jason hickel
2019 A letter to Steven Pinker (and Bill Gates, for that matter) about global poverty
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty
simply pointed out that we cannot ignore the fact that the period 1820 to circa 1950 was one of violent dispossession across much of the global South. If you have read colonial history, you will know colonizers had immense difficulty getting people to work on their mines and plantations. As it turns out, people tended to prefer their subsistence lifestyles, and wages were not high enough to induce them to leave. Colonizers had to coerce people into the labour market: imposing taxes, enclosing commons and constraining access to food, or just outright forcing people off their land.
...
The narrative that you and Gates peddle relies on a poverty line of $1.90 per day. You are aware, I’m sure, that this line is arbitrary. Remarkably, it has no empirical grounding in terms of how much money is necessary to satisfy actual human needs. Indeed, the empirical evidence we do have demonstrates that $1.90 is far too low to be meaningful, for reasons I have outlined in my work (see here and here). See Reddy and Lahoti’s critique of the $1.90 methodology here.
Here are a few points to keep in mind. 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. 1.5 billion are food insecure, and do not have enough calories to sustain “normal” human activity. And 2.1 billion suffer from malnutrition. How can there be fewer poor people than hungry and malnourished people? If $1.90 is inadequate to achieve basic nutrition and sustain normal human activity, then it’s too low – period. It’s time for you and Gates to stop using it. Lifting people above this line doesn’t mean lifting them out of poverty, “extreme” or otherwise.
Remember: $1.90 is the equivalent of what that amount of money could buy in the US in 2011. The economist David Woodward once calculated that to live at this level (in an earlier base year) would be like 35 people trying to survive in Britain “on a single minimum wage, with no benefits of any kind, no gifts, borrowing, scavenging, begging or savings to draw on (since these are all included as ‘income’ in poverty calculations).” That goes beyond any definition of “extreme”. It is absurd. It is an insult to humanity.
In fact, even the World Bank has repeatedly stated that the line is too low to be used in any but the poorest countries, and should not be used to inform policy. In response to the Atkinson Report on Global Poverty, they created updated poverty lines for lower middle income ($3.20/day) and upper middle income ($5.50/day) countries. At those lines, some 2.4 billion people are in poverty today – more than three times higher than you would have people believe.
But even these metrics are not good enough. The USDA states that about $6.7/day is necessary for achieving basic nutrition. Peter Edwards argues that people need about $7.40 if they are to achieve normal human life expectancy. The New Economics Foundation concludes that around $8 is necessary to reduce infant mortality by a meaningful margin. Lant Pritchett and Charles Kenny have argued that since the poverty line is based on purchasing power in the US, then it should be linked to the US poverty line – so around $15/day.
It's not thanks to capitalism that we’re living longer, but progressive politics
https://www.theguardian.com/...19/nov/22/progressive-politics-capitalism-unions-healthcare-education
Progress and its discontents
https://newint.org/features/2019/07/01/long-read-progress-and-its-discontents
The world has never been better. From global poverty to inequality between nations, all the indicators are showing progress. This is a comforting narrative – popularized by the likes of Bill Gates and Steven Pinker. But is it true? Jason Hickel examines the rise of this so-called ‘New Optimism’.
The racist double standards of international development
https://www.aljazeera.com/...ons/2020/7/13/the-racist-double-standards-of-international-development/
The claim that we are making ‘wonderful progress’ against global poverty is a fallacy based on a colonial mindset.
In fact, trade data shows that high-income nations are totally reliant on resources and labour from the South. In 2015, high-income nations appropriated a net total of 10.1 billion tonnes of materials, and 379 billion hours of human labour from the rest of the world. There is an enormous net flow of resources and embodied labour from poor countries to rich countries.
One cannot have it both ways. You cannot have a single global economy when it suits you to use the labour and resources of the poor, but then insist on separation in order to measure their lives by different standards. That is the logic of apartheid.
Global capitalism depends on resources and labour extracted from the South, and yet the people who render it – including those who work in the factories, mines and plantations of multinational companies – receive but pennies in return. Pinker and Gates tell us to celebrate when workers in the South go from one to two dollars a day. But would we celebrate if we learned that workers in the North were earning two dollars a day, while employed by the biggest brands in the world? No. We would be outraged. Because for workers in the North we apply the standards of morality and justice, yet for workers in the South we apply the standards of bare existence.
...
Finally, it's important to keep in mind what's happened this year, with an additional 400 to 500 million people pushed into poverty by the pandemic
Precarity and the pandemic - COVID-19 and poverty incidence, intensity, and severity in developing countries
https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/wp2020-77.pdf