The Fool on the Hill: Extreme poverty

I haven't done my research on this. I have literally no idea to what extent what I'm saying here is true. So you may take it, if you like, as the ravings of a deranged madman; or the seeding of a conspiracy theory; but.

But.

"China declared itself successful in lifting 770 million of its citizens out of poverty"

"India Lifted 271 Million People Out Of Poverty In A Decade"

"at the birth of capitalism, there were only about 60 million people in the world who were not living in extreme poverty. Today there are more than 6.5 billion people who are not living in extreme poverty"

That's a lot of people raised out of poverty, isn't it? And yet,

Branko Milankovic, the former lead economist at the World Bank, is one of the world’s leading authorities on economic inequality. He says bluntly that we are now experiencing the highest level of relative and absolute global inequality at any point in human history. (citation)

Something smells. It smells extremely bad. Let's think about this a bit.

What is 'extreme poverty'? What all the people above mean, is having a limited cash income. The World Bank (yes, that same World Bank) helpfully tells us that it means "Between 2008 and 2015 that line was set at $1.25/day in 2005 [US] dollars..." but it's been updated, and it's now "...$1.90/day in 2011 dollars"; the change was made bearing in mind the need to "minimize changes to the World Bank’s goalpost for the objective of ending extreme poverty by 2030".

So, to be clear, under this definition:

1. A person living securely on their customary lands, in housing built by themselves using materials freely obtained from the local environment, eating a secure, substantial, varied and healthy diet based on customary agriculture supplemented by fisheries and other activities, with low levels of overcrowding, environmental pollution and infectious disease, owing no rent or tax to anyone, and taking part in regular celebrations and dances in a community of friends and relatives, is in absolute poverty;
2. A person living in a dilapidated one room slum apartment in an anonymous overcrowded jerry-built tenement over an open sewer, and working fourteen hours a day in a factory with no natural light to earn two dollars of which $1.70 goes in rent, leaving 30 cents to pay for street food made from scrapings of mouldy rice from the floor of the warehouse and whatever offal the fly-blown knacker's yard couldn't otherwise sell — and nothing at all left over to pay for the medicines needed as a result of the swirling infections and filth of overcrowded, highly stressed urban living, or for new shoes, or clothes, or entertainment — that person, hallelujah, praise the World Bank, praise capitalism, that person has been lifted out of absolute poverty.

Let us all give thanks!

OK, step back a bit. People living in customary rural societies have over the past several thousand years been widely parasitised on by thugs, rentier classes, soi-disant aristocrats. Customary rural societies have not universally been bucolic paradises. The very fact of living at a low population density and with limited access to the money economy has made it hard to organise effective resistance to oppression. And they've been extremely vulnerable in times of war.

But for the most part, being primary producers of food is not a bad place in the economy to be: it takes Stalinist levels of oppression to drive peasants to starvation.

And I strongly suspect that, as with the vaunted 'agricultural improvements' of eighteenth century Britain, of which the World Bank's current campaign is very much the spiritual successor, the lands from which the 'unproductive' rural population are being driven in the World Bank's beneficent and disinterested effort to 'lift them out of poverty' into urban sweatshops and slums do not remain the property of those customary societies who have been evicted. Rather, they either remain property of the descendants of the thugs and bandits — take a bow, Richard Walter John Montagu Douglas Scott — who formerly extracted rent from them, or else in the hands of members of the corrupt elite.

Which amounts to the same thing.

It's easy to see, of course, how forcing people into the money economy benefits capitalism. It's easy to see how it benefits bankers, and elites. It's much easier to extract rent from the poor and the powerless when those poor and powerless are already transacting in fungible tokens.

But let's not pretend this is a useful measure of poverty.

We cannot afford an urbanised world. Megacities can be fed at all only with extraordinary input of fossil fuel energy; and our 'modern,' 'improved' systems of agriculture depend utterly not only on huge inputs of fossil fuel energy and fertilisers, which in themselves destroy soil structure and thereby long term fertility, but also on massive inputs of novel synthetic toxins — biocides, poisons — which are exterminating many of the species, for example pollinators, on which food production and thereby human life depends.

We cannot continue using fossil fuels, or fossil hydrocarbon-based fertilisers. The planet is already burning. We cannot continue poisoning our own environment. The biosphere is already dying.

We need to resettle people on the land, where they can tend it intimately, where they can produce their own food without massive, complex economic superstructures extracting rent.

But more: we need to provide for people places to live where they are secure, from which they cannot be driven; where they can live together and together, convivially, in community, agree the customs by which they will work together to provide the things which they mutually need to live good, fulfilling lives.

Money does not provide this. $1.90 a day does not provide this. Every member of any good society would automatically be deemed by the World Bank to be 'living in extreme poverty.' They are measuring, as classical economists always do, precisely the wrong thing.

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