World Poverty’s Dramatic Decline
Just over 25% of the world’s population (1.4B people), lived in extreme poverty in 2005, according to a report released this month from the World Bank (”Global Economic Prospects 2009: Long-term prospects and poverty forecasts“). This has fallen from 42% in 1990, when the bank first published its global poverty estimates. All regions of the world have seen gains. Rapid economic growth east Asia in particular has led to a dramatic decline in global poverty. In China the share of the population getting by on $1.25 a day, or less, fell from 60% to 16%.
I’m calling bullshit. Look back to one your older posts. The one that “predicted” a “No Global Recession”
After the dot.com crash and 9/11 the fed pumped massive cash (euphamistically called “Quantitative Easing”) into the economy. All that money had to go somewhere. Part of it went to create the housing bubble and part of it ended up fueling China and India’s growth under the guise of foreign investment. It’s not too hard to make money when you borrow at 0% (fed funds rate) and lend at 5%. If this decline in poverty trend continues for the next 15 years at the same rate, I’ll concede to your point. This retreating of poverty over the past 15 years was nothing more than a symptom of the phantom wealth and bubble economy of the last decade and a half (as noted by the highest improvements in the poverty rates of India and China).
Economists are 21st century sophists and their “science” of looking to the past data and fitting the best curve is the ancient world’s equivalent of divining the future from bird entrails; total bullshit. Pop Psychology explains (observes) a lot of stuff and even makes it sound logically elegant and its arguments intuitively plausable (Sociology, Pscyhoanalysis, Handwriting Analysis, Astrology, Economics, Tarot Cards etc.) but it falls way short on the other two requisites of rigorous science (prediction and control). The true test of science, the demarcation line of seperating science and non-science is falsification (Karl Popper).
Economics and economists have an absymal prediction rate in general. I’ll start taking them seriously when their prediction rate can beat a monkey throwing darts willynilly at the wall (over 50%).
Here’s the “No Global Recession” post: http://www.progressdaily.com/2008/11/19/no-global-recession/