It's afraid :sicko-yes:

    • Sephitard9001 [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      I remember reading a jacobin article debunking the World Bank's poverty bullshit even before that Gravel Institute video. This info has been available for a while and these dipshits still repeat the World Bank propaganda over and over to this day.

      edit: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/07/international-poverty-line-ipl-world-bank-philip-alston

      • PeterTheAverage [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty

        This Jason Hickel letter to Steven Pinker is also great.

    • ElGosso [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Jason Hinkel is a great source for these debunks, he was on a very good ep of Citations Needed slapping the shit out of Stephen Pinker's mouth

      • Student [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        His book the Divide Covers it in detail too. Basically, they keep moving the poverty threshold to paint the picture they want and most of the poverty alleviation has been in China who hasn't really liberalized its banking sector.

    • GnastyGnuts [he/him]
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      edit-2
      4 years ago

      Also the Alston poverty report from the UN is pretty good: https://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Alston-Poverty-Report-FINAL.pdf

      Article about it if you don't want to go through the whole thing: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/06/global-poverty-rampant-un-misleading/ EDIT: From the article about it:

      "For 10 years, economists, the United Nations, and world leaders have celebrated a reduction in global poverty, heralded as “one of the greatest human achievements of our time” by then-World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim in 2018.

      If only.

      Those claims of victory appear to be misleading, at best. A scathing new report published on Monday by Philip Alston in his parting shot as the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights paints a world where poverty is rampant—yet undercounted, due to the World Bank’s reliance on outdated metrics.

      The report comes at a critical juncture, as the coronavirus pandemic is set to push half a billion people into poverty and is expected to double the number of people facing acute hunger to 265 million.

      “Even before COVID-19, we squandered a decade in the fight against poverty, with misplaced triumphalism blocking the very reforms that could have prevented the worst impacts of the pandemic,” Alston said in a press release issued alongside the report.

      “When combined with the next generation of post-COVID-19 austerity policies, the dramatic transfer of economic and political power to the wealthy elites that has characterized the past forty years will accelerate, at which point the extent and depth of global poverty will be even more politically unsustainable and explosive,” the report says.

      Alston, who stepped down as special rapporteur in May, places much of the blame for misplaced global optimism on international institutions and economists’ over-reliance on the World Bank’s international poverty line of $1.90 per day as the definition of extreme poverty. In his six years as special rapporteur, Alston has produced a series of withering reports on global poverty—and the world’s richest countries, including the United States, were not spared his scrutiny.

      The number of people living below the $1.90 threshold is down from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 734 million in 2015, but even those who eke their way past the extreme poverty line may still struggle to secure basic necessities, such as food and housing.

      “The IPL [International Poverty Line] is explicitly designed to reflect a staggeringly low standard of living, well below any reasonable conception of a life with dignity,” says the report, which was presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council today by Alston’s successor, Olivier De Schutter.

      “It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this report. It’s a direct, high-profile challenge to the dominant narrative about global poverty that has for so long been promoted by the U.N., the World Bank, and international NGOs,” said Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist and senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London."