[prepend]

> what about how many are in extreme poverty?

This is a simple and knowable answer. And it doesn’t change the facts the sound bite is based on. Extreme poverty is lower now as a percentage. There are fewer born into extreme poverty now, etc.

You can also pick other cutoffs and they are improving as well. Obviously the goal is to raise people higher than $3/day, but this is just an existing measure that’s getting better.

It’s frustrating to me when people nitpick unimportant details as if they were significant.

I don’t think anyone who established the extreme poverty cutoff thinks that it is the end goal, or that $3/day is as good as $30/day. So everyone agrees that 10x is better. But there are measures for extreme poverty because it’s a problem and needs to be addressed differently to get people from $.01/day to $3/day differently than interventions for $3 to $30 (and $30 to $100).

Pinker’s book, Angels of our Better Nature, goes into this quite a bit. And there’s a lot of global health primary sources to also help answer your questions.