Tim Worstall responds to a recent dispatch-from-dystopia from Christopher Ketcham, decrying the “Unbearable Anthropocentrism” he sees in the world:
To true miserablists, this chart is pure bad news. How will we get to the revolution this way?
No idea who Ketcham is built then he doesn’t know who I am so we’re equal there. His complaint is that Our World in Data tends to show that the world is becoming a better place. Poverty is decreasing, infant mortality rates are falling, more folk have at least a square and ever increasing numbers are getting three and so on.
This is, as the cool kids say, problematic. Because if the thing to be opposed — capitalism and markets — is making the world a better place then where will we get the revolutionary fortitude to get rid of what is making the world a better place?
Something must be wrong here, right? Well, yes, it is:
For obvious reasons, Roser’s cheerful view of capitalist business-as-usual – and the data that would seem to support it – has made him a darling of libertarian market fundamentalists, who have lavished praise on his work.
See, this is problematic. So, what?
Given the support that Roser enjoys from billionaire oligarchs at the pinnacle of the capitalist system, one wonders if it is a coincidence that so much of the data he headlines for public consumption happens to valorize that system.
Oooooh, no, the claim isn’t that he’s writing lies. It’s just a question that is being asked. Could it, you know, I wonder if …
To which the correct answer is that Ketcham is a tosser. For it really is true that these last 40 years of global neoliberalism have coincided — at the very least coincided with — the greatest reduction in abject poverty in the entire history of our species.
But because capitalism, markets, the ghastly little tosser has to spread shade on someone reporting — honestly reporting — this truth. Hey, sure, we can have lots of lovely arguments about causation and so on. But reporting facts is wrong if they’re politically inconvenient? Someone will only report facts if they’re being paid — bribed — to do so?
Fuck off laddie, go die in a ditch.
Like, you know, far too many of us all did before this capitalism, markets, shit.
Fuck off.
