Anthropologist Jason Hickel appears to be dedicated to destroying anthropologists' global reputation. You shouldn't let people put lies on top of your work as headlines—and if you do, you then have no standing to complain that others are in any sense telling the wrong truth. If someone "forces" a headline on you, it's still your headline—you endorse it, or you withdraw your article: Dylan Matthews: Bill Gates Tweeted Out a Chart and Sparked a Debate on Global Poverty: "Anthropologist Jason Hickel stood up to say: Not so fast. In a Guardian article titled 'Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong'.... But... everyone agrees that since 1981, the incomes of the world’s poorest people have gone up.... Hickel has disavowed his Guardian headline, saying it was forced upon him by editors. Everyone agrees incomes for the poor haven’t gone up enough, and that $1.90 per day is hardly enough for a human being to live a decent life.... Hickel argues that focusing on data showing declines in global poverty does political work on behalf of global capitalism, defending an inherently unjust global system.... [Max] Roser, as he stressed repeatedly in messages to me, just wants to be clear on what the facts say — and what they say definitively is that living conditions for the world order have improved for decades and decades. Based on my read of the evidence, that’s certainly true...
