| The idea that Capitalism has raised billions out of poverty is simply not grounded in reality. What the world bank has done with their statistics should send up red flags for someone whos taken Stats 101. I mean first off, the idea that 1$ / day is the poverty line and being slightly above that is absurd. But what's worse in 2000 the world bank reported that the number Rose from 1.2 billion people who made less than 1$/day in 1987 to 1.5 billion in 2000. That obviously doesn't fit the narrative. So they changed the poverty line from 1.02 / day in 1985 to 1.08 in 1993. The number again changed to $1.25 in 2008. Overnight 316 million people were raised out of poverty. Of course anyone who experienced life in the 90's can see the glaring problem with this. $1.08 in 1993 has the same purchasing power as $1.61 in 2008. Those hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty? They are all still there. The rate of inflation is greater than the rise of the ipl. They did glaringly bad math tricks to make it appear as if half a billion people were lifted out of poverty by neoliberalism and Capitalism. And yet that couldn't be further from the truth. Now that doesn't even take into account the situation in "wealthier" countries, such as Sri Lanka. A survey of Sri Lanka found that 35% of the country fell underneath their poverty line. However the world bank using the international poverty line reported only 4% were lifted out of poverty that year!. A wave of the hand and suddenly 31% of the population didn't factor in to their feel good story of capitalistic success. And again I want to point out these absurd arbitrary numbers. $1.25 a day? Are you kidding me? Have you ever lived on $1.25 a day? The UN reports that the average person in 2005 needed at least $4.50/day just to meet the minimum nutritional requirements. The minimum. In India, one of the harleded successes of the world bank, children living just above the ipl had a 60% chance of being malnourished. New Castle University once calculated that if people we're to achieve a normal life expectancy they would need at least $2.50 / day as the new IPL. But if we adopted that as the new IPL it would mean that now 3.1 billion people are living in abject poverty. I got these numbers from this video https://youtu.be/A6VqV1T4uYs but in the description they list out all of their sources. When you stop making up numbers to hide actual real poverty, the picture becomes clear. Rather than lifting people out of poverty, neoliberal capitalist policies are responsible for plunging half a billion more people into poverty today than in 1980. |