Yeah .... except when we interrogate the numbers to this graph. Consider Philip Alston’s recent report, conducted as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights [].

In his reports, Alston writes that while the picture these types of graphs paint is https://twitter.com/isabellealiciaa/status/1344659954372902913

quite celebratory and admirable, “the picture it provides is far from complete and it is important to recognize its principal limitations.”

For one thing, these lines are basically globally relevant yardsticks, allowing for the drawing out of the achievement of the same meager

needs in every country.

Furthermore, the current line (U.S. $ 1.90 2011 PPP per day) represents what the amount could buy in the United States in 2011. If expressed in local currencies, it translates to living on 7.49 yuan in China, 1.41 euros in Portugal, 22.49 pesos

in Mexico, 50.83 rubles in Russia, 355.18 naira in Nigeria, 910.15 pesos in Chile, or 36.27 rupees in India. When contrasted to the national poverty lines of most countries, this “generates dramatically lower numbers in poverty [eradication].”

Under the standards of the

World Bank’s international poverty line, consider how Thailand would supposedly have a poverty rate of 0.0 percent [!] but 9.9 percent under the national line, the United States would have 1.2 percent versus 12.7 percent, South Africa would have 18.9 percent versus 55 percent,

and Mexico would have 1.7 percent versus 41.9 percent. The point is that there is a lot of “technical debate” surrounding these numbers and that they “should not be treated as the preeminent basis on which to determine whether or not the world community is eradicating extreme

poverty,” let alone a benchmark for anything beyond that, and that these lines are “set so low and arbitrarily as to guarantee a positive result and to enable the United Nations, the World Bank, and many commentators to proclaim a Pyrrhic victory.”

There’s also just a lot of

debate over the numbers, making the presentation of this simple line highly misleading (see picture).

There are also other problems, like not reflecting the differences in basic goods required to escape poverty, how even the principal architect of the World Bank’s absolute

‘Dollar-a-Day’ line has since argued that a truly global perspective on poverty actually requires a relative approach, and the obscuring of gender relations within the household (with implications leading to the potential “exclusion of millions of women living below the

Bank’s line from global poverty figures”). There’s also just other criticism as well (see picture).

The line is, quite frankly, arbitrarily chosen given these criticisms. And shakes at the fact that other lines do not present such a rosy picture, with “many lines show[ing]

only a modest decline in rate and nearly stagnant headcount.” Even under the Bank’s line, between 1990 and 2015, the number of people living under the line in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East *rose* by some 140 million people.

Beyond these and other criticisms, are we

in any meaningful way accounting for the destruction that COVID-19 has wrought?

What about the implications of ecological collapse and an impending “climate apartheid”? According to Alston, “climate change will make a mockery of” the currently celebrated line, as it threatens

to push hundreds of millions of people below it (and with other lines that hold to a stricter standard, according to Alston, “the future would look even grimmer”).

Does anyone have a plan for this impending (it’s arguably already present) “climate apartheid”? It is arguable

that capitalism is just fundamentally incapable of halting ecological collapse, given its cancerous Grow-or-Die imperative (the need to accumulate more capital and reinvest back into business), which has been shown to have a sharp environmental footprint.

While I’m sure

that there have been admirable efforts at addressing poverty throughout the world, we have no guarantee that most triumphal narratives relay to us an accurate picture on these regards—and the future looks bleak. Furthermore, there is no reason to consider capitalism “the end of

history,” as ‘the idea that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.’

And lastly, we should consider the horrendous violence that it has taken to achieve this system of Integrated World Capitalism, which has been

documented by Mike Davis: massive famines killings tens of millions of people, “not outside the ‘modern world system,’ but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.

They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism” (see:

Late Victorian Holocausts, Davis).

But I’m sure we could just argue that ‘we can’t make “an omelette” without breaking a few eggs’ though, as the Stalinist mantra goes huh? Goes to show the inner psyche of the capitalist then, I suppose. (And how truly similar these competing

world ideologies truly are).