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This is an issue where there is widespread misunderstanding. Here is a great opinion piece about how the way news is reported contributes to this chronic misin

This is an issue where there is widespread misunderstanding. Here is a great opinion piece about how the way news is reported contributes to this chronic misinformation: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/opinion/nicholas-kristof-the-most-important-thing-and-its-almost-a-secret.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/opinion/nicholas-kristof-t... "One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years. Another 29 percent believed that the proportion had remained roughly the same. "That’s 95 percent of Americans — who are utterly wrong. In fact, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty hasn’t doubled or remained the same. It has fallen by more than half..."

jessaustin 11y ago
There might be people who think reducing extreme poverty is more important than telling the truth about it. That is certainly the case with several other issues...
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  Dishonest for a good cause, wonderful, they have now lost the high ground.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    I'm not sure that there is a "high ground" for complicated issues like this. Everyone comes to the issue with preexisting opinions and will use measurement methods that conform to those opinions. So it is in a sense a reasonable shortcut to just ignore distractions like "truth".
    - happyscrappy 11y ago
      This is the left's main problem, they need more and more people on government assistance or they lose power.
    - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
      Nah, systematic dishonesty is always detrimental in the long run. You should always make sure your lies are trivial.
    - 13thLetter 11y ago
      > I'm not sure that there is a "high ground" for complicated issues like this. Well... yes, there is? In a situation where the facts are reasonably clear, such as this one, the "high ground" would be the one that's most in alignment with those facts. Global poverty is both complicated, and isn't as bad as it used to be. There's no need to pick one or the other.
      - jessaustin 11y ago
        Other threads here are talking about "accounting tricks". Even if we could exclude that sort of thing, there are still questions of why press releases are issued, who issues them, when they are issued, etc. If politics are involved (and they are whenever taxes or donations come from one place and go to another) truth is a mirage. My response to this is not to lie myself, or to myself... too often. b^) My response is to assume that everything I hear from everyone is bullshit, unless the source has obvious interests in telling the truth, and until I can confirm the story through other means. What choice do I have? I'm from Missouri. Also it seems that many fans of "truth" have a hard time dealing with any truth that happens to be somewhat subtle.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      That's just giving oneself an excuse for lying. "It's ok if I lie, because everyone else does it, even unconsciously". Lying is one of the most insidious form of harm one can inflict on another human being - poisoning their ability to reason about the world. Lies add up, and also deal recursive damage - people spread them believing they've been told the truth, and spread inferences based on them. Lies should never be treated lightly and excused with trivialities.
      - collyw 11y ago
        As I get older I realise how much of the world runs on bullshit. Not outright lying, but getting close to that end of the scale. A baseball bat to the head is far more harmful than most lying.
        notdonspaulding 11y ago
        > A baseball bat to the head is far more harmful than most lying. Only in the short term. In the long term, lies undermine your confidence, destroy your relationships, ruin your reputation, and can make you completely cynical about the world around you. There's certainly a set of lies that each culture has deemed acceptable, but acceptable is not the same as harmless.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        A baseball bat to the head makes your head hurt for a while. Lying makes hundreds of thousands of people refuse to vaccinate, which puts millions in more danger of diseases. Lying makes people die from refusing cures that owrk and going for glorified sugar pills. And I mean lies from both sides - from those who will sell you the sugar pill and from those who represent the medical world and by lying and bullshitting made it hard to trust it. Lies are toxic and accumulates in society. In an increasingly complex world that depends on mutual trust between people and organizations, this is an existential threat. I think that what's most likely to end our civilization is not war or disease, but this bullshit 'the world runs on' spilling over and drowning us all.
        11y ago
    - danielweber 11y ago
      Once you start lying, you have no way of knowing if your goal is even worth pursuing. You are creating an institution which will have the primary goal of perpetuating itself. See also "The Iron Law Of Bureaucracy."
- jdietrich 11y ago
  It is far from clear that such a course of action is effective. Decision-making is rarely improved by inaccurate information. The belief that global poverty is worsening could easily lead to the conclusion that the problem is intractable, or that our efforts to reduce poverty are not in fact effective; conversely, the belief that poverty is being reduced can lead to the conclusion that what we are doing is effective, and we should do more of it.
  - Retra 11y ago
    Rational people can't improve decision-making ability by losing information, but irrational people can. For instance, I may be less likely to do the dishes if I'm keeping score and realize I do them much more than my roommate, but if I don't keep score, I might only consider whether or not they need to be done when making the decision. Of course, you can't really justify such a thing if you're trying to make a rational argument.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    It's quite possible for organizations to maintain two sets of "truth", one known to senior management and used for decision-making, and one known to the public and used for influence.
    - ptaipale 11y ago
      However, you cannot fool all the people all the time. At least I find the credibility of money-collecting NGOs and GONGOs so much reduced that I prefer to give my money to ones that speak the truth to me, not just the inner circle.
