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The history of capitalism, as portrayed in academia and among much of the media, is a sad story. It's one of smokestacks, sweatshops, child labor, robber barons, social stratification and general exploitation of workers.

But this amazing chart, put together by Max Roser, a fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford University's Martin School, tells a much different story — one of industrialization being associated with a rapid decline in poverty.





In 1820, according to data compiled by Roser*, the share of the global population living in poverty was 94 percent while 84 percent lived in "extreme" poverty. By 1992, the poverty rate had dropped to 51 percent, while the "extreme" poverty rate had dropped to 24 percent. Using a different measure of international poverty, the rate has dropped from 53 percent in 1981 to 17 percent in 2011 – representing the most rapid reduction in poverty in world history.

"In the past only a small elite lived a life without poverty," Roser explains. "Since the onset of industriali[z]ation – and as a consequence of this, economic growth — the share of people living in poverty started decreasing and kept on falling ever since."

This chart is one of many fascinating visualizations on Roser's site Our World in Data, which I highly recommend checking out.

*Note from Roser:

"The share of people of living in poverty and extreme poverty is taken from Bourguignon and Morrison (2002) and 'the poverty lines were calibrated so that poverty and extreme poverty headcounts in 1992 coincided roughly with estimates from other sources.' And in footnote they say 'these definitions correspond to poverty lines equal to consumption per capita of $2 and $1 a day, expressed in 1985 PPP.'

To this I added the share of people living below the international poverty line which, since the revision in 2008, is $1.25 at 2005 purchasing-power parity (PPP). This data is from the World Bank and is available here – for the period 1981-2011. The revisions in the definition of the poverty line and the PPP adjustment make the poverty figures not comparable to earlier data – to illustrate this I have plotted both series for the time from 1981 to 1992. The World Bank data was downloaded in January 2015."


http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/amazing-chart-shows-thanks-to-capitalism-global-poverty-is-at-its-lowest-rate-in-history/article/2562224?custom_click=rss

Since not everywhere in the world operates under a capitalist system, there's no certainty that we can give capitalism all the credit.  I'm sure it's pretty easy to make an "amazing" chart to show anything you want when there's no context whatsoever.  And even if this is accurate, it's still only showing an improvement in extreme poverty, not poverty in general.  The World Economic Forum, Oxfam (https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bp-working-for-few-political-capture-economic-inequality-200114-summ-en.pdf) and other sources still state that global inequality is increasing overall:

Rename chart to, "effects of outsourcing all jobs in America to China and India"

This all depends on how they defined poverty and how accurate the data and what conditions they applied. With enough juggling with data, definitions and conditions anyone can prove anything.

Worldwide poverty will not end, but efforts to alleviate it will stall. The reason why is the greed of many at the top. It is in their self-interest to keep labor costs down, so if that means keeping people in shanties, they are OK with that.

Poverty may be declining worldwide, but in America it is rising.

Isn't it amazing how bullshit stuff is more believable if you can make a chart that appears to supports it? What's funny is that there isn't even an attempt to show any correlating data on capitalism in the chart the OP posted. It is quite obvious (as shown by the graphic below) that the decrease in pirates is the true cause for a decrease in poverty as well as the increase in global temp.

Look, even I lean towards capitalism most of all, but this is a heaping pile of bullshit, we all know another crash is coming and it doesn't matter how much they manipulate the numbers by adding in drugs and prostitution to the GDPs it's not going to change anything. I disagree with the anti-capitalists here fiercely about capitalism itslf being evil, because I do believe capitalism in it's purest form has been completely corrupted by central banking, I don't think anyone here remembers or knows what a truly free market looks like.

QFT. If you want to understand what's going on with capitalism today, it's called economic inversion. Basically that means that the capitalists are abandoning the expensive labor of western Europe and the US in favor of ultra cheap labor in places with terrible labor laws such as China, India, Mexico, and Bangladesh. Dr. Wolff will explain it very well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZU3wfjtIJY).

Thing is, the western world isn't going to tolerate being economically knocked back 300 years into third world societies, which is why revolutionary momentum is building everywhere, and Europe is already on the brink of collapse. The capitalists got too greedy this time, they bit off more than they could chew.

Yep.

I for one would never argue that capitalism is "evil", how childish. Capitalism is the best and most advanced means to distribute resources that humanity has ever produced. It's also some 400 years old and beginning to show it's age. Every dominant system is the best system until it begins to die, even feudalism was far less brutal than the barbarism which preceded it. When a system begins to fail, and capitalism clearly is, that's when society must begin to formulate a new system, always less brutal and more compassionate than the one before.

