Thread by @MaxCRoser

This thread is more personal than most of the things I share here, but I’m at my limit with Jason Hickel.

I want to explain why I dislike him so much and how we got here.

This is a personal story over several years so it’ll take a bit of time.

Jason Hickel is an anthropologist who wrote many articles and tweets about me, my motivations, and my work in the last couple of years.

I’m sure there are good points among them, where he is right and I’m wrong. But some of his big claims against my work are false.

One such big claim he put forward in an article in The Guardian. It was about my work on global poverty and he claimed that it “couldn’t be more wrong” to say that global poverty has declined.

It was shared tens of thousands of times. (theguardian.com/commentisfree/… ).

Just yesterday Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) wrote a long explanation of why Hickel is wrong.

If you are interested in poverty, it is very much worth reading.
noahpinion.substack.com/p/against-hick…

One of the most awful things that Hickel does is that he aims to portrait me as someone who is *legitimising colonialism*.

In The Guardian he wrote that my work “takes the violence of colonisation and repackages it as a happy story of progress.”

In my view (and Noah Smith’s), the improvement of living conditions after the end of colonialism is actually an argument *against* colonial oppression.

The large improvements in health and poverty happened once the oppression of the former colonies *ended*.

The other main point Hickel makes there is that the world should also rely on higher poverty lines (not just the extremely low $1.90 per day).

I very much agree with him on this.

The world should rely on higher poverty lines as Hickel (and every other poverty researcher) says.

On @OurWorldInData we've done this already for many years and I’ve often argued for it. Most recently here: ourworldindata.org/higher-poverty…

He also suggests that I blindly trust existing historical poverty data. I am not.

All existing poverty data has problems – the historical data and the poverty data for the present as well.

That’s the very reason I do research on this!

I’ve just written another paper on the history of poverty (not yet published).

If I’d believe the existing data was perfect, I would not spend much of my energy criticizing existing data and trying to do better.

But I do believe that the existing, imperfect data on the history of poverty is informative.

It is not – as Hickel claimed – “completely wrong”.

If you want to see the research on whether poverty has fallen over the last two centuries, read this new study here.

It compares estimates from different sources and shows that they differ, but also shows that they agree that poverty has declined.

https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1377595029443727362?s=20

If you want to look at how poverty has changed relative to higher poverty lines than $1.90, here is the latest data.

Hickel’s big claim in The Guardian – it couldn’t be more wrong to say that poverty declined – is wrong.

I think, but am not sure, that Hickel now understands that he was in fact wrong. And I’m happy that he changed his mind (if so).

I also want to emphasize that to say that poverty has declined does not mean that the world is free of poverty.

The world is extremely unequal and the huge majority of the world is very poor.

The reason that researchers study the decline of poverty is that they want to know how to achieve further reductions of poverty.

As I wrote here “It is because the world is terrible still that it’s so important to write about how in several important aspects the world became a better place.”
ourworldindata.org/much-better-aw…

Hickel’s article in The Guardian hit me very hard personally.

I was feeling awful for months and I had no idea how I could possibly speak about how I felt in public.

My only reaction at the time was that a colleague and I wrote an explanation of how historians know that poverty has declined (ourworldindata.org/extreme-histor…) and I wrote Hickel an email telling him that I find it awful what he does.

But I didn’t respond publicly.

I just did not know what to do when one of the world’s largest newspapers publishes an article saying that I couldn’t be more wrong and that my work is “not science, but social media” as Hickel claimed.

As you might also imagine, when someone launches an attack like this, it is followed by an incredible number of insults and abuse via email and social media.

Many believed that Hickel was right and followed his lead.

And I don’t think it’s surprising that these people got extremely angry at me.

Hickel writes in this same article “In other words, Roser’s graph illustrates a story of coerced proletarianisation. It is not at all clear that this represents an improvement in people’s lives.”

If a person gets convinced of such things about my work, it is understandable that they get angry at me.

And those who have been at the receiving end of an Internet mob know what this means.

The Guardian article was only one of many attacks by Hickel on me.

Two years ago Hickel and his research assistant wrote an email to ask whether we at Our World in Data can help them with the construction of some simple metrics of inequality that they were unable to construct themselves (something called the ‘absolute Gini’).

One of my team members and I did the work for him and we sent him the inequality data that he needed.

What did Jason Hickel do with it? He used it to write yet another attack against me.

He gave it the title “What Max Roser gets wrong about inequality”

It’s honestly beyond me how someone can possibly do something like this.

What kind of person asks a colleague for help and once that colleague helps out takes that work to attack that same colleague who helped him?

After launching the attack in this way he subsequently changed the title of the post.

But it is still online and the URL also still shows the original title: jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/12/1…

I should also say that the attacks affect the others in our small team as well.

As I said, in this case a colleague helped to do this work, but more broadly everyone feels bad if the work that we put so much time and energy into gets trashed in The Guardian or elsewhere.

He wrote several other articles about my work after that. Last week yet another one (jasonhickel.org/blog/). Again with the same old wrong claims.

For example the very first point he makes is this one (he says historical reconstructions of GDP do not include non-commodity forms of consumption).

If that was true, it’d obviously be massively important. But it is not true.

That Hickel wants his readers to believe that historians do not take this into account is a diffamation of these researchers.

Of course historians know that they have to take things like subsistence farming into account when they study our history. And they do.

These historians spent decades of their lives studying this, how can someone possibly believe that they missed this basic point?

And I’m sure Hickel knows that historians know that. Many people told him over and over again – me in emails, me and many others publicly.

And it is not exactly hard to find out that historians know this, it’s front and center in those studies, just because it is so important.

In this and many other similar cases he is misinforming the readers that trust him.

