Extreme poverty in particular is a far less objective or meaningful measurement than you would think given how often the “everything is fine” crowd likes to cite it. The daily income defined as “extreme poverty” is abysmally low; $2 USD per day wouldn’t be enough to get basic necessities for food and shelter, and while its terrifying to think about having to live on even less we shouldn’t congratulate ourselves when the bar is just barely above the lowest levels of hell. Different poverty lines show different trends and by standards that would allow a person to live decently rather than merely avoiding the absolute worst deprivations we actually see very little change. And that’s before getting into the way poverty is distributed globally and the ways that even with the lowest poverty lines we see a lot of the poorest of the poor who have seen far less of a shift.
Very good point, extreme poverty shows the biggest trend forward, while other thresholds do not show the same progress. That being said, poverty in general seems to be declining according to the graphs you’ve shown.
In no way does a mere positive trend imply “good job team, we fixed the world and we can quit now”. Poverty is still rampant, and we should do what we can to fix it, obviously.
Extreme poverty in particular is a far less objective or meaningful measurement than you would think given how often the “everything is fine” crowd likes to cite it. The daily income defined as “extreme poverty” is abysmally low; $2 USD per day wouldn’t be enough to get basic necessities for food and shelter, and while its terrifying to think about having to live on even less we shouldn’t congratulate ourselves when the bar is just barely above the lowest levels of hell. Different poverty lines show different trends and by standards that would allow a person to live decently rather than merely avoiding the absolute worst deprivations we actually see very little change. And that’s before getting into the way poverty is distributed globally and the ways that even with the lowest poverty lines we see a lot of the poorest of the poor who have seen far less of a shift.
Very good point, extreme poverty shows the biggest trend forward, while other thresholds do not show the same progress. That being said, poverty in general seems to be declining according to the graphs you’ve shown.
In no way does a mere positive trend imply “good job team, we fixed the world and we can quit now”. Poverty is still rampant, and we should do what we can to fix it, obviously.