The Michael Brooks Show
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The TMBS crew breaks down Mehdi Hasan’s interrogation of his rose-tinted gloss of poverty statistics.
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Stinker? That's it? So he's not far-right racist Nazi?
Michael, it isn't a mic drop by any stretch of the imagination. China's economy benefits heavily from free markets. Do they not sell their shit to free markets?? Literally nothing in this video is accurate. You've waaay over simplified the issue. And watching Mehdi Hasan straw-man Dr. Pinker hardly proves your point. What is your point anyway?
That was so biased and missed the point completely. How can you critique a book you clearly have not read.
Cool.
They forgot to discuss how commodification of products of labor leads to a reification of human beings.
Mr. Brooks you seem to be a great example of the Dunning Kruger effect in action.
Does Steven know that the ecosystem is collapsing and the current dominant economic system relies on permanent growth in a finite space to survive? Also, fossil fuels, for which we have no replacement. Just a couple of minor details that tend to contradict this goofy dipshit's thesis.
The childish insults and ignorance in the video made me cringe and the people on the comment section defending statistics and measurable progress gave me hope in reason again.
Lol. The reduction of poverty in china was because of becoming more capitalist though.
Stinky Pink – KITH !!!
Isn't ganging up against others a means to build camaraderie (with a common, albeit minor vice) and orientate the non-aligned, who may wish to avoid a similar kind of firing line, and thus join the crowd. But members who have enough cognizance and self awareness to reveal twinges of guilt because of such apparently necessary evils, is this enough to justify our own participation. Calls to mind what Groucho Marx said right?" Wouldn't want to join any club that would want me as a member. Because the larger the interest group, the greater the stink?
This video made at least one decent point about the affect of privatization and commodification of resources on a population that may be earning higher wages but whose standard of living is nonetheless reduced by an increased cost of living. (We should really be measuring purchasing power, not wages.)
The point that made me facepalm was the claim made immediately after this that improved technology should take credit for decreasing poverty…as if improved technology somehow did not come out of free-market capitalism!
Phillip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Poverty just came to the United States, and did significant
on-the-Ground research into #USA’s : #Poverty. How did the United States respond to it ?? They WITHDREW from the
Human Rights Council!????♀️He is available to watch on DemocracyNow. ☝?His first point, however, was interesting.
He said*, “The United States doesn’t even discuss #Poverty, anymore! “ He said that it WAS discussed, as a Problem,
with which the country must endeavour to overcome, by Truman, and Ike Eisenhower. ( We’re aware that #LBJ ran on
‘Eliminating Poverty’, and ‘Bobby’ Kennedy made a similar excursion…) The other fact that I keep mentioning, is that
The #USA has never signed onto: The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child ? #Healthcare might be
considered a ‘Right’, yet that’s only my own personal speculation as to why this #Oddity Exists!! I highly recommend
that anyone remotely interested, just tap in Phillip Alston’s name into DemocracyNow’s : Archives!
So… Pinker is correct (nothing on this podcast refutes a single point he's made), but if we call him "Stinker" enough times, maybe we'll win. Got it. I presume this insightful approach is going to be published in the next issue of "Nature", correct?
I never got angry when I didn't get sex in college. I got angry because these douchebags would shove it in my face, finding joy in my misfortune. These asshole colleges graduated and no surprise became the 1%.
Pinker is a fucking idiot.
I guess the clip was supposed to condemn Pinker on his statistics. But it just showed an interviewer who has no clue how they work. But sure, Pinker sure does seem like sketchy detached middle class guy just trying to push right wing propaganda. What a joke of a video.
Its hard to have a rational argument when one party just wishes to redefine the concepts being discussed. Now, is there any objective way of measuring total poverty? Not sure, but starvation in the first world has pretty much been eliminated. That said, unrestrained capitalism is foolish, and leads to absolute destruction. The key is probably a balance, nonetheless it is hard to achieve.
Wow this comment section is particularly polarised and incapable of conversation
The soy is strong with this one.
I agree with the critique here- seeing why $2 is totally arbitrary isn't rocket science. And thinking $2 a day still leaves you very poor isn't rocket science either. Come on now, neo-liberals. However, Pinker's other book on the historical decline of violence is a good book, and science and humanism are indeed the sources to which we must turn to solve global issues. If he weren't so influenced by his semi-conscious desire to defend wealth and privilege, he would be contributing much more.
Enjoyed?
How do you guys fit in that room with all of those axes to grind?
3 faggots who think they are funny: Steven Pinker is delusional
also 3 faggots who think they are funny: We live in the worst time of inequality
Also mad props for Hasan Mehdi/Al Jazeera as a creditable source of truth that's a real mic drop.
Ok that was a waste of time happy average <10k views per video, losers.
yawn …
So if I make more than $2 a day I'm suddenly not living in poverty, but I'm in the middle class? That makes absolutely no sense. Just because you aren't as desperate and bad off as you theoretically could be doesn't mean you aren't still bad off.
