It is safe to predict that more countries will refuse to learn from history and give socialism a go.
Marian L. Tupy —
Three years ago, a well-known American leftist, David Sirota, wrote the following in a Salon essay titled Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle,
Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results… When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela’s did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter – and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore.
Last Sunday, Nicholas Casey of The New York Times reported in an article Dying Infants and No Medicine: Inside Venezuela’s Failing Hospitals,
By morning, three newborns were already dead. The day had begun with the usual hazards: chronic shortages of antibiotics, intravenous solutions, even food. Then a blackout swept over the city, shutting down the respirators in the maternity ward. Doctors kept ailing infants alive by pumping air into their lungs by hand for hours. By nightfall, four more newborns had died… The economic crisis in this country has exploded into a public health emergency, claiming the lives of untold numbers of Venezuelans.
I start with these rather long quotations with a heavy heart. Contrary to Sirota’s glib prediction, I do not intend to laugh off as “harmless and forgettable” Venezuela’s “cautionary tale about the perils of command economics.” I do not find dying children laughable. But then, I did not laugh when I read about starving Ukrainians eating their children during Stalin’s Holodomor. I did not laugh when I read of Khmer Rouge soldiers shooting infants off their bayonets in communist Cambodia. And I certainly did not laugh when I saw with my own two eyes children reduced to starvation by the Marxist dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. In fact, there is nothing laughable about the almost incomprehensible degree of suffering that socialism has heaped upon humanity wherever it’s been tried.
As much as I would like to enjoy rubbing Sirota’s nose in his own mind-bending stupidity, I cannot rejoice for I know that Venezuela’s descent into chaos – hyperinflation, empty shops, out-of-control violence and the collapse of basic public services – will not be the last time we hear of a collapsing socialist economy. Looking into the future, it is safe to predict that more countries will refuse to learn from history and give socialism “a go”. And, I am equally certain that there will be, to use Lenin’s words, “useful idiots,” like David Sirota, who will sing socialism’s praises until the moment when the last light goes out and time comes for them to move on and find something else to write about. And that begs an important question: considering that socialism has failed wherever it has been tried, why do we persist in trying to make it work?
Evolutionary psychology provides one plausible answer. According to Professors John Tooby and Leda Cosmides of the University of California, Santa Barbara, human minds evolved in the so-called “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness” between 1.6 million and 10,000 years ago. “The key to understanding how the modern mind works,” Cosmides writes, “is to realize that its circuits were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a modern [humans] – they were designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.” In other words, modern skulls house Stone Age minds. So what are some of the characteristics of these Stone Age minds and what do these characteristics tell us about the way we understand economics?
First, we evolved in small groups. We knew each other and were, probably, related to each other. In a world without specialization and trade, gains by one group, “us,” tended to come at the expense of another group, “them.” That makes it difficult for us to understand and appreciate gains from complex economic activities, such as global trade.
Second, like many other animals, we have evolved to form hierarchies of dominance. And, like other animals, we resent those at the top and form coalitions to displace them. Our resentment of hierarchies includes not only zero-sum hierarchies, like dictatorships, which channel resources to the top, but also positive-sum hierarchies, like corporations, which improve human lives.
Third, the “social nature of hunting and gathering, the fact that food spoiled quickly, and the utter absence of privacy,” Will Wilkinson writes, meant that “the benefits of individual success in hunting or foraging could not be easily internalized by the individual, and were expected to be shared. Envy of the disproportionately wealthy may have helped … those of lower status on the dominance hierarchy guard against further predation by those able to amass power.”
Put differently, humans are, by nature, envious, resentful and unable to comprehend, let alone appreciate, a sophisticated economic system that has evolved in spite of, not because of, our best efforts.
For these and other reasons, people like Sirota wax lyrical about Venezuela, while ignoring examples of true success in the global economy. Chile is one such example. In the 1970s, Chile switched from socialism to free markets and thrived. In 1973, which was the last year of socialist rule, average per capita income in Chile was 37 percent that of Venezuela. By 2015, Venezuela’s average per capita income was 73 percent that of Chile. The Chilean economy has expanded by 231 percent. Venezuela’s has contracted by 12 percent. With any luck, Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s successor will soon be gone, and the people of Venezuela will be able to fix their broken country. They should look to Chile as an example to follow.
PHL Could Hit Single-Digit Poverty Years Ahead of Schedule
“Better labor market conditions and slower inflation in the country could turn the administration’s single-digit poverty incidence aspirations into a reality two years ahead of schedule.
This was according to the latest Macro Poverty Outlook for the Philippines, released by the World Bank on Monday. It estimated that poverty incidence in the country could decrease to 9.3 percent in 2026 from 12.2 percent this year and 17.8 percent in 2021.”
AI Is a Great Equalizer That Will Change the World
A positive revolution from AI is already unfolding in the global East and South.