api 11y ago
That's because the experience for the American middle class has during this same period been wage stagnation coupled with inflation in food, energy, housing, medicine, and tuition. The American middle class finds it difficult to believe things are getting better around the world because for them it's been getting worse since about 1970.
- jahnu 11y ago
  > wage stagnation coupled with inflation in food, energy, housing, medicine, and tuition Is that wage stagnation not adjusted for inflation?
  - api 11y ago
    The numbers I've seen are adjusted for inflation and show that real wages have been largely stagnant since the early 70s. There have been periods of modest gain, usually when the economy is absolutely roaring like the late 90s, but the general trend has been flat to downward. The lower you are on the totem pole the worse it's been: the upper middle has seen some gain, the middle none, and the lower middle has lost ground. I'm also not sure that I fully believe the inflation numbers. It's not necessarily that I think they're fraudulent, but I don't think the methodology for calculating inflation has caught up with reality. The models I've seen assume inflation to be consistent across the economy, which may have been largely true in the 20th century but is true no longer. The problem is that inflation since the early 2000s has been extremely uneven. We've had massive deflation in some areas, like manufactured goods. But necessities -- especially real estate, health care, and college tuition -- have almost hyper-inflated. You can go without gadgets and toys but not without food and a place to live. We've had near-hyperinflation in necessities but it doesn't show in the stats because the stats average those numbers in with the deflationary numbers you get if you look at TV sets, appliances, and computers. Real estate is utterly insane. I cannot even comprehend how it can possibly be so high. How can you have a market for real estate at these prices? Who's buying it and what parallel universe of limitless wealth do they come from? I'm not talking about areas like the Bay Area, which has peculiar circumstances at work, or always-hot areas like Manhattan. There will always be "bubbles" of high prices vs. the rest of the market. If you look across the average of the market, real estate is crazy when compared to wages. I suppose it may be a function of historically cheap money causing larger home loans and jacking up prices, but it's essentially locked anyone out who isn't rich or willing to sign up for a crazy mortgage.
notahacker 11y ago
I'd say the 95% of Americans were utterly right if you define poverty as "a standard of living which anyone raised in America would consider to be extreme poverty", as opposed to "below the income threshold of the latest World Bank redefinition", in which a person earning 10 cents per hour needs only the energy to work 90 hours per week to bootstrap their way out of extreme poverty...
- vidarh 11y ago
  Notably, assuming the linked PDF report of the survey is correct, when asking the question they appear to not have given any supplemental information such as a definition of extreme poverty. Which means the only thing the survey is good for is measuring peoples perception of what will likely be a very nebulous concept for most of them (e.g. I have no idea how much essentials you could get for $1.9 a day if you were actually forced to be cautious)
- BookmarkSaver 11y ago
  No... The point of the survey is that 95% of Americans thought things were getting worse or staying the same. Regardless of what metric you are using, they are dead wrong. Things are getting much, much better. You are arguing about the specific definitions and qualifications of the terms. You are ignoring what the results of the survey are actually saying about the perception of Americans.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    I'll ask you this: how many of the ~1.5 billion additional people living in the world compared with 20 years ago wouldn't be considered to be living in "extreme poverty" by US standards? (I'll give you a hint: more than half the world's present population lives on less than $5 PPP per day, few of them by choice, and it's not the richer countries where the rapid population growth is happening) If you think people earning as little as the equivalent $5 of US-equivalent purchasing power per day are extremely poor[1], that's more[2] people in extreme poverty than there were in the 1990s, despite all the incremental improvements to poor people's average incomes across the developing world and stark improvements in a few rapidly-industrialising regions. Where you draw the line matters. And the survey, notably, didn't draw a line. I'm the last person to defend Americans' knowledge of world affairs, but their belief that poverty is actually getting worse in terms of absolute numbers of people subject to it is not unreasonable. [1]which isn't exactly an unreasonable point of view for anyone used to earning more than that per hour even whilst on minimum wage, even if there's a lot of people in developing countries on that level of PPP-adjusted income that think they're doing pretty well compared with their neighbours. [2]edit: having had a play with the World Bank's model, it suggests that you end up with more people in poverty in 2012 than the early nineties if you set your threshold for extreme poverty somewhere between $5 and $6 per day of US purchasing power. The number of people below that threshold in sub-Saharan Africa - where much of the poverty relief narrative has focused - has almost doubled.
datashovel 11y ago
I think another pertinent point would be that until currency existed poverty did not exist. Humans have managed to exist (and in many cases thrive) on this planet for at least hundreds of thousands of years, and by some accounts millions of years. Only the smallest fraction of that time has currency (and thus poverty) existed. Not that barter / exchange did not happen, but official fiat currency certainly didn't exist. And even if people possessed a commodity for trade, they didn't need to use it to survive. I don't have numbers on it, but would love to know if any studies have been done. My hunch is that, at the lowest levels of income across the planet, actually "needing money" to survive probably hurts their livelihood more than it helps.
- petervandijck 11y ago
  "until currency existed poverty did not exist" -> surely if your kids die of hunger, we can call that poverty?