This guy is making Stephen Pinkers point for him. He obviously didn’t read the guys book.
He wrote his book starting by its cover, pure marketing, he just came up with a title and filled it out with feel-good- delusional-hippie nonsense and sold millions.
Yes…Very good! I have read Jason Hickel's book "The Divide", and I would recommend it to anyone who really wants to know the state of global poverty.
When it comes to commodification, I always remember the old English rhyme from the time of the enclosure acts, that privatized the common agricultural land peasants had used : "The law locks up the man or woman/ Who steals the goose from off the common/ but leaves the greater villain loose/ Who steals the common from the goose!" Love that!
Terrible video. Completely misrepresents the statistics. So much mental gymnastics to dismiss Pinker for essentially no good reason. No wonder Pinker talked in TED about how so many people seemed to hate him, there's just some weird modern drive of 21st century intellectuals to bellyache about how terrible the world is today. As if they can't imagine the idea that, maybe, it actually used to be worse?
8:05
I think this is a very important point. Do not look only at the changes in the amount of stuff that people have, look at it also in relation to changes in how much stuff people are able to produce.
While you might be right, but you have to control for other poverty creating factors, like war, during that period.
Does anyone think the China piece also makes little sense? I mean, it is state run but they’ve really opened it up to a quasi market type thing. I think discarding the China statistics needs a bit more arguing.
And here, ladies and gentlemen ,we see a Jew doing jewy things. As usual.
Pinker is a con man, he's been one for years. bout time people challenged him. Thanks for this
Why is it some of the biggest assholes dress like clowns? Is that supposed to disarm people to make them think that their selfish and cruel ideals are soft, fuzzy and cute?
Christ, in the trump era, even our 'intellectuals' are getting dumber! We need less pink, & more think!
It’s clear that Michael Brooks hasn’t read the book.
Michael Brooks should actually try reading these books before criticizing them ??????
This AlJazeera interviewer is wonderfully stupid!
Ok love TMBS and everything you guys do but Michael is looking really fine here ?
I typically love your videos and your perspective. However, if you're not actually going to directly reference Pinker's book, and instead decide to show a series of tweets, then you're being intellectually dishonest about his claims…
Poverty has gone down, but there are many scenarios in which this could be a bad thing, and data suggest we are in one of them.
Meaning we've gotten here in a bad way that isn't sustainable. We could've gotten here another way.
Yes if you extract more from nature, you have more abundance. But how you extract that abundance matters.
Huge inequality means people are in the most important sense poorer, because poverty is importantly relative. People were not in that sense poorer 200 years ago-because what they expected and also what they valued was different. It makes no sense biologically to say people spent most of our history poor-we would be poor if we lived like them now yes, because we have changed.
But grizzly bears and cockroaches are not poor, and neither are primates, until they change.
Tech, science, education, have made us richer in another sense, and increased our IQs, lifespans, everything.
But the mass extinction not only of life forms and whole terrains, but of cultures and languages that have accompanied this boon in wealth, the insane concentrations of power, the alienation, and the general out of control nature of our economics matter. This is why we shouldn't say things are getting better, we should say things are better now. That isn't the same thing.
I think the message should be that we can slingshot off the material boon we've created- to make a rational, richer, more free, and more equal world. Pinker seems wrong to think we should rather just continue on because what we are doing is slowly working.
The problem is, it just seems we're at a very expensive feast, that will be followed by the worst famine (climate change, nuclear war, gated cities, disposable classes, etc), because our development has proceeded in such an irrational and herky jerky way.
Don’t cut him off before he can answer the question. All his answers up to that point were pretty good. You just make it look like you don’t want us to hear his answer. Otherwise all your arguments seem to rely on arbitrary endpoints which isn’t very good. The only interesting thing in this video is the comment about “relative to our capacity to end it”. But you have no clue what you’re talking about if you think you’ve dented his argument in the slightest. All you’ve done is insult him and claim an empty victory.
Michael Brooks, you’re fucking idiot. You can’t even understand proportions!
It's pretty obvious that there should be more than one poverty line discussed. It doesn't help much if you move billions of people from 1 dollar a day to two dollars a day. You can play with the numbers and talk about a 100% increase in their income…But they're still poor as shit with no hope of ever becoming "middle class" at that salary.
Personal attacks.
Also there is the elephant graph which reportedly shows how wealth and income has been transferred from the top 80 – 90 percentile range to the lower percentiles while the top 1% or so have taken more than twice what the bottom 50% has in terms of income.
But the problem with that graph is that it shows net change over 30 years and lacks context of yearly change for example the bottom 95% in the US have reportedly taken losses since 2010.
Like Pinker or not, his book has interesting ideas and information.