It is an impressively disingenuous piece (if I may use the author's own preferred word). First, he describes economics history statistics time-series as essenti

It is an impressively disingenuous piece (if I may use the author's own preferred word). First, he describes economics history statistics time-series as essentially made up (I'm sure the economic historians like Deaton will be pleased to know that we know absolutely nothing about long-term trends in per capita income etc); then he turns out and claims that people were actually far better off before any statistics he deems sufficiently reliable (I guess there must be some other datasets which are reliable, what a pity we can't use it for anything else). So, the statistics that contradict him are dismissed, and he makes up the ones that favor him. Then he shifts to a nirvana fallacy: because getting out of extreme poverty still leaves you in considerable poverty, actually, it's no progress at all! Wait, there's more: poverty is increasing, because if you look at absolute numbers, there's 'we see that the number of people living under this line has increased dramatically since measurements began in 1981, reaching some 4.2 billion people today.' (Let us take a moment to ponder the intellectual honesty of an author who slides so silently from per capita or inequality to absolute numbers.) But don't worry, it really doesn't matter where all those people come from or per capita vs population growth, po-tah-to poh-ta-toe, because most of them are in China, and China, is, he informs you, not a victory for 'Washington-consensus neoliberalism' (because I guess they got all that economic growth by Mao-style collectivization of farms...?), so definitely don't try to use China as an argument for capitalism or anything crazy like that.