jessaustin 11y ago

There might be people who think reducing extreme poverty is more important than telling the truth about it. That is certainly the case with several other issues...

happyscrappy 11y ago
Dishonest for a good cause, wonderful, they have now lost the high ground.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  I'm not sure that there is a "high ground" for complicated issues like this. Everyone comes to the issue with preexisting opinions and will use measurement methods that conform to those opinions. So it is in a sense a reasonable shortcut to just ignore distractions like "truth".
  - happyscrappy 11y ago
    This is the left's main problem, they need more and more people on government assistance or they lose power.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    Nah, systematic dishonesty is always detrimental in the long run. You should always make sure your lies are trivial.
  - 13thLetter 11y ago
    > I'm not sure that there is a "high ground" for complicated issues like this. Well... yes, there is? In a situation where the facts are reasonably clear, such as this one, the "high ground" would be the one that's most in alignment with those facts. Global poverty is both complicated, and isn't as bad as it used to be. There's no need to pick one or the other.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      Other threads here are talking about "accounting tricks". Even if we could exclude that sort of thing, there are still questions of why press releases are issued, who issues them, when they are issued, etc. If politics are involved (and they are whenever taxes or donations come from one place and go to another) truth is a mirage. My response to this is not to lie myself, or to myself... too often. b^) My response is to assume that everything I hear from everyone is bullshit, unless the source has obvious interests in telling the truth, and until I can confirm the story through other means. What choice do I have? I'm from Missouri. Also it seems that many fans of "truth" have a hard time dealing with any truth that happens to be somewhat subtle.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    That's just giving oneself an excuse for lying. "It's ok if I lie, because everyone else does it, even unconsciously". Lying is one of the most insidious form of harm one can inflict on another human being - poisoning their ability to reason about the world. Lies add up, and also deal recursive damage - people spread them believing they've been told the truth, and spread inferences based on them. Lies should never be treated lightly and excused with trivialities.
    - collyw 11y ago
      As I get older I realise how much of the world runs on bullshit. Not outright lying, but getting close to that end of the scale. A baseball bat to the head is far more harmful than most lying.
      - notdonspaulding 11y ago
        > A baseball bat to the head is far more harmful than most lying. Only in the short term. In the long term, lies undermine your confidence, destroy your relationships, ruin your reputation, and can make you completely cynical about the world around you. There's certainly a set of lies that each culture has deemed acceptable, but acceptable is not the same as harmless.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        A baseball bat to the head makes your head hurt for a while. Lying makes hundreds of thousands of people refuse to vaccinate, which puts millions in more danger of diseases. Lying makes people die from refusing cures that owrk and going for glorified sugar pills. And I mean lies from both sides - from those who will sell you the sugar pill and from those who represent the medical world and by lying and bullshitting made it hard to trust it. Lies are toxic and accumulates in society. In an increasingly complex world that depends on mutual trust between people and organizations, this is an existential threat. I think that what's most likely to end our civilization is not war or disease, but this bullshit 'the world runs on' spilling over and drowning us all.
        11y ago
  - danielweber 11y ago
