This is the criteria by which neoliberalism has failed. Other systems have delivered reductions in relative poverty. But neoliberalism has not. And it’s core promise of choice is disappearing from view under mountains of debt and stagnating wages.
The Oxfam data highlights that. No wonder the Right hate it. They have no available response. That’s because there is none.
We neoliberals do not claim that neoliberalism reduces relative poverty. Although we would not that global inequality has been falling as a result of the recent neoliberal global order.
What we do claim is that neoliberalism reduces absolute poverty. Which, given that the largest reduction in absolute poverty in the history of our species has been taking place in these past few decades of neoliberal globalisation seems fair enough.
We might even think that those who have nothing getting something is rather more important than complaining about how some have more than others. But, you know?
This is the criteria?? Semi-literate buffoon.
These people are basically nasty racists. They want their standard of living to improve, at the expense of brown people living thousands of miles away. They don’t care if those brown people live shittier lives as a result, they want a second car, a better house, a higher income and a fatter pension, and they don’t care who gets stomped on so they can get it.
Jim has it.
It’s the people in the 75% – 95% band feeling squeezed; poor people are getting richer, the top 5% are getting richer, they feel relatively worse off.
But as well as protecting themselves at the expense of others, they also want to feel that they are the good people. Hence the bleating about inequality (rich people are getting richer than meeee) and public services (nice taxpayer-funded quango posts for meeee).
surely the system that most successfully reduces relative poverty is war, preferably of the thermonuclear/mutually assured destruction kind
candidly, does that not make murph a neocon?
Has Murphy made any comments on the effect that the protectionist EU has on poor people who trade with it from outside and thereby contributes to world relative inequality, except to complain about Brexit and to make veiled references to GizAJob?
RH said:
“surely the system that most successfully reduces relative poverty is war”
Murphy probably dreams of the rationing and government control that go with war.
Can’t you just see him, a government office job by day, then going home and putting his ARP Warden uniform on?
Even Murphy’s claim is complete bullshit. Equality in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain was greater than in Brezhnev’s Russia (we were shocked to learn that, so great was the dependence of the mainstream media on the lies produced by the Kremlin for their reporting of Russia). Communist China has more billionnaires than anywhere else; the richest woman in Africa is the daughter of the communist (now ex-)president of Angola.
Murphy is, as we know, Irish so he may not have noticed that there are hundreds, nay thousands, of stately homes in the UK opened to visitors to earn some cash to pay for their upkeep whereas a century ago the owners could live there in style with servants waiting on their wishes and mowing the lawns (that’s two separate groups of servants – indoor and outdoor).
Aaargh! One man may lead a horse to water, but Murphy *drives* a man to drink.
The surest way to reduce inequality is to destroy an economy.
But then everyone’s dirt poor.
See: Venezuela etc.
‘Other systems have delivered reductions in relative poverty.’
Free enterprise is not a system. It is the absence of a system.
. It is the height of Western arrogance to assume the difference between $10 a day and $1 per day doesn`t matter just because its all far below the $100 a day at the other side of the graph
The difference between walking to market school / water and cycling is huge and across Africa a take off point is being reached by just such low level but real increases in living standards even in the poorest of areas
I sometimes think that left wing pepes would rather people starved and died as long as we all do
I would just add that it is not just Neo Liberalism that has delivered this , if by that we mean untrammelled markets. NGOs delivering education and AID have also helped as have peace keeping forces with all the problems that entails
Its been a long messy road overall but the is such hope now and really the only element that can take no credit is the collectivism of the West
Meanwhile in the UK- we would like to go backwards – Genius
abacab, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs!
Custard Cream – That jumped out at me first, too, but the erudite Murphy actually has two verbs that don’t match the subject in this small snippet.
Indeed, government doesn’t “spread the wealth,” it equalizes by spreading the misery. Whereas free enterprise, Gamecock, indeed is not a system – and thus has no need for a cosmic Sysop like Murphy.
Oxfam’s latest “data” are not data but drums to beat for yet another planetary Crusade.
Other systems have delivered reductions in relative poverty.
Communism, Venezuela, the Khymer Rouge…lots of great examples for the Progs to drool over.
