Capitalist apologetics aside, this report shows the immiseration which has occured for most people under the rule of world Capital:
http://cepr.net/globalization/scorecard_on_globalization.htm
Regards, Mike B)
Part of the problem is that there are two sets of figures, almost like Enron's p&l statements that they publicized every quarter and those that only the big bosses knew about. There's a very interesting critique of World Bank stats that are used by the UN for their yearly HDI report at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~sr793/
It was written by Thomas Pogge, a Columbia professor and Sanjay Reddy from Barnard. They say:
For some thirteen years now, the World Bank (‘the Bank’) has regularly reported the number of
people living below an international poverty line, colloquially known as ‘$1/day’.3 Reports for
the most recent year, 1998, put this number at 1,175.14 million.4 The Bank’s estimates of severe
income poverty — its global extent, geographical distribution, and trend over time — are widely
cited in official publications by governments and international organizations and in popular
media, often in support of the view that liberalization and globalization have helped to reduce
poverty worldwide. For instance, the President of the World Bank recently declared: “Over the
past few years, these better policies have contributed to more rapid growth in developing
countries’ per capita incomes than at any point since the mid-1970s. And faster growth has
meant poverty reduction: the proportion of people worldwide living in absolute poverty has
dropped steadily in recent decades, from 29% in 1990 to a record low of 23% in 1998. After
increasing steadily over the past two centuries, since 1980 the total number of people living in
poverty worldwide has fallen by an estimated 200 million — even as the world’s population
grew by 1.6 billion.”
Most readers, including many economists, take these figures as clear-cut facts. But the method
used to calculate them has serious flaws, which render the resulting estimates untrustworthy.
First, the IPL used by the Bank to identify the absolutely poor fails to meet elementary
requirements of consistency. It does not have a common interpretation (in terms of purchasing
power) across countries and years. As a result, the Bank’s poverty line leads to meaningless
poverty estimates, as some of those identified as poor have clearly greater command over
commodities than some of those identified as non-poor. These inconsistencies are an inherent
consequence of the Bank’s method and cannot be eliminated without jettisoning the method altogether. Second, the Bank’s poverty line is not anchored in any assessment of the basic
resource requirements of human beings. Third, the poverty estimates currently available are
subject to massive uncertainties because of their sensitivity to the values of crucial parameters
that are estimated on the basis of limited data or none at all. An alternative method of estimating
global poverty is feasible and necessary.
Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