    Once you start lying, you have no way of knowing if your goal is even worth pursuing. You are creating an institution which will have the primary goal of perpetuating itself. See also "The Iron Law Of Bureaucracy."
jdietrich 11y ago
It is far from clear that such a course of action is effective. Decision-making is rarely improved by inaccurate information. The belief that global poverty is worsening could easily lead to the conclusion that the problem is intractable, or that our efforts to reduce poverty are not in fact effective; conversely, the belief that poverty is being reduced can lead to the conclusion that what we are doing is effective, and we should do more of it.
- Retra 11y ago
  Rational people can't improve decision-making ability by losing information, but irrational people can. For instance, I may be less likely to do the dishes if I'm keeping score and realize I do them much more than my roommate, but if I don't keep score, I might only consider whether or not they need to be done when making the decision. Of course, you can't really justify such a thing if you're trying to make a rational argument.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  It's quite possible for organizations to maintain two sets of "truth", one known to senior management and used for decision-making, and one known to the public and used for influence.
  - ptaipale 11y ago
    However, you cannot fool all the people all the time. At least I find the credibility of money-collecting NGOs and GONGOs so much reduced that I prefer to give my money to ones that speak the truth to me, not just the inner circle.

api 11y ago

That's because the experience for the American middle class has during this same period been wage stagnation coupled with inflation in food, energy, housing, medicine, and tuition. The American middle class finds it difficult to believe things are getting better around the world because for them it's been getting worse since about 1970.

jahnu 11y ago
> wage stagnation coupled with inflation in food, energy, housing, medicine, and tuition Is that wage stagnation not adjusted for inflation?
- api 11y ago
  The numbers I've seen are adjusted for inflation and show that real wages have been largely stagnant since the early 70s. There have been periods of modest gain, usually when the economy is absolutely roaring like the late 90s, but the general trend has been flat to downward. The lower you are on the totem pole the worse it's been: the upper middle has seen some gain, the middle none, and the lower middle has lost ground. I'm also not sure that I fully believe the inflation numbers. It's not necessarily that I think they're fraudulent, but I don't think the methodology for calculating inflation has caught up with reality. The models I've seen assume inflation to be consistent across the economy, which may have been largely true in the 20th century but is true no longer. The problem is that inflation since the early 2000s has been extremely uneven. We've had massive deflation in some areas, like manufactured goods. But necessities -- especially real estate, health care, and college tuition -- have almost hyper-inflated. You can go without gadgets and toys but not without food and a place to live. We've had near-hyperinflation in necessities but it doesn't show in the stats because the stats average those numbers in with the deflationary numbers you get if you look at TV sets, appliances, and computers. Real estate is utterly insane. I cannot even comprehend how it can possibly be so high. How can you have a market for real estate at these prices? Who's buying it and what parallel universe of limitless wealth do they come from? I'm not talking about areas like the Bay Area, which has peculiar circumstances at work, or always-hot areas like Manhattan. There will always be "bubbles" of high prices vs. the rest of the market. If you look across the average of the market, real estate is crazy when compared to wages. I suppose it may be a function of historically cheap money causing larger home loans and jacking up prices, but it's essentially locked anyone out who isn't rich or willing to sign up for a crazy mortgage.