And every time he does this I get attacked from his followers.

I understand that his followers do this. They trust that he is right and that I am wrong.

Because he portraits himself as the lone, courageous scholar who fights for the truth in a world full of economists, historians, and development institutions that are ignorant, complicit with an oppressive system, have bad intentions, or are otherwise corrupt.

Of course many readers who are not experts in these questions themselves are attracted to someone who portraits himself in that way.

But while I understand his followers, I dislike him for it and I hate the consequences of all of this.

It sucks so much to spend your days getting attacked for work that is not wrong and then to explain again and again where the attacker is wrong.

One last point.

I just can’t stand his double-faced manner of how he speaks to me in private and how he speaks about me in public.

For years he sent me emails in which he praises my work – “your recent post was really powerful, thank you for doing that” or “I am a big admirer of your work and I believe OWID is doing a great job” – and then the next moment he goes out publicly to attack me again.

These are just some of the reasons I so very much dislike Jason Hickel.

I should also say that in my case, Hickel is the only person in the world who does this to me.

Most people don’t know or don’t care about my work, some people find it a bit useful, but only one person does this kind of thing every few months.

So my case is really not too bad, I’m sure some researchers who focus on fields like vaccinations or climate change have it much, much worse.

And I’m sure that many who read this had similar experiences where someone was spreading misinformation on a big platform and Internet mobs followed.

It also affects how I behave. In responding to him or his followers I repeatedly overreacted and in the worst cases I assume bad intentions where there are none and as a consequence I’m much ruder than I want to be.
I’m sorry if I was rude to you.

And I can imagine that some of you who read this think badly of me for writing this here – for telling the backstory of the ‘what Max doesn’t get about inequality’ post or quoting from his emails and just generally saying that I dislike a colleague so very much.

You might be right and perhaps there’d be better options, but after many years of this I don’t know what else to do.

I’m absolutely done with Jason Hickel.

I went into these conversations with him with good intentions, but for the reasons above (and more) I just have enough.

I have no respect at all for him anymore. It doesn’t feel nice to say this, but it is how I feel.

I’m telling everyone publicly, because I want to explain myself and share with you what it has been like.

I have no big illusions that this changes anything though.

I know that we’ll be here again in a few months. He will again make his false claims and his readers will trust him and I’ll again sit here reading through a barrage of attacks from his readers.

Nevertheless, let’s end with something positive.

I very much love my work – even if all of this comes with a side dish of Hickel.

I love the @OurWorldinData team and I'm very much looking forward to what is ahead for us:

We just hired a number of great colleagues, I have the hope that we find some new funding this year, we are working on very interesting projects right now, and we will all keep working to achieve our mission.

(ourworldindata.org/about)

And I should say the nastiness of Hickel is an absolute exception. There are many very helpful critics who help us to do better and more useful work.

And everyone here in the team feels very motivated by the very positive and thoughtful feedback from our readers.

If the biggest problem of my work is that every 3 months I get attacked by Hickel and then spend a week defending myself, then so be it.

Thank you for reading.

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This got way more attention than I had thought. Many thanks for all your encouraging comments.

I’ve read through all your replies (last night) and several good questions came up. I want to add three points:

One question that many asked was, why I didn’t reply in the Guardian after Hickel’s article came out.

As I mentioned, I did write an article in response which I published on @OurWorldInData (ourworldindata.org/extreme-histor…).

I also wrote to the @Guardian at the time to ask whether I could publish such an article on their site.

The ‘Global Development’ editor got back and said she is not responsible and told me that those at the ‘Comment section’ are, but the people there did not get back to me.

(I should say, I’m definitely not interested in writing for the Guardian now. I explained it here and hope all of this ends here. I don’t want to prolong it.)

A second question that came up:

Another aspect to the poverty numbers that is worth mentioning, because Hickel mentions this in his Guardian piece and elsewhere, is the number (rather than share) of people in poverty.

As I said, Hickel and I agree that poverty should be measured against higher poverty lines.

In his work he relies on a poverty line of $7.40 (adjusted for price differences across countries) and he calls this the ‘ethical poverty line.’

[I very much disagree with him however that it is appropriate to call such a low poverty line an ‘ethical poverty line.’

I think a person who lives on twice as much is still poor and I certainly find it unethical to name such a low poverty line ‘ethical’.]

In the Guardian article and elsewhere he relies on his ‘ethical’ line and includes this chart (it is his chart) that shows that the number of people living on less than $7.40 has increased until the year 2003.

Since then the number living on less has decreased slightly – also in the years after his chart ends (up to the pandemic).

You find the latest data here iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/povD…. This is the source that he and I rely on and you can look up the data for any poverty line you want.

But the flaw of Hickel’s presentation is of course that he excludes everyone else.
As the world population increases, it is not just the case that the number of poor people increases, the number of people who are *not* poor increases as well.

(The pandemic just showed why it is important to compare figures in rates, when the population differs. Korea had 1,748 COVID deaths to date, more than twice as many as Luxembourg.

But that does not mean that COVID hit Korea much worse, it is just that Korea has a much larger population. The rate of deaths in Korea was 35-times lower than in Luxembourg.)

To be entirely transparent about comparisons in numbers and rates we produce charts in which you can switch between a relative view – rate of people in poverty – and the absolute number of people.

Here it is, with the latest available data.
ourworldindata.org/grapher/distri…

And a third and last point.

I’m now of course asking myself why I was not speaking about all of this in public much earlier.

I think it was a big mistake to not do this earlier. Because what I did instead, was that I got increasingly angry over time and as a consequence was aggressive, even to people that I only associated with him.

I am sorry. I should have not done that, it was a mistake on my side.