Capitalism is the comatose grandparent on life support. The time has come to let go. The longer we deny this reality, the more suffering we will inflict upon ourselves.

...and what comes after capitalism? All of the idealists and naive daydreamers are talking about a new more just, more equal, more peaceful and more sustainable society. I'm afraid they are all wrong.

In America it is rising... Because the USA is moving away from its original free market principles by electing, over and over again, people allergic to the ideal of the American Constitution.

Population growth is slowing (with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa), and that is the main reason why the poverty rates are going down. Right now, wealth is increasing at a rate higher than that of human population growth.

Both capitalism and communism have their own benefits. In the former USSR, no one went hungry or without medical treatment, but there were very few wealthy people. In modern Russia, there are a lot of people who live in abject poverty, but the majority of the nation's citizens have grown wealthy thanks to capitalism.

You forgot to say that the Russian experiment didn't prove to be sustainable. In 1990, the USSR was bankrupt, and it felt apart. That's the best thing about capitalism: its engine is change. It always evolves. A communist country, or the stock market can crash, but capitalism keeps on going.

I see what you mean. If you could chose between deodorant (http://www.quora.com/How-long-were-food-lines-in-the-Soviet-Union) or a loaf of bread then, technically, no one was starving in ussr. Just a little bit smelly, but nothing like a bit of lemon juice under your armpit would not have solved (http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2010/03/13/lemon-juice-as-natural-deodorant/)... That is, after waiting hours after hours in line for that one lemon...


 ;D :D ;D



Those images are amazing:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255693/Last-pictures-life-iron-curtain-collapse-USSR.html

The bankruptcy of the USSR was caused by the following reasons:

1. The non-productive ethnic groups (such as Uzbeks, Azeris.etc) were growing at a rate of 3% per year, and subsidizing them was no longer possible from the earnings of the productive groups.

2. Productive ethnic groups (such as Slavs, Germans and Balts) were growing at just 0.5% per year. Even those ethnic groups which were having very high birth rate (such as the Volga Germans) were not growing in number due to emigration.

3. The Afghan war resulted in huge fiscal deficit to the budget.

4. The high oil prices in 1970s made sure that all other sectors were ignored. When the oil prices dropped in the late 1980s, there was no backup revenue.

As you see, none of these can be attributed to communism.

The problem is whenever the playing field is flattened (financially speaking) dominance must be exerted through force. War is also a big money machine.

The non-productive ethnic groups Vs The productive ethnic groups: sounds a lot like segregated communism... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm)


 8)

There is a drawback common to both communism and capitalism. If the percentage of parasites / welfare-rats crosses a particular threshold, then the entire system will collapse. It is going to happen in the United States in near future.

Holy shit we agree! HUZZAH! But yeah, any system which sets up a socioeconomic hierarchy will filter the high IQ sociopaths and other master manipulators to the top. Bad for everyone, even them.

The problem with capitalism is that to win the game, you have to destroy it. Having all the wealth means no one else can participate in economic activity, no one else can play with you.

An awful game model, unsustainable, and wholly incompatible with human nature.

http://thesocietypages.org/graphicsociology/files/2009/05/conley_champagne_distribution.png

If in a family of 4, only one provides for everything then this family will end up cooking, then eating each other. Something that happened in soviet union, north korea, (as in communist systems) a lot.

If the US decides it is a good idea to be apply the same methods then you will get the same result...

Its constantly being miffed at the system which keeps things evolving.  One day we likely wont need capitalism, until that day i think its healthy to be frustated with it.  Right now its our best option.

"If we disrupt the capitalist status quo, you will literally have to kill and eat your family"
-Wilikon

Good old politics of fear, ever convenient for those with no arguments of substance. I'll just leave this here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn6UJ2QcR7I).

The Cannibals of North Korea







There were times and places in North Korea in the mid-1990s, as a great famine wiped out perhaps 10 percent of the population, that children feared to sleep in the open. Some of them had wandered in from the countryside to places like Chongjin, an industrial town on the coast, where they lived on streets and in railroad stations. It wasn't unusual for people to disappear; they were dying by the thousands, maybe millions. But dark rumors were spreading, too horrifying to believe, too persistent to ignore.

"Don't buy any meat if you don't know where it comes from," one Chongjin woman whispered to a friend, who later defected and recounted the conversation to the reporter Barbara Demick for her book, "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea." Fear of cannibalism, like the famine supposedly driving it, spread. People avoided the meat in streetside soup vendors and warned children not to be alone at night. At least one person in Chongjin was arrested and executed for eating human flesh.

