Today I am cheating. Not with data, mind you, but by essentially paraphrasing a review of data rather than doing my own analysis (not having that expert knowledge.) I chose that particular data set because it is a timely example of trying to sell politics on the basis of claims that turn out not to be true at closer inspection.

What is in front of us was put there by Bill Gates at last week’s Davos World Economic Forum, sent out to his 46 million followers and the rest of the world. The first of the 6 graphs shows that the proportion of people living in poverty has declined from 94% in 1820 to only 10% today. We should all cheer! Or should we?

What’s wrong with this picture? It turns out that scientifically reliable data collection on world-wide poverty numbers only goes as far back as 1981; anything before that is story telling. So to compare back to 1820 makes no sense.

Secondly, historically people had very little money because they lived in subsistence economies with access to an abundant commons: land, water, forests, livestock, and a robust system of sharing and barter. In that sense they were not poor, because they had what they needed – except money. Money was introduced by labor systems and colonization, work in factories, mines and plantations, so they had more than before, but by far not enough to survive, once their resources were taken from them. This might be a decline in poverty if you take money as the baseline (first they had none, then they had some,) but really the change in economic systems with the arrival of a labor market created a proletariat that struggled to survive.

Most importantly, the trend in the graph is based on a poverty line of $1.90 a day which is an absurdly low standard. Really, people need a minimum of about $7.40 per day to achieve basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy. And many scholars insist that the poverty line should be set even higher, at $10 to $15 per day. If we take $7.40 per days as our baseline, then the number of people who have fallen below that line since 1981 is enormous (4. 2 billion people today.) And what few gains were made can be located in China, so make the world average an even unhappier story than the folks in Davos want us to believe.

The number of people in poverty has gone up since 1981, in other words, and only 5% of all new income from global growth trickles down to the poorest 60%. You wouldn’t know that from the graph, would you? No coincidence, then, that that old adage attributed to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli about lies, damn lies and statistics comes to mind.

For the full argument, you can go here: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions authored by Jason Hickel. I got the short version here:https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3blN0FUrGJdnFnD9lmTnGscWL420tQth3vogVFAQg7fjKpqMNJN4hBoao

Photos today are of the excess of luxury consumption, likely what they’re wearing at the soirees in Davos after a day of cheering the disappearance of poverty…..

And here is your morning music: