To look at a graph of the decline in extreme poverty (as defined by living on less than roughly $1.90 per day) since the World Bank began keeping close tabs in 1990 is to assume that we’re well on our way to making it a thing of the past. Development experts and charitable organizations tout the tremendous progress that’s been made towards eradicating extreme poverty as evidence of a job well done, and to push for the continued flow of donations from individuals and governments alike.
Since 2000, celebrities like Bono and their charismatic economist counterparts like Jeffrey Sachs have been enthusiastic mouthpieces for the Millennium Development Goals, which made it a mission to halve the proportion of the world living in extreme poverty by 2015 — a goal which was met 5 years ahead of schedule. According to the UN: “More than 1 billion people have been lifted (my emphasis) out of extreme poverty since 1990.”
This report and this verbiage would have you believe that it is “we”, the experts and the academics, leading the way.
After examining the evidence* with your own eyes, I’m willing to bet you will disagree with that statement as strongly as I do.
*All following data and statistics pulled from Our World In Data, an interactive non-profit website dedicated to global statistics. Accessed Aug 6, 2019.
In 1990, 35.9% of the world’s 5.29 billion people lived in extreme poverty, or approximately 1.9 billion people. By 2015, this number had decreased to 9.6% of the world’s 7.36 billion people, or 706.4 million people.
While this represents a decrease of nearly 1.2 billion people, much of which the development community takes credit for, it doesn’t tell the entire story. It doesn’t even come close.
For starters, when controlling for the advancement that occurred in China alone over this same period (few would argue that the international development community led those efforts), we see that China alone is responsible for nearly 2/3 of the precipitous drop. When we control for just four other large countries that accept relatively little foreign aid per person (India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Brazil), we see that together they account for over 87% of the total number of persons the UN claims have been lifted out of poverty.
What’s more, many of the countries that have received the most aid (per capita), the majority of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), have actually seen an increase in absolute levels of extreme poverty since 1990, and the World Bank forecasts the increase to continue through 2030.
A 2013 report by the World Bank noted that in nearly 2/3 of countries in SSA, more people were living in extreme poverty than in 1990. Today there remain just over 700 million people in the world living on $1.90 per day or less, and by 2030, the World Bank predicts 9/10 of these people will live in Sub-Saharan Africa.
This is a far cry from the rosy, optimistic story we’ve continuously been told about how “we” are doing. Yes, development is happening, but “we” haven’t been driving it.
The major lesson to be learned is that ending poverty is a far more complex and nuanced art than it is an exact academic science. It’s that economists cannot solve poverty sitting in their offices, interpreting spreadsheets and lobbying for more foreign aid money. Context matters. Culture matters. It is not something that “we” can just “do”. For years we’ve been led to believe that to solve poverty, it will simply take more dollars and more smart people working to solve the problem. We’ve been told that we need lower trade barriers, more democracy, and less corruption.
All of these things are true to some extent, but not a single one respects the innate abilities and drive of the people on the other end.
Not a single one of them acknowledges that the massive economic growth of the United States, for example, occurred slowly and steadily over more than two centuries. Not a single one of them acknowledges the significance of being shielded from the economic destruction of multiple worldwide conflicts. Not a single one of them acknowledges the benefit of having near-unfettered access to almost every natural resource imaginable. Not a single one of them extols the benefits of being safe from exploitative and racist Colonialism or its scars, or unchecked abuse by multinational corporations such as De Beers. Not a single one of them acknowledges the importance of unleashing the skills of creative, local entrepreneurs to solve the problems they face, creating markets and millions of jobs in their wake.
What many are finally beginning to realize is that success in development has never been tied to a dollar sign, a diploma, or anyone’s Savior Complex, but to enabling and empowering people to develop on their own.
If “we”, the community of concerned citizens, economists, and charitable organizations around the world collectively known as the “development community”, could stop our tunnel vision of seeing poverty manifesting as a lack of physical resources, we could focus our energy on helping others realize and unlock their potential.
It would all be clear as day if we could only stop our inherent confirmation bias from cherry-picking the best data points with the intent of applauding the sunk costs of our time, our effort, and our money spent.