Q, do all indicators showing world poverty getting worse?

Q, is the first world getting poorer too?

Q, if you are in a hole should you stop digging?

Did the MGD, really lift "about" a billion people out of poverty? There are many defnitions of poverty. People who believe they can cure real poverty are kidding themselves and the rest of us, not to mention the 'lifting' of money from people in 'rich' countries who are not terribly well off themselves. Poverty is a cultural phenomenon, even in Western country sub-cultures. Until cultures change, there will always be poverty to keep many, many unecessarily employed by the corrupt United Nations this 'advertising' man works for.

"Eradicating poverty also requires well-designed social protection systems that provide social assistance to the extreme poor, especially for groups that are traditionally vulnerable or excluded."

Doesn't seem to have worked for the poor dispossessed Aboriginals. Some people just can't be helped.

David

The very first action should be to close down the UN, sack all it's tens of thousands of overpaid staff, & redistribute the money. Even if we just gave most of it direct to the dozens of tin pot petty dictators around the world, rather than by UN organisations, it would get rid of some of the thousands of spivs that leach on the poor.

Humanity’s progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals is a wonderful achievement, especially the reductions in absolute poverty in recent decades.

Whether the Goals were actually instrumental in achieving them is another matter entirely. Much of the reduction in absolute poverty in recent decades has been in China, and most of it in East Asia. Very little can be attributed to UN policies and programs, and in many cases success has come through implementing policies the UN would not approve of, such as China's environmentally destructive and socially inequitable pursuit of growth.

I fear the Sustainability Development Goals will be even less effectual. They are less concrete, more diverse and arguably internally inconsistent. They are ideologically freighted to subordinate economic development to other agendas.

The article also uses some poor logic. For example, it states:

“Economic growth has unequivocally been the biggest single factor responsible for poverty reduction during the MDG era”

But then continues:

“ An analysis of 117 developing countries between the early 1990s and late 2000s finds that on average those that grew at faster rates, irrespective of initial income level, experienced larger increases in inequality than those that grew at slower rates. Therefore, inequality reduction, in all its forms and dimensions, remains a crucial issue to resolve in order to end poverty”

The conclusion does not follow from the premise. The data suggest instead that economic growth causes both reductions in poverty and rising inequality. If measures to reduce inequality also slow economic growth, it is likely that poverty be worse, not better.

As 1% of humans now own 99% of the planet's wealth, redistribution of wealth would be sensible - that is if we really do want to reduce poverty. Instead, all capitalist democracies are reducing social welfare programs, and refusing to alter taxation systems that favour the already wealthy - despite knowing that as the gap between rich and poor widens, the ratio of poor to not poor increases.

Whilst the poor are expected to try and feed unlimited children, as they cannot afford family planning, they have little hope. We could of course provide it, but choose to a large extent not to, due to our religious lobbyists. Shame on them.

VK3AUU & Hasbeen, spot on.

Rhian & ybgirp, your way of doing things has been ruthlessly imposed on the world's poor ever since WW2 & is still progressively worsening world poverty. When you are in a hole stop digging.

Yabby, half true, every Christian on earth other than Catholics would gladly donate container loads of condoms to third world nations if it would lower birth rates.

Imacentristmoderate

The proportion of the world’s population living in absolute poverty has fallen steadily in recent decades to its lowest level in human history.

Specifically, in the context of this article, The Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of the world’s population in extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015 was met five years early, in 2010.

According to the UN, “the proportion of undernourished people has decreased from 23 per cent in 1990-1992 to 15 per cent in 2010-2012”

http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/Goal_1_fs.pdf

There is still a long way to go, but we are most emphatically heading in the right direction on global poverty reduction.

While they I understand 99% of wealth is controlled by 1% of the people, I will bet that 1% don't have near as many children per capita as the 99%.

Control breeding, esspecially where there are little to no prospects for the offspring.

Such action is also needed in our country as well.

