It's called absolute poverty for a reason. Just because you're above the absolute poverty threshold doesn't mean you're not poor anymore. It just means that you can minimally survive. Whether you're poor or not depends on the society around you, because poverty determines how well you can participate in society.
He even cites this data:
>Using the $1.90 line shows that only 700 million people live in poverty. But note that the UN’s FAO says that 815 million people do not have enough calories to sustain even “minimal” human activity.
I went to check the numbers and I'm not quite sure where he took the numbers from. They're not really wrong, but I didn't find either number in the reports. The numbers I found in the report are closer together.
According to the FAO 2018 report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition [1] the number of undernourished people is projected to be 820.8 million in 2017. In 2016 it was estimated to be 804.2 million. In 2015 it was estimated to be 784.4 million.
The World Bank's Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018 report [2] gives a figure for the number of people living in extreme poverty at 736 million, but the latest figure is from 2015.
The 784.4 million and 736 million figures are remarkably close for such fuzzy data.
>- Most economic successes have not been due to neoliberal markets but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation.
Yeah, it was just a coincidence that when China stated opening up their markets that their quality of life improved immensely and hundreds of millions are lifted out of extreme poverty. When you're talking about economic success in general then you can't forget the ex-Soviet states either. The ones that embraced free markets the most recovered the most.
>- Most quality of life improvements have not been due to neoliberal globalization but simple public interventions including free healthcare and education.
All of which requires enough economic success to support such policies and societies.
>- Progress is slowing relative to the resources available to tackle the problem.
Because the percentage of the population in extreme poverty is shrinking.
[1] http://www.fao.org/state-of-food-security-nutrition/en/
[2] http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/poverty-and-shared-p...