I have a hypothesis that some really bad ideas that refuse to die in the face of overwhelming evidence must be somehow genetically hard-coded.
Malthusianism and collectivism are two examples.
Malthus has been wrong with regards to humans now for almost 300 years yet the basic idea is still attractive to those who discover it. Hence the religiosity of many with regards to climate change.
Collectivism has killed just a few hundred million and counting but dreamers like Murphy still pine for the opportunity to finally implement the working version.
PJ O’Rourke said that Communism DOES work; it is an absolutely perfect system inside his family home, the problem is that it just doesn’t scale any wider.
Perhaps that’s why we can’t shake these bad ideas; we’re trying to scale to the macro what only works at the micro level.
‘I have failed, and demand everyone else fails too.’
@ Rob
The Catholic Church for a few centuries before the Borgias (yes, I know that they were a symptom, not a cause but they comprise a timemark) – tithing and the forbidding of usury both had an impact to reduce inequality on top of the charitable giving that remained popular in England after the Reformation – the Charity Commission spendsa lot of time on Almshouses and Charities for the relief of Poverty that want to change the terms of the ancient endowment when there are no longer enough impoverished people in the Parish.
“It is the height of Western arrogance to assume the difference between $10 a day and $1 per day doesn`t matter just because its all far below the $100 a day at the other side of the graph”
You assume too much. We don’t fvcking care. Conditions in Kamchatka are none of my concern, nor my business.
Do I wish they were more prosperous? I DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT THEM. I’VE GOT MY OWN LIFE TO DEAL WITH.
“I can’t cry for the world.” – Eldrick Woods
It’s the same deal with racism. Dingbats like Ms Hirsh think I’m racist cos I can’t understand her experience. I DON’T FVCKING CARE! Which she transmogrifies into RACISM – OH MY!
@ Gamecock
Most people on the left don’t care either and some of us on the right do.
So don’t shout…
That provides an excuse for dingbats to scream that “right-wingers are callous” while hiring illegal immigrants as domestic servants at a tiny fraction of their own wage from the NYT orthe “Post”
“Newmania
January 24, 2018 at 7:27 pm
. . .
I would just add that it is not just Neo Liberalism that has delivered this , if by that we mean untrammelled markets. NGOs delivering education and AID have also helped as have peace keeping forces with all the problems that entails ”
Which system do you think produced enough wealth to allow people to be able to afford to create, fund, and work in NGO’s – instead of profit-seeking enterprises?
So, yeah – it was untrammeled markets that created so much wealth that people could afford to splurge it on these projects
– “Other systems have delivered reductions in relative poverty. But neoliberalism has not. ”
That’s because “neoliberalism” has delivered various degrees of wealth rather than endemic poverty.
And this is a problem?
Can’t you just see him, a government office job by day, then going home and putting his ARP Warden uniform on?
Put that economy out!
I’ve asked this to Oxfam on twitter but no reply: is it the same 1% and the same 50% from 2016/17, or are they using a rolling 1% and a rolling 50%, so income mobility means nothing and it’s whoever is in those groups at the time that matters.
Heck, the BBC had a feature yesterday about a rough sleeper who was on 300k USD a few years ago whose mental health went.
The usual globalisation shares the world’s wealth number on a website that went apeshit at the time of the referendum because poor migrants were coming over here and sharing the wealth by working for less. Get the story straight. Foreigners are OK when they stay in their own countries, supply things for next to nothing as exports and don’t come over here practising their peculiar religions. Basically the Anti-Corn Law argument, which, as Marx observed at the time, supplied the country with cheap food so the employers could drop wages for factory workers whose numbers increased because they were driven out of agriculture, lowering wage levels still further.
Kids round here (nowheresville) are paying £800 a month in rent in the sooperdooper free market and trying to bring up children.When are you fuckers going to acquire a conscience?
No “system” in human history has ever produced a reduction in relative poverty, because no one can devise a method of achieving the mathematically impossible.
And if this delusional fool thinks he can devise a “system” that we all need to live by, he merely illustrates his desire for feudalism, except that in Murphyworld, he is Lord of the Manor.
