"Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history."

[alp227]

A friend on facebook posted this UK Spectator article "Why 2012 was the best year ever" with comment "The Free Market is the most successful system ever devised for eliminating poverty around the world." (The Spectator in the UK is a right wing publication, like the unrelated American Spectator in the US...hmm, what's conservative about being a spectator?) Friend highlighted this passage from the article:

Take global poverty. In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too.

Wow. With this kind of worship of the free market and "in business we trust" tone in Fox News and talk radio (and a corporate media like ABC/CBS/CNN/etc that's too lazy to counter such messages) you wonder why so many middle class Americans don't realize they're voting to screw themselves. Or whenever they call talk shows or post on message boards "pro-business" arguments like "unions/regulations hurt businesses and kill jobs", "government makes things worse, so let the free market decide", etc. they're being distracted by this game of pitting the middle class against each other while the 1% vultures are robbing them.

The comments section is challenging some of the claims made in this shoddy article.

[DCKit]

1. Yeah, it's heaven over there in China in those factory towns....

steeped in toxic waste. A true workers paradise.

[Sherman A1]

2. I have always been a fan of buying books at Christmas

for the extended family (nieces & nephews). Now it's gift cards for the bookstore so they can pick out what they want on the topics they like. They are all good kids and I enjoy them at family gatherings, but I always go for books.

[pampango]

3. Never in the history of the world has there been less hunger, less disease and more prosperity...

Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low.

War has historically been humanity’s biggest killer. But in most of the world today, a generation is growing up that knows little of it. The Peace Research Institute in Oslo says there have been fewer war deaths in the last decade than any time in the last century. Whether we are living through an anomalous period of peace, or whether the risk of nuclear apocalypse has proved an effective deterrent, mankind seems no longer to be its own worst enemy.

Do you disagree with the assessment of the UN that global poverty has fallen dramatically since 1990 or is it that you have a different interpretation on the causes of that decline?

From the UN:

The developing world as a whole has already attained the first Millennium Development Goal of halving the 1990 incidence of extreme poverty by 2015.

Uneven progress across regions, but (for the first time) progress in all regions:
 Dramatic progress in East Asia. Looking back to the early 1980s, East Asia was the region with the highest incidence of poverty in the world, with 77% in 1981. By 2008 this had fallen to 14%.
 In China alone, 662 million fewer people living in poverty, though progress in China has been uneven over time. In 2008, 13% (173 million people) of China’s population still lived below the poverty level.
 In the developing world outside China, the poverty rate has fallen from 41% to 25% over 1981-2008, though not enough to bring down the total number of poor, which was around 1.1 billion in both 1981 and 2008, although rising in the 1980s and ‘90s, then falling since 1999.

Good news, but a great many people remain poor and vulnerable in all regions.

The UN is not crediting any economic philosophy or practice. It merely tracks global poverty and notes the global decline. The decline in poverty is most significant in East Asia with more modest declines in the rest of the developing world.

Each of us is free to speculate as to why this decline has occurred. Your friend may credit the 'free market' but the UN does not. It is equally possible that global development aid is more effective in bringing a better life to people than it was in the days when such aid was largely targeted at high-profile, wasteful projects or siphoned off by corrupt dictators.

[reformist2]

4. Capitalism increases wealth, but only socially-minded governments reduce poverty.

I've seen absolutely no evidence that capitalism alone EVER reduces general poverty. If it weren't for government, the minimum wage would be $0.00 an hour.