The author discusses poverty, not health. We can argue that health is more achievable in modern world, but the picture of poverty isn't changed by that.
It absolutely is. If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any income. We should expect poverty to be directly corellated with health, and the data agrees. Poke around on gapminder and see for yourself.
> It absolutely is. If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any income
That's the author's (main) point, i.e. that using money/income in order to compare today's capitalist world with the one that came before it is pointless, because money wasn't that much of a thing in a pre-capitalist world and you could live reasonably well (and healthy) without having any access to "income".
You couldn't really live reasonably well and healthy though. For the vast majority of human history about 40% of people died before reaching adulthood.
Not being paid wages doesn't mean not taking income. In an agricultural society, the produce of your farm, and profit from selling it is your income. You can't work the fields or go to market when you're bedridden with tuberculosis. Food didn't magically appear on people's plates ojt of thin air before capitalism.
Also, why are we pretending that precolonial society was exclusively barter driven and agricultural? Tradespeople go back to the dawn of time.
The first chart in Gates's tweet (which is what the article is all about) is based on the idea that all incomes are converted into money for comparison reasons, otherwise I have no idea how they managed to compare incomes going back 200 years from different types of societies. How do you assign income for shared grazing grounds? Or for shared forests? Or for rotating ownership of the agricultural fields? (btw, rotating ownership is an idea very alien to capitalism, if you propose it today you'll be treated as a communist). You basically can't do all that, because these things don't have a very easily computable money equivalent.
And, as such, comparing the rate of poverty in a capitalist society to the rate of poverty from a pre-capitalist society is bogus. Again, this is what the article is all about.
> you're bedridden with tuberculosis.
No, you can't, but your wife/uncle/cousin/aunt can until you get better. While living in a capitalist society mostly means an atomic family unit where, if you happen to be bed-ridden, you're basically on your own. Again, charts like the ones tweeted by Gates don't assign any monetary value to this type of close human relations, even though those close human relations greatly improve our well-being. Afaik nobody has assigned yet any money value to the ease of mind provided by thoughts like "hey, I'm not alone in this world, I'm not on my own".
> If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any income.
It's easier for me to imagine sick person doing some work for himself or his family than sick person doing many kinds of work for others in monetary economy. If you have society with little use of money, I think relationship between health and poverty is different than in modern capitalism.
> What makes you think that day laboring in a field is any easier to do while sick than driving or serving or knowledge work?
The fact that doing work for yourself allows you to structure it to your needs. You may till the garden early in the morning or late at night, when you feel like it, you can make decision on the spot and you don't need to coordinate with others. Or you can switch to home-centered work which you postponed before.