The panic, Demick concludes, may have exceeded the actual threat. "It does not seem," she writes, "that the practice was widespread." But it does appear to have happened.

One defected military officer, who fled with his family into China, repeated the horror story that had long followed mass famines. "People are going insane with hunger. They even kill and eat their own infants. This kind of thing is happening in many places," he said, according to the North Korea-focused postscript to Jasper Becker's history of the famine that wracked China 30 years earlier, in which reports of cannibalism were widespread.

North Korea's famine is over, but the stories of desperate men and women, driven so insane by starvation that they consume their own children, have resurfaced. Last week, Asia Press published a report alleging that thousands recently died of starvation in a North Korean province, a trend that is sometimes called a micro-famine. The story was sourced to Rimjingang, a collection of underground North Korean journalists whose work is generally considered reputable. According to Rimjingang's sources, the famine, like others before it, had led to cannibalism. One man, they said, had been arrested and executed for killing and eating his children.

The story of that man has swept through the Western media, a harrowing tale of the horrors still unfolding behind North Korea's largely closed borders. But is it true? Could something so awful still be happening?

The simple answer is that we don't, and can't, know for sure. North Korea-watchers seem skeptical about this one, sensational report, but they often point out that stories of micro-famine and cannibalism are coming at a worryingly regular pace. Joshua Stanton, who runs the site One Free Korea, wrote in May, the last time that stories of cannibalism leaked out of North Korea, "My first reaction to these reports years ago was skepticism, but if you hear enough people say the same thing (see here and here), you start to think they can’t all be lying."

North Korea is supposed to have solved its famine problem, in part with food aid from the foreign powers it considers mortal enemies, and it largely has. Officially, North Korea's economy is collectivist; the state owns all products, including every single crop grown within the national borders. But, as China and the Soviet Union learned, this isn't very good at keeping people fed. Since the 1990s famine, the regime has tolerated informal food markets and small, private farm plots. When the official, state-run food market fails, which it inevitably does, the secondary market can keep people fed.

And yet micro-famines are still possible, or at least plausible, in North Korea. The government can't bring itself to surrender control over food. Though agricultural trade has more flexibility now than it did 15 or 20 years ago, it is still one of the world's most rigidly controlled. With a weak secondary market and virtually no social safety net, it's not difficult to imagine local North Korean communities facing the sort of brief but deadly famines that the rest of the world has largely learned to avoid. Unlike in places such as East Africa, where thousands died of hunger last year, the primary causes are not environmental but human.

The regime needs the secondary food trade to prevent mass starvation, but it appears to fear these markets as threats to its power. There is likely an ongoing cat-and-mouse game, with the state working to keep farmers sufficiently weak, and the secondary markets sufficiently spare, that everyone still relies on the regime to feed themselves. It's about power and control, and it places North Korean families at real risk.

Recently, members of China's sympathetic state-run media were allowed to visit a special "economic zone" across the border, a commune of thousands of North Koreans who grew their own food. During the tour, the North Korean minders let slip that all 13,000 residents would be forcibly relocated and replaced by new workers, a disturbing policy that seems meant to secure state control over food at the risk of its continued production.

State-run "collectivist" food distribution systems have always failed, leading to some of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of the last century. North Korea's failed catastrophically in the 1990s, and though the system has changed significantly since then, it's difficult to know the degree to which informal markets and private plots are tolerated.

In an arbitrary and closed system, the state's approach might vary from place to place and time to time. Kim Jong Eun has worked aggressively to consolidate his power since taking over a year ago, a campaign that might well extend to the agricultural sector.

Maybe the stories of cannibalism are nothing more than that; rumors, stories from two decades prior that devolved into folklore. But cannibalism, for all the voyeuristic horror it inspires, is a symptom of something much worse: starvation and social breakdown, the conditions for which remain in North Korea. Perhaps most telling is that North Koreans themselves still seem to consider it possible, the defectors and underground reports still whispering of starvation and worse, a medieval horror in the 21st century.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05/the-cannibals-of-north-korea/

Why do progressives hate Walmart for low prices and its 3% profit margin but love high-priced Apple and its 24% profit margin?






Evil Walmart makes a lot of money, right? We hear that all the time even though the retail giant’s profit margin was only 3.12% in the most recent quarter. Interestingly, we never seem to hear as much about the much higher profit margin of Apple, the “darling of the progressives.” In the most recent quarter, the computer behemoth with a market capitalization ($725 billion) that exceeds the value of the entire stock markets of Mexico, Thailand and Russia, had a whopping profit margin of 24.2%. No wonder its market cap is so astronomical.


