The percentage of humans living in extreme poverty has diminished greatly since 1820. That’s an important and marvelous fact. But there’s also nuance around how to interpret that, and what narrative it might serve. There was recently a debate between researchers on the subject, and Vox does a good job of summarizing it. Recommended reading.

…over the course of the debate, the two sides’ positions appeared, at least to me, to converge substantially. Everyone agrees that since 1981, the incomes of the world’s poorest people have gone up — even Hickel has disavowed his Guardian headline, saying it was forced upon him by editors. Everyone agrees incomes for the poor haven’t gone up enough, and that $1.90 per day is hardly enough for a human being to live a decent life.

The big differences, then, are how to slice and interpret these facts, and which political interests and narratives they serve. Hickel argues that focusing on data showing declines in global poverty does political work on behalf of global capitalism, defending an inherently unjust global system that has failed residents of rich and poor nations alike. Pinker agrees that the data supports the idea that capitalism is working for the world’s poorest, and says that’s a decisive rebuttal of Hickel’s narrative of enduring persecution.

Bill Gates tweeted out a chart and sparked a debate on global poverty – Vox

Like George Pullman and Milton Hershey, the tech industry’s elites take all prisoners in their respective campaigns to expand, absorb, and dominate. The tech company town, that most contemporary of neofeudalist wangles, is the next step in West Coast corporate behemoths’ quest to lure employees into a twenty-four-hour working existence—the totalizing successor to bottomless Indian food spreads, on-site bike-repair shops, and Frank Gehrized habitats. Its premise deviates not at all from that of its antecedents: a genial, painstakingly aestheticized service to workers, where beneficent corporate hands take the reins of the public good for the well-being of the community. This time around, though, that community will be bridled with union–busting and data-harvesting apparatuses sure to make even the most paranoid techno-tyrant salivate.

Certainly, the megalomaniacs who aim to populate municipal fixtures with registered-trademark logos will expect cities to genuflect at every turn. Bezos has exemplified this in Seattle, whose recent measure to “tax the rich” drove him to seek another location in which to build Amazon’s second headquarters. While residents of its hometown grapple with a commandeering leech that “suck[s] up our resources and refus[es] to participate in daily upkeep,” Amazon will soon attempt to prime another city to be sapped. Meanwhile, the smooth-faced metallic vampires of California have just begun to cosplay as frontiersmen, raring to follow Bezos’s lead. Drunk on glib TED Talk propagandizing, and accustomed to dismissing the civic inconveniences of corporate regulations and poor neighborhoods, our technosettlers feel little need to heed the lessons of the past when their chief interest is to monopolize the future. Taxing the techie billionaires is a start, but only when cities refuse to be their hosts will they cease to be their parasites.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/zucktown-usa-tveten

This article does a good job showing just how crippling student debt has become. And it brings home what an utter failure of moral governance it is that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program has denied over 98% of the people who have put in ten years of public service and requested the loan forgiveness they were promised.

There’s a reason our current debt situation has been dubbed a “student loan crisis”: It foreshadows radical shifts in the way millions of Americans, most of them still in early adulthood, will be able to participate in the economy, in society, in the workplace. For many of us, student debt means delaying — if not entirely forgoing — homeownership, marriage, and parenthood. This new form of social stratification — between those who have student debt, and those who do not — will have ramifications for generations to come.

I think of a 28-year-old, now in her first year in the PSLF program, with $110,000 in graduate school debt. Her health insurance with a public service employer doesn’t cover specialist visits to the doctor — so she goes without, because she uses her extra income toward covering her student loans. “I basically can’t have children until I’m at least 38, and who knows if my eggs will be dead by then,” she told me. “I have pretty abysmal views that I’ll save much money at all in the next ten, twenty, THIRTY years.”

And if hundreds of thousands of people aren’t even saving for themselves, we’re certainly not saving for our kids’ college tuition, effectively ensuring their future monumental student debt. It’s a slow-motion emergency, but because it is built on two cherished components of the contemporary American dream — the necessity of both debt and education — almost no one has heeded the calls for help.

You might not have student loans. You might not be in a student loan forgiveness program — and, as such, might think that the problems plaguing the thousands who are struggling with their debt have nothing to do with you. You’re wrong. The experience of student debt is isolating, lonely, and often dismissed as the result of individual choices — but its ramifications span generations and demographics. To actually address those ramifications, however, means looking to the larger, societal issues underpinning student loans in general: how we, as a country, came to frame college and “credentialing” as essential and how we shifted from one paradigm of funding college to another. Because the only way to actually fix a problem of this magnitude is to really, clearly, see it: what created it, what continues to fuel it, and who profits from it.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/student-debt-college-public-service-loan-forgiveness

I find this question both troubling and very hard to answer. 2013.

So are we making a mistake putting our faith in economics? Are economists themselves just charlatans, to be scorned as medieval cranks? Or for all their flaws, are they really the best experts we have? I don’t have a definitive answer….But having gone through an economics PhD, I do know a few things that I think the public should realize about the field.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/06/should-we-trust-economists/276497/

Here’s pro-business stalwart The Economist, giving a startling amount of credit to contemporary socialism. They come down against it in the end — it would be incredibly shocking if they didn’t — but their critique is thoughtful and worth reading. I love them for their intellectual honesty, even if I disagree with them more often than not, and this article is a great demonstration of that.

[EDIT – it turns out there’s an accompanying article which goes into more depth on the same stuff.]

