this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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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.
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.
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.
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:
That's from this link: https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty
That's the first sentence from this article by the UN (the people you claim say poverty is increasing)
Politifact says that the claim:
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.
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.