Joseph Stiglitz : The end of neoliberalism and the rebirth of history

[Recursion]

99. Except I've actually lived in the global south

And what I get tired of is the developed world's left who haven't trying to gaslight me about what has actually happened. China literally hired Milton Friedman and took his economic advice: you don't get more neoliberal than that. India (who is almost as much a part of this story as China) liberalized extremely under Singh and Rao and continues to (though Modi, as part of the global populist wave trying to burn this system down, is undoing some of that).

You say, correctly, that 5% of the money went to 60% of humankind, ignoring the fact that this is more money than they have ever received under any previous system. You say, again correctly, that the $1.90 PPP line is not ambitious enough, ignoring the fact that the globalized trade system at least got people there (and, again, India is as much a part of that transition as China).

The past 20 years have seen the number of people without access to a toilet collapse from 1.5 billion to 600 million, and has seen the number of people without access to clean water fall from 2 billion to 800 million.

You do say one thing that's simply outright false:

inequality has been getting worse not only between countries, but within them.

Inequality between countries is what has fallen. Inequality within developed countries (that is, the richest 10-15% of the world, that is, us) has increased, and I don't care, particularly since standards of living have improved (for some reason the populations of the developed world simply do not remember how much poorer we all were even relatively recently; the US poverty rates in the 1960s were appalling). This gets to the bigger problem that most of the US has really fallen for the myth of a high school graduate getting a factory job that paid enough to support a family: that was arguably true for a segment of the population in a segment of the country, but wasn't true for women, minorities, or people living in the southern or western US. In fact, the US population is itself a mirror of the global experience, with wages for women and minorities steadily rising since the 1970s, a fact that gets politically eclipsed by the fact that white men's wages have not risen during that time (ask yourself, as an example, why it's politically potent to call for a return of factory jobs but not switchboard or typing pool jobs).

So, basically, I would mirror your call to be a little more skeptical about narratives that reinforce what you already believe.