Is Global Poverty Falling? Not in Absolute Terms

This headline and story frame relies on a strained redefinition of what people usually mean by an &quot;absolute&quot; measure of poverty.<p>The source paper doesn&#x27;t have this problem: neither its title nor abstract refer to &quot;absolute&quot; poverty or even &quot;global poverty&quot; (which would tend make people think of rates-of-poverty). The paper clearly considers just the &quot;floor&quot; experienced by the &quot;poorest&quot; (of which there are fewer).<p>In discussing its own data sources, the paper also says outright:<p><i>&quot;The latest results from these data confirm past findings that the developing world has seen impressive progress against absolute poverty over the last 30 years, with signs of acceleration since 2000.&quot;</i><p>The WSJ story&#x27;s author&#x2F;editor&#x2F;headline-writer should be embarrassed by the confusion-creating spin they&#x27;ve added.

What a strange article. It seems to be saying that the dramatic reduction in the number of poor people over the past two decades doesn&#x27;t matter because the poorest person in the world now is just as poor as the poorest person in the world was in 1990.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure that the people who were poor in 1990 and aren&#x27;t poor any more would differ.

The actual paper is a little clearer than the blog: <a href="http://papers.nber.org/tmp/80245-w20791.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.nber.org&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;80245-w20791.pdf</a><p>Basically, it says that although the income of the poorest has risen, their consumption has risen at a much lower rate (and significantly lower than the median) -- see figure 2 on pg 28.<p>Table 1.. says consumption (by those under 1.25&#x2F;day) has increased from 0.73 to 0.88 over the past 30 years. So a 20% increase.<p>The main point seems to be that the poorest have increased their consumption at a lower rate than the median.. so therefore they&#x27;re being &#x27;left behind&#x27;.<p>But it seems to me that consumption would just be a lagging indicator of income...