Thread by @jasonhickel

1/ Here is a big thing that's wrong with the dominant discourse on global poverty, IMO. Thread.

2/ The whole discourse proceeds from the notion that "No one should live in poverty," and "Not being in poverty is a human right," etc etc.

Of course, everyone agrees with this. Even billionaires like Bill Gates agree. To disagree is obviously obscene.

3/ Problems. First, this framing immediately renders the whole project subject to the chosen poverty line. Push the poverty line lower and voila: job done! Now everything is just fine, thanks. (And what is the dominant poverty line? High or low? Take a guess).

4/ Also, it locks us into a charity/philanthropy mindset. "Those poor people out there, let us make sure that they have enough to eat, shall we? That would be nice." Deeply apolitical. Erases the power dynamics that determine the distribution of global income.

5/ A much better way to approach it is to start from the position that the poor (the world's majority) deserve a fair share of the income that the global economy produces.

6/ This gets us into the realm of thinking about wages, resource prices, and other factors that influence global income distribution, as well as the forces that determine them: trade rules, debt, finance conditions, ISDS rules, IP law, voting power in the WB/IMF, etc.

7/ After all, the global South contributes the majority of the labour and resources that keep the world economy chugging along, but they get literally pennies for it.

8/ That has to change. Suddenly it's political again. Suddenly we're talking about the pathologies of power, and about how to create a fairer world. We've lost the billionaires, but this reveals that they were never really interested in solving the problem in the first place.