But, But, What If Reality Supports Free Market Capitalism?
You know, could be true?
Anthropocentrism is such a horrible thing, right? The word means centering humans as the thing that humans should worry about. And, you know, there are possible arguments against that. Eating live monkey brains might do more damage to the monkeys than pleasure to the eaters. You know, maybe? I’d probably oppose the practise on the grounds of what something so vile does to the human beings doing the eaten but perhaps that’s just me.
Still, you know, human pleasure, the satiation of human desires, is not everything. But it’s also something. And more humans getting up into that bourgeois pleasure of three squares, a change of shirts and a crib for the night sounds to me like one of those good things. You know, maybe?
Counterpunch seems to disagree:
The Unbearable Anthropocentrism of Our World in Data
by Christopher Ketcham
No idea who Ketcham is built then he doesn’t know who I am so we’re equal there. His complaint is that Our World in Data tends to show that the world is becoming a better place. Poverty is decreasing, infant mortality rates are falling, more folk have at least a square and ever increasing numbers are getting three and so on.
This is, as the cool kids say, problematic. Because if the thing to be opposed - capitalism and markets - is making the world a better place then where will we get the revolutionary fortitude to get rid of what is making the world a better place?
Something must be wrong here, right? Well, yes, it is:
For obvious reasons, Roser’s cheerful view of capitalist business-as-usual – and the data that would seem to support it – has made him a darling of libertarian market fundamentalists, who have lavished praise on his work.
See, this is problematic. So, what?
Given the support that Roser enjoys from billionaire oligarchs at the pinnacle of the capitalist system, one wonders if it is a coincidence that so much of the data he headlines for public consumption happens to valorize that system.
Oooooh, no, the claim isn’t that he’s writing lies. It’s just a question that is being asked. Could it, you know, I wonder if……
To which the correct answer is that Ketcham is a tosser. For it really is true that these last 40 years of global neoliberalism have coincided - at the very least coincided with - the greatest reduction in abject poverty in the entire history of our species.
But because capitalism, markets, the ghastly little tosser has to spread shade on someone reporting - honestly reporting - this truth. Hey, sure, we can have lots of lovely arguments about causation and so on. But reporting facts is wrong if they’re politically inconvenient? Someone will only report facts if they’re being paid - bribed - to do so?
Fuck off laddie, go die in a ditch.
Like, you know, far too many of us all did before this capitalism, markets, shit.
Fuck off.
Ok, Ketcham, let’s give you the benefit of the doubt that Roser is being paid by capitalist piggies to cherry pick and misrepresent data to support your contention that the spread of capitalism/ markets and the decline in world poverty is mere coincidence. Now do the data on North Korea. Or any of the other socialist utopias you wish us all to enjoy. Then get back to us. Or, as Tim suggests, just fuck off. Maybe go and live in North Korea.
I want to know more about what he said about anthropolocentrism.
"Metcalf spent decades studying an Indigenous community in the state of Sarawak, in the Malaysia-controlled part of the island of Borneo. He watched it transform from a place where the villagers had no money but lived well to one where GDP went up and they could “barely feed themselves.” "
I wonder what their infant mortality rate was like.
"massive plunder of the landscape on which the dwellers of Sarawak depended"
Sounds like a property rights issue.
"the Narmada Valley where dams have displaced tens of thousands"
Sounds like the sort of thing governments do.
"The global middle class – wherein the impact-variables of “population,” “affluence,” and “technology” are fused into one single devastating blow on planet Earth – is headed upwards of 5 billion by 2030."
That's the real crux of it! He doesn't want people getting rich and comfortable because of "the Earth". Here is where we get to anthropocentrics vs misanthropes.
But then if it's really about that, why the concern for the unhappy tribes? Perhaps he really does think we can be poor and have lots of dying babies to save the Earth but also be happy. I don't think so and I don't the the Earth has an opinion.