However misguided their ideas, until recently it was safe to assume that those on the Left did at least want to improve the lot of humanity – they wanted the global population to enjoy better health, a better diet and longer lives. They just disagreed with capitalists and free marketeers over how best to achieve those things. Now I am not so sure. An extraordinary piece appears in the Guardian today by Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at Goldsmiths College, which savages Bill Gates for tweeting, from Davos last week, an infographic showing several ways in which global poverty is declining.
I can think of many reasons to savage Bill Gates, not least over the nightmare that is Windows 8, Microsoft OneDrive and other things. It wouldn’t be unreasonable, either, to attack him for complacency, especially for lecturing the world on poverty-reduction from well-fed Davos – even if Gates has devoted his time and part of his fortune to tackling these issues.
But to claim that Gates is ‘completely wrong’ when he draws attention to graphs of falling global rates of extreme poverty, rising rates of literacy and falling child mortality and writes: ‘people under-estimate just how much life has improved over the past two centuries’ is something else entirely.
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