• CriticalResist8 [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Extreme poverty is a subset of poverty, it's included in it. If you reduce extreme poverty then you reduce poverty.

    But most of that extreme poverty was created by removing the “iron rice bowl” during Dengist reforms in the 90s

    Poverty jumped up after the reforms, but the numbers don't lie: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Poverty_in_China.jpg. From 80% of the population in 1980 to 0% in 2019.

    The specific inclusion of "Dengist" instead of Deng strikes me as trying to dunk on MLs who uphold today's China as AES.

    • MF_COOM [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Extreme poverty is a subset of poverty, it’s included in it. If you reduce extreme poverty then you reduce poverty.

      This isn't actually true. It can (and in the time frame we're discussing, does) mean that the people under extreme poverty were bumped out of that category while remaining in poverty. This is part of why the Pinker/Gates etc neolib arguments that capitalism alleviates suffering are misleading, because over the time period where people living on less than $1.90/day or whatever decreased the number of people living on $5/day increased.

      Thanks for sharing the graph, I hadn't seen the data represented like that.

      And people are allowed to say Dengist when talking about Dengist policies it's not some dogwhistle to attack MLs