No, the World Isn’t Getting Better for Everyone

We read, often, today, about how wonderful the world is. It’s the best time to be alive, and it’s just getting better!

The usual way this is “proven” is by saying that dire poverty is decreasing in the world. There’s a lot of problems with that, and the biggest one is that the definition of extreme poverty is too low.

According to Peter Edwards of Newcastle University, if people are to achieve normal life expectancy, they need roughly double the current IPL, or a minimum of $2.50 per day. But adopting this higher standard would seriously undermine the poverty reduction narrative. An IPL of $2.50 shows a poverty headcount of around 3.1 billion, almost triple what the World Bank and the Millennium Campaign would have us believe. It also shows that poverty is getting worse, not better, with nearly 353 million more people impoverished today than in 1981. With China taken out of the equation, that number shoots up to 852 million.

I’ve felt for a long time that his narrative was, to put it gently, bullshit. The full article is worth reading, because it goes into the way tiny statistical changes move the number in poverty by hundreds of millions of people. But the bottom line is that earning $1.25 a day isn’t enough, and anyone with common sense knows it isn’t enough.

Meanwhile, in India, we know that over the last 20 years, despite increased is GDP per capita, the average amount of calories being eaten is going down. And it’s not as if Indians, as a group, were overfed 20 years ago.

The truth is that neoliberal policies have been very bad for the developing world. Actual poverty decreased faster from 1945 to the mid 70s than it has since, and, although it’s not as important, GDP rose faster too.

The exception, of course, is China. But China did not implement the policies that the IMF and World Bank force on countries: The “Washington Consensus.” They did not open their markets wide, unpeg their currency, and move to cash crops and commodities. Instead, they, like all but maybe three countries larger than city states who have ever industrialized, pursued mercantile policies, managed trade, and moved steadily up the value chain.

This is the model Britain used. It is the model the US used. It is the model Japan used. It is the model South Korea used. Etc…nations only become free traders when they are mature industrially. And in most cases, when they do so, it is a mistake, though this goes profoundly against the current consensus ideology, which claims that free trade and monetary flows are virtually always a good thing.

Even before climate change, the world was getting worse for a lot of people. Not just for people in the developed world (though there is no question that Millennials in most first world countries are worse off than GenXers, who are worse off than Boomers were), but for people in most of the developed world.

You cannot wash the sins of the neoliberal consensus by adding in China’s numbers, when China didn’t follow it. And statistical games over a few cents are pathetic.

Things are bad now. They are going to get worse for more people than they get better, until we significantly change how we run our economies, and given the realities of climate change, maybe not even then.

Getting punch drunk on oil and coal for two centuries is all very nice. But all parties come to an end, and for a lot of people, this party included getting trashed by what amounted to home invaders.

It’d be nice if we figured this stuff out, and if we stopped lying to ourselves.

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