"We are in the midst of the fastest period of (global) poverty reduction the world has ever seen."

[pampango]

With Little Fanfare, Hundreds Of Millions Escaped Poverty

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/opinion/with-little-fanfare-hundreds-of-millions-escaped-poverty/451432

We are in the midst of the fastest period of poverty reduction the world has ever seen. The global poverty rate, which stood at 25 percent in 2005, is ticking downward at one to two percentage points per year, lifting around 70 million people — the population of Turkey or Thailand — out of destitution annually. Advances in human progress on such a scale are unprecedented, yet they remain almost universally unacknowledged.

Global poverty has come to be seen as a constant, with the poor cut off from the prosperity enjoyed elsewhere. In a new study of global poverty, we upend this narrative, finding that poverty reduction accelerated in the early 2000s at a rate that has been sustained throughout the decade, even during the dark recesses of the financial crisis.

This means that the prime target of the Millennium Development Goals — to halve the rate of global poverty by 2015 from its 1990 level — was probably achieved in 2008. Whereas it took 25 years to reduce poverty by half a billion people up to 2005, the same feat was likely achieved in the six years between then and now. Never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time.

This stunning progress is driven by rapid economic growth across the developing world. During the 1980s and 1990s, per capita growth in developing countries averaged just 1 to 2 percent a year, not nearly fast enough to make per serious dent in poverty levels. Since around 2003, however, growth in the developing world has taken off, averaging 5 percent per capita per year.

---------------------------------------------------

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launches annual progress report on the Millennium Development Goals

http://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/2011/july/20110707amdgreportlaunch/

On 7 July, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched the annual progress report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), the MDG Report 2011, shining a spotlight on where progress is being made and where stronger efforts are urgently needed. The report presents the latest statistics on each of the Goals, globally and regionally, collected through more than 25 UN and international agencies.

This year's report shows that the world is on track to reducing the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by half. It also shows that some developing countries such as Burundi, Madagascar, Rwanda, Togo and Tanzania have achieved, or nearly achieved, the goal of sending all children to primary school.

[Warren Stupidity]

1. That is the good news.

The bad news is that 6 billion new people are getting "on the grid" over the next 20 years. That energy demand, and as we have done NOTHING to change, that additional carbon output into the environment is causing an unprecedented crisis of civilization - and by unprecedented I mean conditions that alter the basic equations of human existence that have underpinned agricultural/metropolitan civilization for the last 10,000 years or so.

But for a while anyway we will all have Big Screen TVs.

[Zywiec]

7. 6 billion new people in the next 20 years?

Do you happen to have a source for 12 billion people 'on the grid' by 2031. Thanks.

[Warren Stupidity]

18. 3 billion current off grid people going on grid

+3 billion additions to the current population. 6B new people on the grid over the next 20 years.

[defendandprotect]

20. And all government activity warning of overepopulation was shut down decades ago ....

the RCC must go on -- !!


:evilgrin:


In fact, these days we're financing it's "faith-based" organizations!!

[Uncle Joe]

28. Poverty is a stimulant to population growth reducing the former will have a positive impact

on reducing the latter.

I agree with you re: the desperate need to think differently about what constitutes progress, prosperity and our impact on the planet.

On a thread by marmar

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x612145

Saving the Earth will take more than merely adjusting our actions—polluting less here, conserving more there, moving toward sustainability within the confines of today’s prevailing worldview.

To really declare our commitment to protecting the rights of nature, we must change how we think about the world itself and our place within it. This means taking a fresh look at nature, learning from its amazing rhythms, patterns and interconnections. And it means opening our selves up to new possibilities for how humans work together to survive, thrive and ensure good lives for coming generations.

A shift of this importance will not happen easily. It requires a fundamental reorganizing of our industrial, hierarchical, technocratic, economic-centric culture. And it will be ferociously opposed by those who reap fat profits from the way things are.

[leeroysphitz]

2. Fucking outsourcing... n/t

[robcon]

3. This results from freer trade across the globe. Free trade=prosperity for all.

n/t

[Fumesucker]

4. It damn sure hasn't worked that way in this country.. n/t

[robcon]

5. It sure has. NAFTA and WTO are tremendous contributors to economic growth over the last 15 years.

n/t

[Fumesucker]

6. Then why are so many people on food stamps?

Economic growth doesn't mean people coming out of poverty if all the benefits go to the top few percent.

