alt Hacker News> Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions.
Agreed, let's do that! Here is the economic history of the developing world over the past 70 years.
https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun
Pick any metric you care about: number of people living on less than $1/day, literacy, maternal mortality, access to birth control. It has dramatically improved in the developing world over the past 70 years or so.
Capitalists invented metrics to show how awesome capitalism for the world, and then said "see, against these metrics, the world is better!"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2...
Putting the poverty line at 1$ a day, or saying people crossed from 2$/day to $3/day is "poverty decreasing," lets people get these self-serving numbers. Poverty declined, relative to what threshold? Do these people have secure housing, medical care, education, political power, in line with their contributions to the global market they've been shoved into?
People being moved from centuries old homes distributed across agrarian geographies into slums, that's improvement?
https://data.unhabitat.org/pages/housing-slums-and-informal-...
People living side by side to polluting factories that poison their water, that's improvement?
These people are foisted into a global supply chain, their economies changed into e.g. unsustainable cash crop or similar fragile-to-price-shock products, and themselves thrust into market dependence without any labor security since outside entities show up, exploit while it's profitable, then disappear without leaving any meaningful industrialization to the overall nation. Not to mention there's still a lot of people being straight up enslaved.