Center for Global Development’s “Views from the Center”: Really, Global Poverty *Is* Falling. Honest.
Charles Kenny, senior fellow at CGD, discusses a Humanosphere piece by Martin Kirk and Jason Hickel that was written in response to the annual Gates letter and addresses the status of global poverty. Kenny discusses global poverty measures and writes, “So, by the most common international definition (adopted by the United Nations), poverty has been cut by more than half since 1990. That poverty line is surely too low as a measure of what we would like to see as the minimum quality of life worldwide, but under pretty much any income definition of a poverty, the proportion of the world living under that line has declined since 1990 as incomes have grown for the vast majority of humanity. And that’s a clear sign that global poverty has been falling — not increasing dramatically” (3/23).