In constant inflation-adjusted dollars, income in this country has been flat or declining since the 70's.

[LooseWilly]

34. They're on food stamps because their jobs have been sent overseas...

... which causes "economic growth" for the corporations and their executives which, when statistically averaged with the loss of wages for the workers, results in a statistical "increase" in "economic output".

And the article speaks of global poverty rates... which are reduced as jobs are exported from developed countries across the globe to under-developed countries. Statistically the global poverty rates are probably so low that working a minimum wage job in the US probably does not qualify as poverty on the global "poverty-meter". Hence, global poverty rate is reduced, despite locally-judged poverty rate increases in the US.

I think of it as a global closed system (free-trade system) which used to be a lot of closed systems (closed & protected national economic systems) which interacted with each other only peripherally.

Where higher and lower concentrations of wealth/prosperity used to diffuse within the small closed systems (a factory owner might move the factory from Indiana to Mississippi... thus moving earning opportunities within the US system in a manner that decreased the concentration of said opportunities in one area and increased them in another... adjusting the tentative "balance" of wealth, this way or that)— the same process is now happening in one closed global system. Developed countries had a higher concentration of wealth/opportunity (leading to expectations of higher wages in order for work to be "worth it" to do), while the developing world had low concentrations (in some places bordering on a vacuum)... and so now there is a "re-balancing" going on which will probably take a few decades to reach a new (lower) balance.

We're all going to earn less and less and less for doing the same job, as this process continues.

Meanwhile, the owners will earn more and more and more off of every sale of product or service, because the work of doing such will cost them less... leaving more profit.

If workers want to earn more, they're going to have to figure out how to unionize globally. I think Marx had some ideas on the subject.

Of course, given current trends, if governments want to remain solvent in the coming decades, they're also going to have to "unionize" in order to combat the successes that corporations have had in playing one government against another. If Ireland and the Bahamas and the US and all the rest all agree that 28% corporate tax rate is the deal—rather than trying to lowball each other in pursuit of income tax revenue from potential local employees of the corporations—then maybe there wouldn't be any need for all the "austerity" programs working their way around the world.

[Uncle Joe]

35. That's a good post, LooseWilly, I believe you nailed the situation.

[Romulox]

9. LOL. I'm sure you can support this comical assertion with some fact (not from CATO, plz!)

:hi:

[KittyWampus]

10. Outsourcing does create better paying jobs and grows economies in other countries.

That's a simple fact.

The problem in the USA is that we failed to create new jobs and invested in new technologies. Like we did with Silicon Valley.

BTW, this is Krugman's view.

The problem isn't the outsourcing or free trade, it's the lack of creative growth to replace those lost jobs.

[Romulox]

13. That wasn't robcon's claim: "Free trade=prosperity for all," is what he said.

Goalposts = MOVED! :hi:

[closeupready]

21. Mr. Robert Reich, 1992 called for you; it wants its NAFTA talking points back.

Thank you.

[defendandprotect]

23. Only growth has been in elite/corporate pockets ... even Mexico is suffering from these trade ...

which are destroying their own farms, etal --

[bluestate10]

31. You make some salient points.

As more water in Mexico is being fouled by industrial use, Mexican farms are suffering. Industry and farming should not have the historically adverse relationship that the two industries have had. The cause of the conflict is societal blindness by many industrialists. Industrialists should have maintaining purity of water,soil and air on a level with making profits. Some companies have gotten the message and are leading the push to reduce their industrial footprint. It is imperative for consumers to corner companies they they buy products from and demand that the environment get put on the same level with profits.

[Quantess]

27. Economic growth for whom?

Certainly not for the "little people", as the spokesman for BP once referred to regular, working, middle-lower class Americans.

[LongTomH]

29. Neither the Jakarta Globe or UNAIDS articles credit 'Free Trade' or Outsourcing

...with reducing poverty. Both articles did credit such things as education and local development.

By the way, for years many people have been questioning whether shipping jobs to China, India and elsewhere was a good model for development in those countries, since it ties their fate to the state of the American economy.

[muriel_volestrangler]

30. 'local development' in China is trade with the west

Their domestic market has not grown anything like as fast as their exports. You're sticking your head in the sand if you don't think the lifting of millions of Chinese out of poverty was from trade. And the UN does say the lion's share of the people getting out of poverty was in China.

