

The same economic systems you praise resulted mass starvations due famine killing millions in the process of trying to raise them out of poverty, (see the great leap forwards). Whats really lifting them out of poverty is the west exporting manufacturing to China. its not socialism pulling China out of poverty its mercantilism. As western cash is exchanged for Chinese products, its no surprise then that as poverty has waned in China is has been waxing in the west?

[James_K]

> Whats really lifting them out of poverty is the west exporting manufacturing to China

How does one export manufacturing? It is undeniable that that China has benefited from science and innovation, but these I would consider to be the fruits of all mankind. If anything, the west has tried its hardest to keep knowledge from China. China has only advanced by systematically breaking intellectual property law that the west set up with the intention of hoarding knowledge to ourselves.

> its not socialism pulling China out of poverty

As you would expect, since China isn't really socialist. That said, there is certainly something unique about China's approach that has cause it to be much more successful than many other countries.

> As western cash is exchanged for Chinese products, its no surprise then that as poverty has waned in China is has been waxing in the west?

It should be a surprise. You cannot eat money. China consistently runs a trade surplus. That means that they give other countries more than they get in return. It is surely a great critique of the western system that China giving us stuff for free made us poorer. That the rich and powerful of our own countries discarded their citizens in favour of cheap Chinese labour. And so the benefit of all this free stuff which China has given us is focused into the hands of the few, rather than the many. This is sad, but not inevitable.

> The same economic systems you praise resulted mass starvations due famine killing millions in the process of trying to raise them out of poverty

Exactly. Just because a system lifts people out of poverty doesn't make it good. Yet the western system fails to even lift people from poverty.

[Avicebron]

>How does one export manufacturing?

By not doing it locally and purchasing it from another entity like China? they mean the export of the action of manufacturing and the associated benefits

[James_K]

So when I buy an apple from a shop instead of growing it myself, am I exporting apples to shops? No. The apple had to exist before I could buy it. Chinese factories were built by Chinese people and then the west began to buy products from them. We did not export those factories there. At most, showed China some of the knowledge required to build things. That's hardly an export, especially since a lot of this knowledge was taken without our permission and in violation of laws we set out to try and avoid other people getting it.

I suppose "coming up with the idea for something" is a good enough definition for exporting the manufacture of it, but it seems much simpler (and less egotistical) to say that "China used our scientific discoveries to advance itself" instead of "we exported manufacturing to China".

[Kamq]

> It is surely a great critique of the western system that China giving us stuff for free made us poorer.

I mean... is it? I can think of a few times that something previously expensive is suddenly made very cheap, and there's always a class of people that really don't do that well.

The closest situation I can think of is when the west was dumping food in africa [0][1]. Which made it harder for local farmers to make a living and made the food problems worse.

Unless you're talking about switching to an autocratic system where the elites can turn down cheap things in exchange for the long term benefits of local production. And, in theory, China might be able to, in theory, do that. I don't know their elite culture well enough to say otherwise. But modern Western elites definitely seem too short sighted to give that sort of power, so the critique seems like it falls flat.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/world/americas/14iht-food...

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2006/10/13/6256274/u-s-european-subsidie...

[James_K]

> I can think of a few times that something previously expensive is suddenly made very cheap, and there's always a class of people that really don't do that well.

Obviously this will be somewhat true in the short term, but there is no reason these people can't just retrain and start doing something different.

> Unless you're talking about switching to an autocratic system where the elites can turn down cheap things in exchange for the long term benefits of local production.

It wouldn't have to be autocratic. For instance, our system is not an autocracy, yet we chose to move manufacturing to China. Not every system that makes decisions is autocratic. People could just as easily vote to do something democratically if they know it is in their own good.

But consider what is really happening in these places. They have an economic system which makes decisions about the allocation of resources. In response to the addition of new resources, these systems decided to decrease production of local resources below existing levels, and hence make people poorer as a result. The issue here is purely one of distribution and management. Suppose in the trivial case of food being dumped in Africa, said food was instead sold below market rates, and the income from this was used to subsidise farms to bring their outputs to the same price as the aid. Local manufacture remains worthwhile, prices decrease, and supply increases. Everyone benefits.

I don't think it should be crazy to envision an economic system stable enough to allow people to benefit when you give them things for free. Especially since in the future, everything will be produced for free by machines. At that point, I should like everyone to live in luxury, rather than for everyone to be poor.

[maxerickson]

What measures of poverty are you using for each country?

Are they roughly equivalent, so that you are comparing similar things?

[James_K]

Pick a metric, it really doesn't matter. The claim that western economic systems are presently lifting people out of poverty is absurd, and my point is that China is responsible for the decreases in global poverty that have taken place over the last decades. Both of these facts are relatively uncontested.

[maxerickson]

Yes, in recent decades the US has barely had the sort of poverty that China has been eliminating, so it hasn't really made any progress against it.

I think it would add a lot of clarity to your comparison to name the metrics you are using.

[James_K]

I wasn't really intending to compare the countries. Just to point out that something which was being attributed to America (a decrease in poverty) was actually happening because of China.

[alisonatwork]

This doesn't make sense. If your point is that global poverty is decreasing because people in China are moving from subsistence farming to factory jobs, then the people ultimately doing the "lifting" are the ones buying the products the Chinese factories are producing, i.e. not Chinese people.

But that point is a couple decades out of date by now and even then the situation was more complex than just "people in rich countries want cheap products, people in poor countries make them, therefore people in poor countries get richer, and people in rich countries get poorer".

[James_K]

> then the people ultimately doing the "lifting" are the ones buying the products the Chinese factories are producing

You know money is just paper, right? When we give China paper in return for something of value from their country, that is a bad deal for them unless they can trade the paper and get some actual good in return. China runs a trade surplus, which means they give away more than they get back, so it is actually a bad deal for them. It's one that makes their country poorer because they are giving away more than they get back. Almost all economists agree that China's trade surplus is bad for its economy, is even worse for its citizens, and should be reduced.

People in China were lifted out of poverty through the creation of manufacturing centres. These cities and factories were built by the Chinese, not by the west. It is ridiculous for us to try and take credit for their advancement when all we have done is exploit them.

[maxerickson]

Fascinating.

[philwelch]

It's Western economies that lifted China out of poverty in the first place. China's economic development was built on the foundation of being a cheap sweatshop for the Western world. We'll see how well they navigate the middle-income position they've managed to reach in the coming years.

[int_19h]

The economic system in China is capitalism.