Here’s one way to put Walmart’s 3.12% profit margin in perspective. Over a typical 31-day period like the month of March for example, Walmart generates about $40.5 billion in sales revenue (roughly $1.3 billion per day). To generate that amount of sales, it costs Walmart about $39.3 billion every 31 days to pay for all of its expenses: merchandise to stock its stores, shipping expenses, the cost of labor including fringe benefits, utilities, corporate income taxes, property taxes, payroll taxes, interest expenses, advertising, etc. After incurring all of those costs to provide the merchandise for consumers over a 31-day period, there’s about $1.26 billion left over for profits, which is also 3.12% of the $40.5 billion in sales revenue.

Think about Walmart’s 3.12% profit margin this way: For the first 30 days of every 31-day month, 100% of the sales revenue collected during that 30-day period (about $39 billion) go entirely towards paying Walmart’s monthly operating expenses: the costs of merchandise, labor, taxes, etc. In other words, it takes 30 days of sales during every 31-day period for Walmart to cover its costs and break even. Only on the last day of every 31 day period, after finally breaking even the previous day, does any of the sales revenue generated by Walmart go to its profits. Finally, on the 31st and final day of a month like March, the retailer’s daily sales of $1.3 billion become the company’s monthly profits (3.12% of sales for the month). So greedy, evil Walmart typically gets a single “profit day” every 31 days – if it’s lucky and nothing goes wrong.

And a lot can go wrong in any 31 day period (or quarter or year), which is especially risky when retailers like Walmart operate on razor-thin margins of only about 3% – costs might unexpectedly rise or revenues might unexpectedly fall (ask Target about that). In that case, Walmart doesn’t get a “profit day” every 31 days, it might take 40 (at 2.5% profit margin) or 50 days (at 2% profit margin) of sales before Walmart covers all of its costs, breaks even, and finally earns a “profit day.”

In contrast, Apple’s whopping 24.2% profit margin means that the company can typically cover its costs to operate for 31 days in a little more than three weeks (23.5 days) and it then usually has 7.5 “profit days” every 31 days. That is, for more than an entire week every month, all of the sales revenue collected by Apple during those 7.5 days turns into profits for Apple’s shareholders.

So why is Walmart so reviled by progressives when its profits (and prices) are so low that it might earn a “profit day” every 31 days, and its main corporate objective is to provide low-cost merchandise to America’s low- and middle-income households? Every day that a Walmart opens its doors for business, it gives everybody in that local community a raise and makes them better off. On the other hand, why do progressives worship Apple so religiously when its extremely pricey products generate such huge profit margins (more than 7 “profit days” every month) that the company’s stock is worth almost as much as the entire Brazilian stock market? Every day that an Apple store opens for business, it stands ready to extract $24.20 in profits for every $100 spent that day, which seems like a huge transfer of wealth from Apple’s loyal customers to Apple’s wealthy shareholders. And yet the progressives worship Apple and revile Walmart – go figure?!


http://www.aei.org/publication/every-month-walmart-gets-one-profit-day-from-its-sales-while-apple-gets-7-5/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=perrywalmartapple

The true form of capitalism basically says your wealth is proportional to your productivity to ssociety.

This means in the end that society is deciding wether capitalism will be good or evil.
society could decide not to buy products that are made from slave labor or by destroying nature.

Yep.

Free market + decentralization of knowledge. Only when information is 100% not controlled that a real free market flourishes.
Communism hates the concept of property. The property of entrepreneurship that is, among other things. If someone has something that the other one does not then this is the root of all evil. Envy. Greed. Jealousy, etc... Because you have something the others do not. If you abolish any kind of ownership, like the concept of copyright for example, everyone owns nothing, killing the root before becoming a tree. The State will manage all the needs, goods and services for all. Property becomes the State. Simple enough.

Strangely they do not hate the concept of exclusive ownership and use of weapons by the State against those not believing enough though...


Free Market.

A free market is a market system in which the prices for goods and services are set freely by consent between sellers and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority. A free market contrasts with a controlled market or regulated market, in which government intervenes in supply and demand through non-market methods such as laws creating barriers to market entry or directly setting prices. A free market economy is a market-based economy where prices for goods and services are set freely by the forces of supply and demand and are allowed to reach their point of equilibrium without intervention by government policy, and it typically entails support for highly competitive markets and private ownership of productive enterprises. Although free markets are commonly associated with capitalism in contemporary usage and popular culture, free markets have been advocated by market anarchists, market socialists, and some proponents of cooperatives and advocates of profit sharing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

The decrease in pirates only happened since the Pirate Bay was shut down. (No, not really. The pirates simply went underwater, I mean underground.)