[lumberjack_jeff]

32. No. It's simply levelling of the working class.

A worker in Tanzania is just like a worker in the US. The rationale behind this is that the US worker doesn't own any of the wealth his or her society created.

You can't have aristocracy if the workers have wealth.

[Romulox]

8. Cheap labor in the third world has mostly benefited rich first worlders.

What about the environmental devastation wrought by multinational corps. and their "third way" allies, for example? :hi:

[KittyWampus]

11. No, it's benefitted a huge number of people across the globe who no longer live in abject poverty.

That fact doesn't negate that a small number of people have benefitted disproportionally well.

[Romulox]

14. Nonsense. It's poisoned the third world and put children to work making crap. nt

[bluestate10]

33. The next time you have a chance to buy a USA made shirt, bedsheet

or car, put your principle first. Pay a few more bucks for those items. I am one that have argued until I am blue in the face that the problem is not business people looking to produce products with the cheapest possible labor, the problem is consumers that are too blind or too lazy to look for USA made alternatives. I am often disgusted by some that post virulent anti-business posts, while I am sure that their next purchases will be made with no thought of the impact of those purchases on their neighbors. I have seen some of the most virulent anti-business voices on DU rabidly defend their purchases of foreign content cars because they live under the mistaken belief that those cars are cheaper and last longer, both assumptions that are largely invalid given the enormous progress of USA content rich automakers.

[Romulox]

37. Um, your post is ridiculous.

"The next time you have a chance to buy a USA made shirt, bedsheet or car, put your principle first. "

Maybe google "Dearborn, Michigan" before lecturing me on automobile purchase, will you? :eyes:

[pampango]

17. Well said. Tremendous progress has been made. That doesn't mean that there aren't

still enormous problems - both the many who remain in abject poverty and those who have benefited disproportionately.

To recognize that there has been progress (as is clearly the case) is not to diminish the problems that remain both in the US and in the Third World.

[Romulox]

36. Nonsense. Inequality here at home is at Gilded-Age levels.

Still waiting for your OPs detailing the deprivations of domestic poverty, btw. You *assured* me you made lots of those! :hi:

[defendandprotect]

25. Elites prosper . . . Welfare for the rich, Free Enterprise for the poor ... as usual .. !!

[defendandprotect]

24. +1 -- Notice also we don't jail the employees who hire illegals here... we jail the illegals!!!

Quite the scam to further enrich elites here --

and blame it on immigrants in order to enact even more fascist policies --

and fill our jails with people of color!

[Zywiec]

12. Even here you can find people upset that

the world is on track to reducing the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by half.

:crazy:

[Romulox]

15. Just as many cheap labor corporatists cheering child labor!

:hi:

[CleanGreenFuture]

16. Yep. +1000.

[defendandprotect]

26. All the way with the "Third way" ... !!

This is the Rise of the Fourth Reich --

[defendandprotect]

19. DU is focused on Dem Party being turned upside down -- now anti-FDR/New Deal values -- but ....

the dangers for us and for the rest of the world lie in what is actually

the Rise of the Fourth Reich --

America taken off guard -- with infilration of our government set up by those elite/corporatists

who sponsored Hitler and the Third Reich -- and perhaps only JFK coming to know the programs,

and trying to warn us?

Political violence assured them of their goals --

and we've had more than 50 years of that rw political violence.


This will be about way more than Social Security and Medicare - but take seriously what you

see happening as our Democratic Party has become infested by "Third Way" - PPI -- and

PNAC fascist agenda -- the destruction of even our safety nets will not be the end of it --

this is about slave labor.



I'd also caution everyone here who doesn't know it to understand that Global Warming is the

greatest threat to the planet and humanity. They spent 50 years and tens of billions of

dollars lying to the public about it so that control over our natural resources/government

would not be challenged and taken out of their hands.


I'd also advocate Al Gore's advice in his Rolling Stone article which really describes

fascism without using the word -- and that is to talk with one another, your family and

those you meet in life -- it is certainly difficult as we all know, but it's necessary.

[Rex]

22. And yet the standard of living in America goes down and down

while rich fucks steal the Treasury. They are coming up with a new way to measure our 'standard of living', because being responsible and holding people accountable for their actions is impossible next to lying and slight of hand tricks. Our fed govt is a joke the world over...thanks GWB.

[Romulox]

38. Feature not a bug. The globalists will tell you the decline in our standard is *necessary*

to achieve equalization of standards of living throughout the globe.