, 12 tweets, 3 min read Read on Twitter
1. Not sure why you can't acknowledge the limitations of the Bourguignon/Morrisson paper and the Maddison database for the purposes of assessing poverty. Everyone else does. You cite Branko Milanovic. Here are his thoughts:
2. The two methods of measuring poverty are completely different. One relies on national accounts, the other relies on household surveys. They measure different things. One was designed to assess poverty, the other was not.
3. The long-term data in the Maddison dataset is extremely thin. Over the entire 130 year period from 1820 to 1950, only *3 years* have data for Africa and Asia. Out of the 54 African countries included in the dataset only *5* have any data prior to 1950.
4. No one has ever said that global GDP isn't rising. That's a straw man. Of course global GDP is rising. It's the distribution that keeps me up at night. Here's a nice picture.
5. No one ever said that poor people are getting poorer. That's another straw man (and misleading). I simply pointed out that the number of people in poverty has risen since 1981, and now stands at 4.2 billion. Not sure why you can't bring yourself to acknowledge this.
6. You haven't offered a defense of the $1.90 line that responds to any of the substantive critiques that I and others scholars have raised. Just saying it's "extreme" doesn't count as a defense. It's time to stop using it in your flagship graphs.
7. No response to @sanjaygreddy's critique of the PPP data that underpins the poverty line, which overestimates the consumption power of the poor. He will be discussing this at the World Bank next month. You can watch it live. Perhaps he will share some thoughts here.
8. To understand how non-capitalist economies worked, you might start with the literature in economic anthropology - a whole discipline that has long specialized in precisely this question. It might help you understand why the Maddison data is inadequate for this task.
9. Still no acknowledgement of colonialism here. To me, this is not acceptable for a post that purports to describe the colonial period.
10. If you read B/M's paper, you will see that they hedge their conclusions over and over. For example: "In view of these assumptions, it would be unwise to take the resulting estimates of national income distribution at face value."
11. The World Bank's PovcalNet suppresses results when coverage of household surveys is too low to be meaningful. We need the same approach to the thin smattering of data points for the global South prior to 1950. It is not robust enough for confident conclusions.
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