A overused rhetoric that does not hold much ground when you realize that poverty is decreasing fast everywhere around, and faster than we expected it to.
https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-...
We consider that a villager living from subsistence farming and therefore having almost no use for money to be part of the very poor, less than 1$/day crowd.
Take this same peasant and send it working for some multinational company harvesting cocoa or sugar cane, under horrible, exploitative conditions for 2$ a day, and bam! poverty has been halved!
Ditto if you send him and his family in some shanty town collecting plastic on a rubbish pile, feeding on refuse : he's now making 3$ a day, poverty decreased again!
What is called "lifting out of poverty" is actually "making them a cog of a worldwide, money-based economy". That's a mixed blessing, to say the least.
They weren't actually subsistence farmers, but they did live without money before this was done to them. They were incredibly bitter.
And people forced to become cogs don't automatically gain meaningful access to things like healthcare and education, plus the education of the city people can involve horrible prejudice that is actively harmful to them for various reasons.
Half of the worlds population lives in poverty, and ~650m live in extreme poverty [1][2].
[1] https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-global-p...
Meanwhile in most developed countries, inequality is grotesque and the consequent poverty is on the rise.
*Absolute poverty would decrease much faster if we exploited and expropriated from developing countries a little less.
If I live aboard a ship, I am not in poverty because I do not own a car, because in my society, you do not need a car. But if I live in a city with no public transport where you need a car to get around, but I can't afford one, I absolutely am.
Poverty apologists always bring up TV as an example, as if poverty is about optional extras rather than basic dignity, respect and participation.
It's about feeling inferior, it's about being treated inferior, often violently so.
For instance, what happens when you try and retrieve groceries from a supermarket when you cannot afford to pay for them.
There's a running joke in my country that US poverty is our middle class - only two cars and a small house.
It is still plenty good enough but employee want to be paid in the currency their employers uses.
If you trust your employer to do things for the greater good, you can accept less money, or even no money at all like with the charities. If your employer is simply pursuing the highest profit, employee want the biggest amount of money.
Banking never could claim a "Moral High Ground", so they compensated with cold hard cash. SV is loosing its and needs to align its salaries accordingly.
But what about climat change? We've improved so much across so many areas, surely that'll offset a few more degrees across the globe? It's just one metric among so many where we're doing great.
What if it doesn't? How will we cope in 50 years with hundreds of millions of landless refugees? Right now we can't. Are we doing so great that in 50 years we will?
* Literally every piece of lab equipment that uses any kind of controller/control board (most of them)... has needed programming of one sort of another. Hmmm, with the exception of older analog gear maybe (decades ago?).
* Every single piece of data collection, storage, analysis, and control software is created through programming.
* Even communication of results among team members, to management, to the public, often requires programming.