Last month, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates touched off a high-profile debate about global poverty after tweeting out a graph from the website Our World in Data showing that the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day (adjusting for inflation and price difference between countries) has fallen dramatically.
One of Hickel’s main arguments is that the poverty threshold used by Our World in Data — $1.90 a day in 2011 international dollars — is too low. Hickel suggests instead using a threshold of $7.40 a day to measure extreme poverty. If this higher threshold is used, the total number of poor people in the world rose steadily in the 1980s and 1990s, and only began to fall very gradually in the late 2000s. Thus, Hickel declares, global poverty has risen rather than fallen.
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