Zion Lights —
Summary: Concerns over potential negative impacts of AI have dominated headlines, particularly regarding its threat to employment. However, a closer examination reveals AI’s immense potential to revolutionize equal and high quality access to necessities such as education and healthcare, particularly in regions with limited access to resources. From India’s agricultural advancements to Kenya’s educational support, AI initiatives are already transforming lives and addressing societal needs.
The latest technology panic is over artificial intelligence (AI). The media is focused on the negatives of AI, making many assumptions about how AI will doom us all. One concern is that AI tools will replace workers and cause mass unemployment. This is likely overblown—although some jobs will be lost to AI, if history is any guide, new jobs will be created. Furthermore, AI’s ability to replace skilled labor is also one of its greatest potential benefits.
Think of all the regions of the world where children lack access to education, where schoolteachers are scarce and opportunities for adult learning are scant.
Think of the preventable diseases that are untreated due to a lack of information, the dearth of health care providers, and how many lives could be improved and saved by overcoming these challenges.
In many ways, AI will be a revolutionary equalizer for poorer countries where education and health care have historically faced many challenges. In fact, a positive revolution from AI is already unfolding in the global East and South.
Improving Equality through Education and Health Care
In India, agricultural technology startup Saagu Baagu is already improving lives. This initiative allows farmers to increase crop yield through AI-based solutions. A chatbot provides farmers with the information they need to farm more effectively (e.g., through mapping the maturity stages of their crops and testing soil so that AI can make recommendations on which fertilizers to use depending on the type of soil). Saagu Baagu has been successful in the trial region and is now being expanded. This AI initiative is likely to revolutionize agriculture globally.
Combining large language models with speech-recognition software is helping Indian farmers in other ways. For example, Indian global impact initiative Karya is working on helping rural Indians, who speak many different languages, to overcome language barriers. Karya is collecting data on tuberculosis, which is a mostly curable and preventable disease that kills roughly 200,000 Indians every year. By collecting voice recordings of 10 different dialects of Kannada, an AI speech model is being trained to communicate with local people. Tuberculosis carries much stigma in India, so people are often reluctant to ask for help. AI will allow Indians to reduce the spread of the disease and give them access to reliable information.
In Kenya, where students are leading in AI use, the technology is aiding the spread of information by allowing pupils to ask a chatbot questions about their homework.
Throughout the world, there are many challenges pertaining to health care, including increasing costs and staff shortages. As developed economies now have rapidly growing elderly populations and shrinking workforces, the problem is set to worsen. In Japan, AI is helping with the aging population issue, where a shortage of care workers is remedied by using robots to patrol care homes to monitor patients and alert care workers when something is wrong. These bots use AI to detect abnormalities, assist in infection countermeasures by disinfecting commonly touched places, provide conversation, and carry people from wheelchairs to beds and bathing areas, which means less physical exertion and fewer injuries for staff members.
In Brazil, researchers used AI models capable of predicting HER2 subtype breast cancer in imaging scans of 311 women and the patients’ response to treatment. In addition, AI can also help make health resource allocations more efficient and support tasks such as preparing for public health crises, such as pandemics. At the individual level, the use of this technology in wearables, such as smartwatches, can encourage patient adherence to treatments, help prevent illnesses, and collect data more frequently.
Biometric data gathered from wearable devices could also be a game-changer. This technology can detect cancers early, monitor infectious diseases and general health issues, and give patients more agency over their health where access to health care is limited or expensive.
Education and health care in the West could also benefit from AI. In the United States, text synthesis machines could help to address the lack of teachers in K–12 education and the inaccessibility of health care for low-income people.
Predicting the Future
AI is already playing a role in helping humanity tackle natural disasters (e.g., by predicting how many earthquake aftershocks will strike and their strength). These models, which have been trained on large data sets of seismic events, have been found to estimate the number of aftershocks better than conventional (non-AI) models do.
Forecasting models can also help to predict other natural disasters like severe storms, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. Machine learning uses algorithms to reduce the time required to make forecasts and increase model accuracy, which again is superior to the non-AI models that are used for this purpose. These improvements could have a massive impact on people in poor countries, who currently lack access to reliable forecasts and tend to be employed in agriculture, which is highly dependent on the weather.
A Case for Optimism
Much of the fear regarding AI in the West concerns the rapid speed at which it is being implemented, but for many countries, this speed is a boon.
Take the mobile phone. In 2000, only 4 percent of people in developing countries had access to mobile phones. By 2015, 94 percent of the population had such access, including in sub-Saharan Africa.
The benefits were enormous, as billions gained access to online banking, educational opportunities, and more reliable communication. One study found that almost 1 in 10 Kenyan families living in extreme poverty were able to lift their incomes above the poverty line by using the banking app M-Pesa. In rural Peru, household consumption rose by 11 percent with access to phones, while extreme poverty fell 5.4 percent. Some 24 percent of people in developing countries now use the mobile internet for educational purposes, compared with only 12 percent in the richest countries. In lower-income countries, access to mobile phones and apps is life-changing.
AI, which only requires access to a mobile phone to use, is likely to spread even faster in the countries that need the technology the most.
