Bill Gates Is Mistaken About World Poverty

Later last month, Bill Gates, the billionaire who is famous for his charity works, posted an infographic on Twitter saying that there are now only 10% of people living in extreme poverty compared to 94% in 1820. While it was an impressive figure and Gates stated that it was his favorite infographic, Jason Hickel, an expert in anthropology from the University of London claimed that it was wrong.

With an article on The Guardian recently, Hickel expresses why he thinks that the narrative presented by the mentioned infographic is powerful yet wrong.

The first problem with this infographic which was created by Max Roser from Our World in Data is that the official data on world poverty was only collected since 1981 so everything before that all the way back to 1820 is unreliable. Not to mention the figures are only about the unequal distribution of GDP all over the world and it only applies to a few countries.

According to Hickel, what this graph actually proves is that the severe impacts of dispossession that forced people into the capitalist labor system and colonialization on the economic states of the vast majority of the population. The fact is, before colonialization, people weren't that poor since they didn't need money at all and had little of it but their means of production such as land, water, forests, and livestock is abundant. It is the colonialization that pulled people out of their reciprocity life and put them into the factories and mines in which they are the victims of exploitation in return of paltry wages. Hickel explains that it is how the graph package the colonialization as a "happy story of progress".

What's more, the definition of "extreme poverty" used in the graph is irrelevant since it is far from reality and once we choose a reasonable minimum income with which people can live with minimum nutritional and mortality requirements, it suddenly makes more than 4.2 billion or roughly 60% of people extremely poor.