Originally Posted by
The "Reason" article linked above
Some gloomsters perversely refuse to acknowledge when a glass is even half empty, especially when doing so cuts against their ideological sensitivities. One ploy is to pour the data into a bigger glass and hope that no one notices. London School of Economics anthropologist Jason Hickel has given us a near-perfect example of this sort of sleight-of-hand in Guardian column headlined "Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn't be more wrong."
At this month's meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davis, Gates cited data that show the proportion of people living in extreme poverty declining from 94 percent in 1820 to only 10 percent today. "The claim is simple and compelling," asserts Hickel. "And it's completely wrong."
Actually, it's Hickel who gets it entirely wrong.
Gates' alleged offense is to have shown a slide devised by the folks at the invaluable Our World in Data project. As you can see, it tracks six positive economic and social trends over the past 200 years:
World100Trends
Our World in Data
Hickel mischaracterizes that first chart as a count of "people living in poverty." Then he complains that the cutoff—an income equivalent to $1.90 per person per day—is "obscenely low." But absolutely nobody is claiming that living on $1.90 a day is a picnic. The condition being measured here isn't poverty but extreme poverty, as defined by the World Bank. And that has indeed been declining steeply over the past four decades.
Hickel claims that there are a number of problems with Gates' graph. "First of all, real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981," he argues. "Anything before that is extremely sketchy, and to go back as far as 1820 is meaningless." As we'll see, that's also wrong, but for now let's follow Hickel's lead and look at that more recent period.
So what do the "real data" on poverty tell us? Starting with that $1.90-per-day measurement, the level of extreme poverty fell from 42.2 percent of the world's population in 1981 to 8.6 percent in 2018. In 1981, 1.9 billion people lived on less than $1.90 per day; in 2018, the number was around 660 million.
Don't like that metric? The World Bank has adopted two additional poverty threshold measures at $3.20 and $5.50 per day per person. They too are falling:
WorldBankPovertyTrends
World Bank
But Hickel doesn't bother to tell his readers what the global income data say about those trends. Instead he insists on his own threshold of $7.40 per person per day. "We see that the number of people living under this line has increased dramatically since measurements began in 1981, reaching some 4.2 billion people today," he observes.
Charitably interpreted, Hickel has succumbed to judgment creep. The Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues have argued, in a 2018 study published in Science, we are misled about the state of the world because we have a tendency to continually raise our threshold for success as we make progress. "Solving problems causes us to expand our definitions of them," they explain. "When problems become rare, we count more things as problems. Our studies suggest that when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it, and this can cause us to mistakenly conclude that it hasn't actually gotten better at all. Progress, it seems, tends to mask itself."
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