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(1/6) "Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong," says @jasonhickel. Here Hickel is dismissing extensive research by many people. He would need a good case, but he does not have one. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
(2/6) Nobody denies that data quality deteriorates as one goes back in time. Nonetheless, serious economic historians (with Angus Maddison at the top of the list) have been able to assemble credible estimates of GDP back to 1820. And it is not just cash income as Hickel claims.
(3/6) Bourguignon and Morrisson (AER 2002) combined Maddison's GDP estimates with historical data on distribution to estimate both poverty and inequality measures back to 1820. The data are hardly ideal, but it is credible evidence of much higher global poverty rates in C19th.
(4/6) From 1990, I led a team at the World Bank estimating poverty and inequality measures from better data, drawing on a great many h'hold surveys. Our claim that absolute poverty is falling over 30 years is robust to the poverty line. And it is not just China as Hickel says.
(5/6) This adds up to a huge amount of careful research over many decades by many people. @MaxCRoser et al have drawn on this research to make the graphic reproduced by Hickel, which he says is baseless--that "it's not science; it's social media." I beg to differ.
(6/6) Granted, it is not all good news. There has been less progress against relative poverty. Progress in reaching the poorest of the poor has been slow. Inequality is rising in many countries. But I contend that it is Hickel who could not be more wrong on absolute poverty.
