Global poverty rates were cut in half over 20 years due to globalization, but yeah, just because westerners lost all of the low skill manufacturing jobs, it all sucks. You realize the US is still one of the biggest manufacturers on the planet but it's for higher end complex products? Not saying there aren't problems in the west, but globalization helped billions of people.

[–] BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tf 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The UN disagrees. When using their model for extreme poverty, which is ~$8/day compared to the oft-cited $1.90/day, the number of people in poverty has increased over the last 4 decades to 4.2 billion. You might say, “I’m referring to the proportion of people in poverty”, which, even under this model has fallen from almost 75% to around 55%.

If so, You’d be right. Where exactly have those gains been centered, though? When excluding China, the number of people in poverty has increased, and the proportion fell less than 5% between 1982 and 2018, from 62.7% to 57.3% of the population. There’s been dozens of countries collectively representing billions of humans effected by globalization, but yet most still are in miserable poverty. It seems that it is not globalization alone that brings people out of poverty. I am not saying it has no effect, but that it is not so simple as to say that global reductions in poverty can be attributed to cavalierly to globalization.

[–] Stovetop@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When using their model for extreme poverty, which is ~$8/day compared to the oft-cited $1.90/day

Doesn't this depend entirely upon the buying power in certain countries? The value of $8 is going to have a lot of variation between India, Indonesia, China, Costa Rica, etc.

[–] BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tf 3 points 1 year ago

That number accounts for such discrepancies, and while there may be some wiggle room, nowhere on the planet can one sustain a healthy diet that ensures a normal life expectancy on the frequently cited $1.90/day.

[–] charliespider@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had the number of years wrong as I was relying on my terrible memory instead of looking it up before posting, that said, not sure where you are getting your numbers from since you didn't post any links.

According to the World Bank global poverty was cut in half in 30 years, not 20 as I posted:

For 30 years, global extreme poverty had been steadily declining, and by 2015, the global extreme-poverty rate had been cut by more than half.

That's from this link: https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty

While pre-pandemic global poverty rates had been cut by more than half since 2000,

That's the first sentence from this article by the UN (the people you claim say poverty is increasing)

Politifact says that the claim:

"Over the last 30 years, extreme poverty has been cut in half."

Is mostly true at this link: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/mar/23/gayle-smith/did-we-really-reduce-extreme-poverty-half-30-years/

If you look at the second graph on the wikipedia page on Extreme Poverty here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty it looks like the total number of people in poverty was around 1.6 billion around the year 2000, but by 2015 it appears to have dropped below 800 million.

So yeah, it's obvious that there's a lot of variations in the numbers but still looks like my initial claim was not completely without merit.

[–] BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tf 2 points 1 year ago

Again, the WorldBank uses a $1.90/day threshold for extreme poverty, a rate at which no one in any country can sustain basic human nutrition and ensure a standard life expectancy. The UN uses the ~$8/day as a standard by which the aforementioned can be accomplished, and by that measure, the vast majority of poverty reductions in the last 40 years have been in China, and not just any globalized nation. China has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, the rest of the world has done remarkably little in comparison.

[–] Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The trick is that they constantly just redefine what poverty is to make the math look good. What used to be "I'm having a bit of trouble living" quickly turned into "I'm genuinely starving to death because I can't even buy a loaf of bread" EDIT: and as that other commenter pointed out, they do pretty much every mathematical fudge they can to hide the fact their economic model is literally murdering people for profit.