A podcast, Citations Needed, forgot that poverty, violence, hunger and infant mortality are declining and decided that all of the media folk saying positive things about the major trend of our time (modern economic growth) are all wrong.
The neoliberal optimism industry is hard at work pushing a cherry-picked slab of bias in our faces and we fellow optimists are all being bamboozled. Of course this is completely wrong, per abundant scholarship and evidence, some even tweeted by Pinker himself on November 24th 2018, four days before this podcast was released.
At 05:00 into the podcast they seem to suggest that liberal capitalism = alt-right and fascism! You might wonder why I bother mentioning this since they say they don't take the fish hook theory very seriously themselves. It's because they insist on reading things Pinker isn't saying into Pinker's public statements, so I will work from the assumption that I am supposed to read things these podcasters aren't saying into their podcast.
Which you actually have to do to take the podcast seriously because they didn't bother to include any connective tissue between 'some people are professing optimism' and 'these optimists are wrong or at least very seriously less right than they claim'.
If you don't believe me have a listen and look for any evidence cited to actually back up their own claims versus the claims they're attacking. In fact rather embarrassingly they even include examples of the claims they're attacking in some of the audio excerpts early on in the podcast... and yet they don't make any attempt to marshal a dataset with which to attack those optimistic talking points.
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To go on a mild tangent for a moment, that memo, penned by James Damore, who was fired for publishing it, only goes so far as to say that present-day preferences among male and female jobseeker cohorts is a robust explanation for the non-50-50 representation of the two sexes at Google. This should not be controversial. The memo does not deny the existence of sexism in the workplace, and it does not blame women as a whole.
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Pinker is attacked for a tweet on the subject of race back in 2013. Pinker linked to a New York Times article reporting that scientists had found evidence of genetic mutations (a normal evolutionary pathway in biological organisms) about 35,000 years ago that seemed to help explain modern visible traits of East Asian peoples.
His comment in the tweet was to the effect that denying the existence of race as a biological phenomenon was wrong. At no point did he make any prejudicial judgements about the moral worth of individuals of these different races., and at no point did James Damore make any prejudicial judgements about the moral worth of human females versus males.
Now, I personally don't believe race is a biological phenomenon, but the fact that Pinker does believe it is real does not instantly make him racially prejudiced, unless you can show that he is. And the podcasters do not. They take it as read that Pinker is dog-whistling despite no obvious chain of evidence suggesting he might be doing so.
Speaking of dog-whistling... our hosts commit a little of this themselves, at least if their bizarre readings of Pinker are to be taken seriously, because if the Pinker side of the equation is supposed to be read as 'Pinker supports racism' then the Citations Needed side of the equation is supposed to be read as 'the fish hook theory with which we opened our discussion applies to Steven Pinker's views'...
so Pinker is dog-whistled to be a fascist sympathizer, which seems to be at odds with the position he was implying when he tweeted a link to an article about how police forces in the USA must change
how they engage with their communities.
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For another tangent, our enlightened hosts complain about two different arguments about poverty in the Middle East and Africa as though they are the same argument: the "it's the poor folks' fault because of their values" argument and the "it's the institutions, stupid" argument.
Thomas Friedman makes the former argument, Bret Stephens makes the latter.
I'll grant you, Friedman's values argument is not well attested in scholarship. Unfortunately for Citations Needed the argument they summarized from Stephens is very well attested in scholarship, particularly in Why Nations Fail (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012) which is widely accepted as the gold standard on explaining why certain nations are still poor today.
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It's all very well to complain about Pinker, but what about Angus Deaton or Max Roser or Hans Rosling or Deirdre McCloskey?
Hans Rosling's Gapminder website shows GDP per capital change versus life expectancy change... are they strongly correlated and generally recognized as causally linked? You betcha!
Max Roser's OurWorldInData website shows... well, all kinds of things that we should be celebrating loudly and proudly re income, life expectancy, education, violence levels, and more!
There is also the Global Hunger Index if you wanna look specifically at food insecurity trends over decades... it has a quick easy summary of hunger trends from 2000 to 2015 on its Results page.
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Citations Needed are not the only offenders. Al Jazeera has an article up entitled 'Exposing the great "poverty reduction" lie' that takes aim at the UN Millenium Campaign, but considering what Media Bias Fact-Check have to say about Al Jazeera that shouldn't be too surprising. And obviously the Al Jazeera piece is completely wrong anyway.
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DISCLAIMER
This post is not intended as an endorsement of he views of Thomas Friedman or Bret Stephens. I consider both of them to be very wrong about many things. It is perfectly possible for a person to be right about something and wrong about something else. I DO NOT endorse Stephen's argument for some kind of return to colonialism. I only agreed with his point about institutions, because that explanation is very well backed up by evidence.
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