*every Christian on earth other than Catholics would gladly donate container loads of condoms*

Not quite correct. Fundamentalist Xtians are as fanatical as some Catholics in preaching abstinence. The Guttmacher Institute has a number of publications highlighting the unmet need of hundreds of millions of third world women, when it comes to family planning.
First world financing could easily provide it, but the Catholic lobby, even in the UN, is too strong. So they keep popping out more babies than they want, which means more hunger, poverty and misery. If third world women had the options which Australian women take for granted, the problem would be solved. Yet we don't even use our foreign aid money for the purpose as we are too scared to put religious noses out of joint

Rhian, all those stats are manufactured by humanities academics or the UN & should be viewed with extreme scepticism. Ethiopia is in famine every year through over population, courtesy of Sir Bob Geldof.

Yabby, you are still being a bit too harsh, the fundies are a small minority of Protestant Christians.

Imacentristmoderate

Actually, the authoritative source of data on global poverty is the World Bank, whose data the UN relies on, as do most academics, NGOs, policy makers and others in the field.

http://data.worldbank.org/

Whose data were you using to back your claim that word poverty is “progressively worsening”?

*the fundies are a small minority of Protestant Christians.*

You should spend some time in the US bible belt. The fundies got George Bush jun. over the line to win as prez and one of the first things he did was cut family planning to places like Ethiopia. Some women landed up leaving their babies out for the hyenas, in desperation. At the time I read the reports in complete shock. Next alot of US schools had sex education cancelled and the pledge was introduced. The net result was one of the developed world's highest teen pregnancy rates. Some learn the hard way.

Rhian, Actually, your missing my point all of the authoritative sources of data on global poverty are the World Bank, the UN, academics, NGOs, policy makers and others in the field who are the 1% ruling left wing elites & therefore we know that they are lying. Why are you so desperate to help the 1% steal from the 99%?

Yabby, i hear where you are coming from but elections are won & lost by a minority of swinging voters. They also had plenty of spare time to think about relaxation like sex because we gave them food & water. if the bleeding hearts had left them alone they would still have a lower population.

Ima, the US bible belt is not just a small minority. They run whole states in the South.

As to your next point, I have no problem in being humanitarian, but we provide boatloads of food and plane loads of vaccines to the third world. Doing so without providing family planning at the same time, is very foolish and in fact creates a population explosion!

Imacentristmoderate

Ok, so if you rule out “authoritative sources of data on global poverty” including “the World Bank, the UN, academics, NGOs, policy makers”, who precisely do you think is competent to produce estimates of global poverty? I repeat my question:

Whose data were you using to back your claim that word poverty is “progressively worsening”?

imacentristmoderate,

"Ethiopia is in famine every year through over population, courtesy of Sir Bob Geldof."
Much as you'd like that to be true, it's completely false. Not only is Ethipoia not in famine, but the famine of the 1980s was causesd not by famine but by bad governance. The government could've fed its people, but chose to spend the money on weapons instead.

And saving lives does not cause overpopulation; the truth is almost the exact opposite! When survival is in doubt, people have as many children as they can to ensure that some of them will survive.

Yabby, agreed, give them condoms instead.

Rhian, it is called social media & networking, as in talk to someone from Zimbabwe & get the real story.

Aidan, i hear you but Africans have been killing each other to cull the population for millennia.

Most of the countries with too big populations,
Are that way because of the dominance of religious males
Who do not allow women control of their own wombs by banning
Contraception.

Nature will cull the populations of any species who are too
Large for the available resources. That includes humans.

We save them with aid, nature's natural law of survival is
Undone and the problem grows worse.

Imacentristmoderate

A single individual in a single country is not exactly a representative sample. Nor is a social media network of people who think like you.Talking to someone in Zinbabwe won't tell you what's happening in China or Bangladesh.

Zimbabwe is one of the few countries in the world where living standards have gone backwards in recent years, thanks to its appalling government. Data from the international agencies you so despite – the IMF, UN and World Bank - reflect this, eg

https://www.wfp.org/countries/zimbabwe/overview

Rhian, i know more than one person from Zimbabwe & have contacts from China & Bangladesh as well. it is called the internet as well as social media & they all have the same problems caused by the same "problem children" in every nation on earth.