Violet Elizabeth Reed, when are you going to venture out of your bedsit and get a job?
No-one pointing out it should be “This is the criterion…”? The standard of pendantry is falling.
@Henry (how’s Minnie by the way?)… ISRT “Violet Elizabeth” saying that he’s in his 70s. Should this be correct he’s a perfect worked example of the old adage “If you’re not a socialist in your twenties you have no heart, if you’re still a socialist in your forties you have no brain”. 🙂
Pogo, Ms Bannister is fine in her thoroughly modern way.
“Kids round here (nowheresville) are paying £800 a month in rent in the sooperdooper free market ”
Hmm, let me see. Population 60m, rents =X. Population 67m not many years later (and certainly not an extra 7m houses later either), what do you think thats going to do to rent then?
Jim–“These people are basically nasty racists. They want their standard of living to improve, at the expense of brown people living thousands of miles away. They don’t care if those brown people live shittier lives as a result, they want a second car, a better house, a higher income and a fatter pension, and they don’t care who gets stomped on so they can get it.”
You have described NewRemainiac to a T.
“Reedy–The usual globalisation shares the world’s wealth number on a website that went apeshit at the time of the referendum because poor migrants were coming over here and sharing the wealth by working for less.”
Some work–mostly white EE . Others get their lives paid for by taxpayers and repay the scummy socialistic states enforced kindness with rape /child-rape/stabbings/acid splashing/mass murder(inc little kids)/crime /takeover plans and subletting properties that the tax-ratepayer is paying for them to live in. And of course voting for and participating in vote fraud on behalf of the scum of the left. And helping out with anti-white racial hatred and general abuse of women.
You are deceitful slime Reed.
“Foreigners are OK when they stay in their own countries, supply things for next to nothing as exports and don’t come over here practising their peculiar religions.”
Better when they don’t come here at all Reed. We have enough dross of native origin like you without need of importing more evildoers.
“Basically the Anti-Corn Law argument, which, as Marx observed at the time, supplied the country with cheap food so the employers could drop wages for factory workers whose numbers increased because they were driven out of agriculture, lowering wage levels still further.”
And look at the gaunt , starving masses around us all as proof of how correct that hate-filled lying sack of shite Marx was.
“Kids round here (nowheresville) are paying £800 a month in rent in the sooperdooper free market and trying to bring up children.When are you fuckers going to acquire a conscience?”
Anywhere you spew your poison is nowheresville Reedy. I suspect your 800 a month is straightforward lying leftist bullshit. But if the young can’t get on the ladder it is statism and socialism who have created that circumstance not the operation of free markets.
As for conscience –you must be fucking joking. 150 million murdered by the socialist scum of the Earth, a gang and a creed daily endorsed by lying trash like you and you have the brass neck to sqwark about conscience?
You are scum man. Scum.
DBCReed
I’ve every confidence your friend Carol Wilcox is in the process of sorting things out ‘with her customary good humour’ (once more in evidence on my FB feed where she continues to display a level of mental instability rarely seen outside a secure facility)
@ DBC Reed
I expect that you don’t want to be confused by facts, but I will try anyway:
i) in the five years after the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846, real wages in England rose by 11%
ii) I don’t know in which area of Nowheresville you live, but rents across much of it are much lower than you quote. For example, the median rent for a studio in the East Midlands is just £325 per month; that for a two bed place is £550 per month.
Have a nice day.
This was my favourite excerpt:
‘the simple fact is that people are increasingly better off in countries with higher spending ‘
Let’s all head for Pyongyang right now – what an utter moron. My concern is this kind of nonsense is being churned out across british academia, so is being put forth by ‘graduates’ who are increasingly a majority of the tranche of graduates being produced by British higher education.
“Foreigners are OK when they stay in their own countries, supply things for next to nothing as exports and don’t come over here practising their peculiar religions.”
The everythinginWalmartismadeinChina argument.
VP-Unless they produce “on-message” shite then they may not get to graduate.
Lets hope that not all of them are stupid enough to believe it.
Purge and Purge now.
“When are you fuckers going to acquire a conscience?”
150,000 died today. I assume you won’t be able to get out of bed tomorrow from crying.