In short, the claim that poverty is getting worse is utter bullshit. It requires either climate-change-denialist levels of willful ignorance, or a xenophobic definition of "poverty" that only counts people living in your own much-richer-than-global-average country.
In which case you are no longer measuring poverty. You are measuring inequality.
If you define poverty as never knowing if you will have enough for the next meal then the $2 cutoff is again probably fairly irrelevant.
However, according to your own analysis of the poster's source, the absolute number of people in poverty has increased a lot.
>In short, the claim that poverty is getting worse is utter bullshit.
371 million more people in poverty is not "getting worse"?
You're implying that your baseline scenario is a constant absolute number of poor people in the world.
But that scenario is not really constant. If things are getting neither better nor worse, the children of the poor are as poor as their parents, and the absolute number of poor people keeps climbing.
If nothing got better, the number of additional poor people would have been at least 611 million, and that is an under-estimate because poorer people have higher fertility rates.
So yes, "only" 371 million more people in poverty necessarily means things are getting better, when sheer demographics without economic growth would have pushed the number 2x higher.
If i remember correctly, a 1981 $1 is now worth $2.50 if you factor in inflation so the fact they've chose to lower the bar at $1.90 reeks of politics.
One example is that the US Census Bureau's reporting of poverty statistics based on income has changed to NOT include the income of many benefits including food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit. If you include these benefits prior to counting the poor, the poverty rate falls to nearly zero.
This is why the director of the Census Bureau's report now answers to the White House instead of the Director of Commerce. Bending the numbers is essential to maintaining and expanding institutions.
The switch was made when Obama nominated Rebuplican senator Judd Gregg as Commerce Secretary. Given that Gregg had previously voted to abolish the Commerce department, it is likely that his influence would have brought the numbers in line with the facts. But, had Gregg accepted the nomination, it would have opened up a senate seat that would have been filled by the Democratric governor of his state. So to have his cake and eat it too, Obama took control of the number reporting. Gregg did not accept the nomination.
Talk about accounting tricks.
Another example is the disparity between counting income vs. consumption. Again in the US, when the money spent by poorer classes that are studied is counted it is far greater than what is calculated as their income (which is what policy is based on) This indicates that in-kind gifts and other non-reported income is substantial, but not counted.
The lowest version you can get from that table is 11.8% - if you remove medical out of pocket expenses from the income subtractions before calculating the rate (in other words: if you assume people are perfectly healthy, directly contradicted by evidence, you get a more favourable number of how many people can afford to put food on the table).
I'm curious what elements you'd add/remove to the SPM to get to "nearly zero".
[1] http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication...
In fact, it specifically says that the definition has not changed.
It does claim as you do that the rate should be near zero, but it does not address the Supplemental Poverty Measure, that does provide a number of scenarios accounting for benefits in kind, and does not end up with numbers near zero when that is taken into account.
The 33rd percentile of expenditures on food, clothing, shelter, and utilities (FCSU) of consumer units with exactly two children multiplied by 1.2
http://www.census.gov/hhes/povmeas/methodology/supplemental/...
So if you were to reduce the income of everyone from the 34th percentile downward to exactly $1.24/day you'd actually reduce supplemental poverty.
A good example is in medications. Lots of people go off medication because they feel better. But they feel better because of the medication. So they no longer feel better after they go off it.
Similarly, if all poverty reports in the US included benefits, many conservatives would say: see, we have no more poverty. We can get rid of these programs. But these programs were why we had no-one under the poverty line. We now have poverty again.
But I don't think the census should be a political tool. If a person did not, in fact, spend a decade living in poverty thanks to the resources she had (either earned or given to her), why should the census report show that she lived in poverty?
In the end a lot of 'government assistance' really lines other peoples pockets and only indirectly assists the poor.
But you are right. Poverty is an accounting trick for everyone depending on how it suites those who are calculating it. In reality it is a hard thing to measure. But even the back of the envelope calculations would show that Poverty is substantially lower in India, China and many other countries which are known to be very poor.
I.e. if a worker gets $5 in salary and $5 in welfare subsidies, it is somewhat dishonest to argue that because his income is only $5, the welfare subsidies are insufficient.
It's the net income after taxes and transfers that should be looked at when considering poverty, not pre-tax pre-transfer income (which quite astonishingly seems to be used fairly often).
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-gr...
I don't understand this, and they don't explain. What is PPP, if not "real terms"? Plus I hate it when somebody makes a claim like this without actually showing the numbers, or creating a graph - it makes the claim less plausible than what they are complaining about.
Otherwise the article has valid points, mostly about watering down goals, and the lack of real progress in poverty reduction.
Note also that the OP is about the poverty rate, not about poverty being in decline, which is in fact increasing all too quickly.
Clicking the first two inflation calculators I found on Google and assuming their numbers are right (they both gave the same result), it does seem that if they had inflation adjusted the number using US rates, the original USD 1.02 should have been USD 1.37 by 1993.
EDIT: It's of course important to keep in mind that inflation rates are different across the world, and presumably the world bank at least will insist that they accounted for real term price changes for the relevant goods, so I still don't know how relevant this point in the article actually is.
So just a bit playing with the data seems to imply that the claim of a strong reduction in global extreme poverty seems to be warranted. (This is certainly not a sciency study...)
Why not use some stuff like infant mortality or literacy or deaths from starvation or deaths from communicable disease? You know, stuff that actually indicates whether someone is impoverished or not.
No, because the poverty lines are all expressed in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Why not use some stuff like infant mortality or literacy or deaths from starvation or deaths from communicable disease? You know, stuff that actually indicates whether someone is impoverished or not.
Those measures are all improving dramatically too.
The numbers then does show increasing absolute numbers of poor until 1999, and then a decline getting to slightly below 1981 levels in 2011. As percentage of the worlds population it looks a bit better.
[1] This version uses 205 PPP: http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNetPPP2005/index.htm?0
So I'm not sure how this constitutes a "trick". You'd have to move those people directly out of extreme poverty over the $5.00 a day in your article in order to drop the number of people in poverty.
It's still frankly an improvement to move such a large number of people up the poverty scale. I'm sure i'd rather be living on $4 a day rather than $2.
There is no possible way I could think of how poverty could have increased. If we just look at China an India which is home to 33% of world population extreme poverty is down by 50% in whatever way you measure it.