Dear Steven,

I’m writing to respond to a letter you posted regarding claims I made in the Guardian about the global poverty narrative. I’m addressing you directly because I think it’s preferable to engaging in back-channel debates, and because I’d like to invite you to respond to what follows. This is an important question that demands serious, honest engagement.

The point of my piece was that the story of global poverty is more complex than you and Gates have been willing to acknowledge, and the data do not support your narrative about neoliberal globalization. Let me elaborate on my key points here, to clear up any confusion, while also addressing your specific comments.

First, the long-term poverty graph (1820-present) developed by Max Roser and recently tweeted by Bill Gates is misleading and has little empirical legitimacy. There are a few reasons for this.

Real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981, by the World Bank. It is widely accepted among those who research global poverty that any data prior to 1981 is simply too sketchy to be useful, and going back to as early as 1820 is more or less meaningless.

The data for 1820-1970 comes from a source (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002) that draws on the Maddison database on world GDP. That data was never intended to assess poverty, but rather the distribution of GDP – and that for only a limited range of countries. Data for the global South is particularly thin, and there is very little that exists for prior to 1900. The data is not robust enough to draw meaningful conclusions about what was happening to people’s livelihoods during the colonial period.

It is important to recognise that the graph mixes two very different measures. The measure for 1820-1970 is based on estimates of GDP per capita, with only rough guesses about household share, and takes little if any account of the goods and resources that people may have acquired from their land, from trees, from forests, from rivers and the sea, and in the form of gifts from relatives. We might try to speculate about the share of GDP that the poorest people had, but that’s very different from telling us anything very useful about poverty. By contrast, the World Bank’s measure for 1981ff is based on surveys that seek to assess household income and, wherever possible, consumption of all non-monetary goods.

These two disparate measures cannot be united into a single long-term trend, and cannot be used to draw confident conclusions. Roser’s graph might make for nice social media, but it’s not rooted in science.

In fact, uniting the two methodologies is misleading in both directions. (1) By using GDP per capita from 1820-1970 it likely understates the resources that households had at their disposal in comparison to the representation of the later period, and (2) By including total consumption from 1981ff it likely overstates people’s “income” in comparison to the representation of the earlier period.

The only way to construct a legitimate long-term graph would be to use a single consistent indicator. While data on GDP per capita alone is not regarded as a robust way of assessing poverty, it is at least available (if too patchy to be useful) for the whole period. But in such a graph the falloff in poverty since 1981 would not be nearly as steep, as it would not count non-monetary transactions. Alternatively, we could wait until someone devises a reasonable method for measuring poverty in terms of household consumption since 1820. But in the meantime, I think it’s wise to refrain from making claims about long-term poverty trends that lack empirical validity.

You say: “Hickel’s picture of the past is a romantic fairy tale, devoid of citations or evidence.” On the contrary, as the above makes clear, it is the graph of the past on which you so glibly rely that is devoid of meaningful evidence.

As to my actual claims about the past, my argument was straightforward. I 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 any 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.

You ask for citations. Here are some you might try: Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, Ellen Wood’s The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View, Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, and of course Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.

The process of forcibly integrating colonized peoples into the capitalist labour system caused widespread dislocation (a history I cover in The Divide). Remember, this is the period of the Belgian labour system in the Congo, which so upended local economies that 10 million people died – half the population. This is the period of the Natives Land Act in South Africa, which dispossessed the country’s black population of 90% of the country. This is the period of the famines in India, where 30 million died needlessly as a result of policies the British imposed on Indian agriculture. This is the period of the Opium Wars in China and the unequal treaties that immiserated the population. And don’t forget: all of this was conducted in the name of the “free market”.

All of this violence, and much more, gets elided in your narrative and repackaged as a happy story of progress. And you say I’m the one possessed of romantic fairy tales.

The Maddison database on which you rely might tell us what the dispossessed gained in GDP per capita (eventually), but it does not tell us whether those gains offset their loss of lands, commons, supportive communities, stable local economies. And it tells us nothing about what global South economies might be like today had they been free to industrialize on their own terms (take the case of India, for instance).

Let me be clear: this is not a critique of industrialization as such. It is a critique of how industrialization was carried out during the period in question. If people had willingly opted into the capitalist labour system, while retaining rights to their commons and while gaining a fair share of the yields they produced, we would have a very different story on our hands. So let’s celebrate what industrialization has achieved – absolutely – but place it in proper context: colonization, violence, dispossession and all. All we gain from ignoring this history is ignorance.

Now, to the present period.

You say that the “massive fall of global extreme poverty” is simply a neutral fact of the data. But here again the data on this is more complex than you have ever acknowledged (I collaborated with Charles Kenny to review the basics here).

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 many times (see here and here). See Reddy and Lahoti’s withering 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 patently 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 figures 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.

The literature on this issue is now vast and nuanced – I have only scratched the surface here – and yet you pretend it doesn’t even exist. That is intellectually irresponsible, and an inadequate approach to scholarship.

You say: “The level at which one sets an arbitrary cutoff like ‘the poverty line’ is irrelevant — the entire distribution has shifted, so the trend is the same wherever you set it.”

Not so fast. In fact, the story changes quite a bit - and you know it. If we use $7.40 per day, we see a decline in the proportion of people living in poverty, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as your rosy narrative would have it. In 1981 a staggering 71% lived in poverty. Today it hovers at 58% (for 2013, the most recent data). Suddenly your grand story of progress seems tepid, mediocre, and – in a world that’s as fabulously rich as ours – completely obscene. There is nothing worth celebrating about a world where inequality is so extreme that 58% of people are in poverty, while a few dozen billionaires have more than all of their wealth combined.

That’s proportions. Don’t get me wrong: proportions are an important indicator – and we should pay attention to it. But absolute numbers are equally important. In fact, that is the metric that the world’s governments first agreed to target in the Rome Declaration in 1996, the precursor to the Millennial Development Goals. The goalposts were shifted to proportions in the following years, which created the impression of faster progress. But really now it’s a moot point: if the goal is to end poverty, what matters is absolute numbers. Certainly that’s what matters from the perspective of poor people themselves.

And if we look at absolute numbers, the trend changes completely. The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981, from 3.2 billion to 4.2 billion, according to World Bank data. Six times higher than you would have people believe. That’s not progress in my book – that’s a disgrace. It is a crushing indictment of our global economic system, which is clearly failing the majority of humanity. Your claims about global poverty intentionally skate around this fact. Again, that is not responsible scholarship.