 :D

Kim Jong Un balloons to 300 pounds as famine nears






Portly North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, whose hostile actions have brought crippling international sanctions to his impoverished nation, has a new message for the Hermit Kingdom’s starving masses: Get ready to eat plant roots.

Kim, whose weight the South Korean government estimates has ballooned to nearly 300 pounds, signaled through state media that the nation could be headed for another famine like the one that killed an estimated 3.5 million people in the 1990s.

“The road to revolution is long and arduous,” an editorial in the state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper said Monday, according to The Telegraph. “We may have to go on an arduous march, during which we will have to chew the roots of plants once again.”

“Arduous march” in North Korean is code for famine. It’s how state media described the disaster that struck when Kim was a mere teen, which experts say was brought on by the economic mismanagement of his father, Kim Jong Il, loss of foreign aid and natural disasters.



http://nypost.com/2016/03/31/kim-jong-un-weighs-nearly-300-pounds/

WE are in a modern era but sad to say, its like being in an ancient era where the poor stays poor and the rich get richer.

Even under the soviet regime nothing changed. The rich had access, power and privileges. The poor had one loaf of bread for a whole neighborhood.

Capitalism is the best way to live ..Just need to be a bit of a socialist when using the money you made by being a capitalist.. Then every one can become a bit of a communist..

The money your country makes share it out properly and your country will have nice public services which then becomes a common goal

Now you have become all 3 capitalist socialist communist all rolled into 1 ;D

If you have total capitalism the top few will end up with all the money..Middle class is now the poor
soon people with a million will be the middle class ..and as time goes further people with 3 million will be the middle class and so on and so on till the money is worthless because only a few own it.

Also have you ever thought about what these total capitalist will do when robots can do what a human can do but 100 times better and 1000 times cheaper over a life time?

 :D :D :D :D :D :D :D YOU BE SCREAMING FOR SOCIALISM :D

Also look what capitalism as done 1970s 80s 90s you could work in a car factory and get a mortgage..
Now you need to be a brain surgeon to buy the same house..
I bought a two-bed flat for £32,750 in 1985 and sold my home of 20 years for £660,000 in 2014. The next generation is not so lucky.This is not me by the way I wish..Just an example..

This is total capitalism for you..can you see the pattern if it's 600k now imagine in the future how much then..
So you see the people with 3 million will be moved out of London then becoming the middle class?

Can global poverty be at a all time low but even more tragic for those on the bottom than it was in the past?
Meaning the people at the top skew the numbers? Whats that stat about the top 10-20 people have more money than the bottom 40%!
Makes me think the poll does not add up and is shifty pushing of numbers to get to the outcome on the chart.

The poor are richer now than any poor since the birth of mankind. Thanks to capitalism. Know fact. Access to food, medicine, clothing, a place to live, cable TV, computer, internet, smart phones, etc, etc...

So why in the uk do we have food banks plus have to wait 2 weeks to see a doctor..
even in the 70s when uk was poor you went the doctor's same day always had somewhere to live

A place to live food and medicine as all gone sky high..
and all the other electrical items you can get on a tip for free all the riches dumped tat..

Don't see the poor with a brand new apple phone?

The things in life that people mostly need as become expensive .
In the uk It used to be the other way round..Food was cheap and homes hospital free..
Electrical goods expensive..
If you bought a tv it would last for 20 years..Now they blow up after 4 years..

But which ever you look at it your country needs to make money or your doomed..
You need capitalism no matter what..Just how it's spread about this is now the problem..

Capitalism gets a bad rap these days, often conjuring up images of greedy oil barons, sweatshop factories and polluted oceans, but a recent study shows exactly how much capitalism has helped the poorest of the world.

The study, conducted by Max Roser of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford University, shows that global poverty has declined dramatically over the last two centuries, with the sharpest declines coming just after industrialization began to take hold.

“In 1820 the vast majority of people lived in extreme poverty and only a tiny elite enjoyed higher standards of living,” Roser wrote in the report.

The nature of man should not be overlooked either. A lot of people have no respect for life or the planet. Some people are truly George Soros evil...

Those on the extreme end of poverty are really suffering though and thats not a good look for us as a species.
Stats lie is what I really mean to say,I see a lot more people ass out these days then 10 years ago and I do not think the other shoe has dropped quite yet. Might be my perception though.

If you live in America, your observation could be correct thanks to president 0bama.