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As #coronavirus ravages the globe, its wholly disproportionate impact on poor people and marginalized communities is inescapable.
Hundreds of millions of people are being pushed into poverty and unemployment, with woeful support in most places, alongside a huge expansion in hunger, homelessness, and dangerous work.
Over the past decade, world leaders, philanthropists and pundits have embraced a deceptively optimistic narrative about the world’s progress against poverty.😔worldbank.org/en/news/press-….
It has been lauded as one of the “greatest human achievements”, a feat seen “never before in human history” and an “unprecedented” accomplishment. But the success story was always highly misleading. #ClimateAction
the World Bank’s $1.90 (£1.50) a day international poverty line – which is widely misunderstood, flawed and yields a deceptively positive picture.🤔chrgj.org/wp-content/upl…
Under that line, the number of people in “extreme poverty” fell from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 736 million in 2015.But the dramatic drop is only possible with a scandalously unambitious benchmark openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/hand…
The best evidence shows it doesn’t even cover the cost of food or housing in many countries.And it obscures poverty among women and those often excluded from official surveys
The consequences of this highly unrealistic picture of progress against poverty have been devastating.First, it is attributed to economic growth, justifying a “pro-growth” agenda characterized by deregulation, privatization, lower taxes for corporations and the wealthy
Everything from tax breaks for the super-rich to destructive mega-projects that extract wealth from the global south are lauded as efforts to reduce poverty, when they do no such thing.
Presenting the agenda of the wealthy as the best road to poverty alleviation has entirely upended the social contract and redefined the public good as helping the rich get richer
Until governments take seriously the human right to an adequate standard of living, the poverty pandemic will long outlive #coronavirus.
This requires them to stop hiding behind the World Bank’s miserable subsistence line and abandon triumphalism about the imminent end of poverty.#ClimateAction
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