Socialism is storming back because it has formed an incisive critique of what has gone wrong in Western societies. Whereas politicians on the right have all too often given up the battle of ideas and retreated towards chauvinism and nostalgia, the left has focused on inequality, the environment, and how to vest power in citizens rather than elites (see article). Yet, although the reborn left gets some things right, its pessimism about the modern world goes too far.

[…]

Not all millennial socialist goals are especially radical. In America one policy is universal health care, which is normal elsewhere in the rich world, and desirable. Radicals on the left say they want to preserve the advantages of the market economy. And in both Europe and America the left is a broad, fluid coalition, as movements with a ferment of ideas usually are.

Nonetheless there are common themes. The millennial socialists think that inequality has spiralled out of control and that the economy is rigged in favour of vested interests. They believe that the public yearns for income and power to be redistributed by the state to balance the scales. They think that myopia and lobbying have led governments to ignore the increasing likelihood of climate catastrophe. And they believe that the hierarchies which govern society and the economy—regulators, bureaucracies and companies—no longer serve the interests of ordinary folk and must be “democratised”.

Some of this is beyond dispute, including the curse of lobbying and neglect of the environment. Inequality in the West has indeed soared over the past 40 years. In America the average income of the top 1% has risen by 242%, about six times the rise for middle-earners. But the new new left also gets important bits of its diagnosis wrong, and most of its prescriptions, too.

Millennial socialism – The resurgent left

The NYT has a good history of the shifting dynamics of gender parity among programmers since the ENIAC days. A mentor of mine at UNC put energy into investigating and combatting this, so I’m familiar with a lot of it, but they bring up an interesting aspect that I haven’t encountered before: when personal computers started appearing in homes, boys tended to get more time and guidance on them, and so as students started showing up to CS classes with programming experience — really for the first time, historically — (some) boys tended to be the ones with that experience, and so they had a real advantage that then built stereotypes about boys being better at it, and increasingly drove girls away, and so the gender parity that had previously existed in the field started to drop, and then that became a vicious cycle.
(There were lots of other factors involved, and the article gives a good overview; that just happens to be one I found interesting and unfamiliar)

Source: The Secret History of Women in Coding – The New York Times

Some interesting thoughts about how to be an artist under the precarity of platform capitalism:

In the weirdest way, it’s quite paradoxical: the last horizon of independence is through social self-promotion, but then those socials are already being farmed and mined.

Metricized. In terms of next steps though, I think one thing we could jettison is this concept of independence. It’s not that helpful. In many ways, the meme of independence won. Now everyone is individuated, and independently free to compete with one another to sell their time and wares on the platforms, and the reality of that is a pretty precarious and unfulfilling existence for most. When everyone isindependent, it turns out that we don’t have much collective bargaining power to influence anything all, or at least those with the most wealth or resources will dominate. Counter intuitively, I think that when you take the independence narrative to its logical extreme, most people have less agency than they did without it. So it’s interesting to call that bluff.

In a music context, I think it’s only playing out to eviscerate the ways in which musicians as a community came to accrue collective wealth and agency. That’s what labels are, for example, or festivals, or venues, or magazines. Legacies that get to keep a thread going as a result of the work created in their community. Fortresses that get to represent something.

If they disappear, which is happening, what we then have is a chaotic sea of competing, individuated artists, serving as a free-ideas factory for those at the top of the pyramid to extract value from them. So someone like Kanye, or whoever, can hire scouts to do a quick survey of stuff percolating on the fringes, and then hire teams of producers to create some kind of weird scrapbook of a bunch of culturally interesting moments that happened over the past year, and collect all the profits from that labor. It’s a trickle-up ideas economy. That’s where pure independence gets you. When everyone has access to everything, those with the most money and best ability to survey that information win out, which is why we see a monarchic class emerging across culture.

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/philosopher-and-digital-artist-mat-dryhurst-on-redesigning-the-system/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/02/becoming-jan-van-ijken/

On the marginal value gain by destroying your privacy. The whole thing is well worth a read.

I don’t mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that’s not what happens.

A former co-worker told me once: “Everyone loves collecting data, but nobody loves analyzing it later.” This claim is almost shocking, but people who have been involved in data collection and analysis have all seen it. It starts with a brilliant idea: we’ll collect information about every click someone makes on every page in our app! And we’ll track how long they hesitate over a particular choice! And how often they use the back button! How many seconds they watch our intro video before they abort! How many times they reshare our social media post!

And then they do track all that. Tracking it all is easy. Add some log events, dump them into a database, off we go.

But then what? Well, after that, we have to analyze it. And as someone who has analyzed a lot of data about various things, let me tell you: being a data analyst is difficult and mostly unrewarding (except financially).

See, the problem is there’s almost no way to know if you’re right. (It’s also not clear what the definition of “right” is, which I’ll get to in a bit.) There are almost never any easy conclusions, just hard ones, and the hard ones are error prone. What analysts don’t talk about is how many incorrect charts (and therefore conclusions) get made on the way to making correct ones. Or ones we think are correct. A good chart is so incredibly persuasive that it almost doesn’t even matter if it’s right, as long as what you want is to persuade someone… which is probably why newpapers, magazines, and lobbyists publish so many misleading charts.

But let’s leave errors aside for the moment. Let’s assume, very unrealistically, that we as a profession are good at analyzing things. What then?

Well, then, let’s get rich on targeted ads and personalized recommendation algorithms. It’s what everyone else does!

Or do they?

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201

Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.

But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.

The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html