notahacker 11y ago

I'd say the 95% of Americans were utterly right if you define poverty as "a standard of living which anyone raised in America would consider to be extreme poverty", as opposed to "below the income threshold of the latest World Bank redefinition", in which a person earning 10 cents per hour needs only the energy to work 90 hours per week to bootstrap their way out of extreme poverty...

vidarh 11y ago
Notably, assuming the linked PDF report of the survey is correct, when asking the question they appear to not have given any supplemental information such as a definition of extreme poverty. Which means the only thing the survey is good for is measuring peoples perception of what will likely be a very nebulous concept for most of them (e.g. I have no idea how much essentials you could get for $1.9 a day if you were actually forced to be cautious)
BookmarkSaver 11y ago
No... The point of the survey is that 95% of Americans thought things were getting worse or staying the same. Regardless of what metric you are using, they are dead wrong. Things are getting much, much better. You are arguing about the specific definitions and qualifications of the terms. You are ignoring what the results of the survey are actually saying about the perception of Americans.
- notahacker 11y ago
  I'll ask you this: how many of the ~1.5 billion additional people living in the world compared with 20 years ago wouldn't be considered to be living in "extreme poverty" by US standards? (I'll give you a hint: more than half the world's present population lives on less than $5 PPP per day, few of them by choice, and it's not the richer countries where the rapid population growth is happening) If you think people earning as little as the equivalent $5 of US-equivalent purchasing power per day are extremely poor[1], that's more[2] people in extreme poverty than there were in the 1990s, despite all the incremental improvements to poor people's average incomes across the developing world and stark improvements in a few rapidly-industrialising regions. Where you draw the line matters. And the survey, notably, didn't draw a line. I'm the last person to defend Americans' knowledge of world affairs, but their belief that poverty is actually getting worse in terms of absolute numbers of people subject to it is not unreasonable. [1]which isn't exactly an unreasonable point of view for anyone used to earning more than that per hour even whilst on minimum wage, even if there's a lot of people in developing countries on that level of PPP-adjusted income that think they're doing pretty well compared with their neighbours. [2]edit: having had a play with the World Bank's model, it suggests that you end up with more people in poverty in 2012 than the early nineties if you set your threshold for extreme poverty somewhere between $5 and $6 per day of US purchasing power. The number of people below that threshold in sub-Saharan Africa - where much of the poverty relief narrative has focused - has almost doubled.

datashovel 11y ago

I think another pertinent point would be that until currency existed poverty did not exist. Humans have managed to exist (and in many cases thrive) on this planet for at least hundreds of thousands of years, and by some accounts millions of years. Only the smallest fraction of that time has currency (and thus poverty) existed. Not that barter / exchange did not happen, but official fiat currency certainly didn't exist. And even if people possessed a commodity for trade, they didn't need to use it to survive. I don't have numbers on it, but would love to know if any studies have been done. My hunch is that, at the lowest levels of income across the planet, actually "needing money" to survive probably hurts their livelihood more than it helps.

petervandijck 11y ago
"until currency existed poverty did not exist" -> surely if your kids die of hunger, we can call that poverty?