pages tagged developmentspwhittonhttps://spwhitton.name//tag/development/spwhittonikiwiki2015-11-18T17:09:12ZTracking Poverty and Gender Disparitieshttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/poggemeasures/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2011-05-25T12:04:00Z
<p>Went to a talk on Tuesday by <a href="http://pantheon.yale.edu/~tp4/">Thomas
Pogge</a> on how the World Bank and related
governments track poverty, and how they are really being rather
dishonest about the goals they are meeting, because they keep shifting
them. Basically the Maths says that we’re on track to meet the
Millennium Development Goal on poverty, in fact we’re ahead of schedule,
but all this means it that the proportion of the world on less than
$1.25 is going to halve. And wait—this is a figure that takes into
account borders, so what it actually means is that we’re going to halve
the number of people who, if they were living in the US, had less than
$1.25 to live off. I don’t like in the US but that doesn’t seem like
much of an achievement yet they’ll be celebrations.</p>
<p>The tricks pulled to make the target easier add up to reducing the
required yearly drop from 3.58% per year in the early nineties, so just
a 1.25% drop today. I won’t go into the details, but it was staggering
just how much was going on. The result of doing what we’re doing now
rather than the original goals means that the number dying from poverty
per year after 2015 will be 6m higher. This is costing 6m lives <em>per
year</em> extra.</p>
<p>Here’s another unpleasant fact: the number of people at the very bottom
who are ‘chronically undernourished’ is actually going <em>up</em> (and not
just with the population of the world), and topped 1bn for the first
time in human history a few years ago. There’s something badly wrong
with our ways of measuring poverty if this happens while we celebrate
meeting a Millennium Development Goal.</p>
<p>The response is that we don’t want problems and targets so large that
governments and their people will just give up. But, the entire problem
of poverty is a deficit of cash equal to 0.17% of world income. If we
raise this “dollar a day” figure to $2.50, and raise everyone above this
level, it costs 1.13% of the world’s income (which is two thirds of the
US military budget). The major countries involved in WWII spend 50% of
their income on the war effort.</p>
<p>Towards the end he switched back to his moral philosopher’s hat and
talked about how this goes on. It’s interesting that politicians are
allowed to say “we’ll halve poverty” and be really excited about that,
but consider: would it have been okay to say “we’ll halve the number of
people in concentration camps”? Pogge’s conclusion was that the reason
for all this is a conspiracy between the governments and the people of
the western world. They give us stats, we say hooray and stop thinking
about it, and nothing improves, because we just sit here and say “it’s
the politicians fault and we can’t change that”.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.genderpovertymeasure.org/storage/Pogge%2021%20March%20.ppt">These
slides</a>
seem to be very similar to the ones he used.</p>