This is what we should be talking about: not a technology panic but a technology revolution for greater equality in well-being.
“High growth and large decline in inequality have combined to eliminate poverty in India for the PPP$ 1.9 poverty line. (Here we use the PPP$ 1.9 line [2011 prices] rather than the PPP$ 2.15 line at 2017 prices because the former closely corresponds to the official India Tendulkar poverty line.)
The Headcount Poverty Ratio (HCR) for the 2011 PPP$ 1.9 poverty line has declined from 12.2 per cent in 2011-12 to 2 per cent in 2022-23, equivalent to 0.93 percentage points (ppt) per year. Rural poverty stood at 2.5% while urban poverty was down to 1%.”
India’s Good Fortune: How the Country Is Tackling Energy Poverty, Increasing Growth, and Building the Future
Energy poverty and many other problems will soon be things of the past for India.
Zion Lights —
Summary:Over the past two decades, India has made remarkable strides in multidimensional poverty reduction. This comprehensive measure, which considers factors like education and infrastructure alongside income, paints a more accurate picture of poverty. Additionally, India has achieved significant progress in areas such as child mortality, sanitation, access to clean water, and electricity, signaling a positive trajectory for improved living standards and environmental outcomes in the country.
Just two decades ago, life in India looked bleak. Between 2005 and 2006, 55.1 percent of the Indian population—the equivalent of 645 million people—suffered from multidimensional poverty, and in 2004, 39.9 percent of Indians lived in extreme poverty.
Multidimensional poverty measures the percentage of households in a country deprived along three factors: monetary poverty, access to education, and basic infrastructure services. That captures a more thorough picture of poverty.
Multidimensional poverty dropped from over half of the population to 27.7 percent (370 million people) in 2014. In 2019–21, the proportion of people suffering from multidimensional poverty declined further to only 16.4 percent of the total population, or 230 million people. Although the pandemic slowed some aspects of poverty alleviation, the percentage of people in multidimensional poverty has continued to drop significantly year on year in India.
It’s also worth considering extreme poverty, which is defined as living below the international poverty line of $2.15 per day. Using this measure, the number of people living in extreme poverty in India declined from more than half of the population (63.1 percent) in 1977 to only 10 percent in 2019.
Moreover, child mortality declined from 43.4 percent in 1918 to only 3.1 percent in 2021. The number of people without adequate sanitation has dropped from 50.4 percent to 11.3 percent, and the proportion of people without adequate drinking water has fallen from 16.4 percent to just 2.7 percent. As well, more people in the country have access to clean cooking fuels than ever before, from 22.3 percent of people in 2000 to 67.9 percent in 2020.
India has also been tackling environmental concerns. The population of the greater one-horned rhino, which has a “vulnerable” conservation status, has increased from 40 in 1966 to over 4,000 in 2021. Air pollution is one of the world’s largest health and environmental problems, and in low-income countries, it is often the leading risk factor for death. Although there is still work to do, the death rate in India from air pollution decreased from 1990 to 2019 by 42 percent, from 280.5 deaths per 100,000 people to 164.1 deaths per 100,000.
In 2017, Indian Prime Minister Modi launched a plan to electrify more households, targeting over 40 million families in rural and urban India, or roughly a quarter of the population. The plan was called “Saubhagya”—literally, “good fortune” or “auspiciousness.” Although the country did not meet its target as quickly as planned, access to electricity in India has been increasing.
The term “access to electricity” does not have a universally accepted definition, but general usage takes into account the availability of electricity, safe cooking facilities, and a minimum level of consumption. According to the International Energy Agency, “access to electricity” involves more than just connecting a household to the grid; it also requires households to consume a certain minimum amount of electricity, which varies based on whether it is a rural or urban household.
According to the UNDP report, 97.9 percent of Indians had access to electricity between 2019 and 2021. Only 50.9 percent of Indians had access to electricity in 1993. The country has achieved immense progress. In 2018, Prime Minister Modi stated that every village in India had access to electricity.
Climate change is likely to be costly to the Indian subcontinent. Heatwaves have already led to an increase in deaths in India, particularly since a large share of the population is employed in outdoor labor like farming and construction.
India aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2070 and for 50 percent of the power-generation capacity to come from clean energy sources by 2030. The energy transition for India will take time, and the country will need fossil fuels to meet its energy needs for many years yet, but the future is looking promising.
Last year, for example, India brought an indigenous reactor design online at the Kakrapar Atomic Power Project Unit 4. India has 22 working nuclear reactors, which produce about 3 percent of the country’s electricity. India has ambitious plans to build more reactors—aiming to commission a new reactor every year.
The fact that a large country can more than halve multidimensional poverty in only 15 years is a cause for celebration, but India’s foresight of meeting future increasing energy needs is also something to be applauded. Energy poverty will soon be a thing of the past for India. Increased electricity will lead to further poverty alleviation, economic growth, and improved living standards, which in turn will lead to better air quality and environmental outcomes. These are good fortunes that we can all celebrate.
