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.