This is as close to a palindrome as a truism can get:  No news is good news <-> Good news is no news.  The good news that (happily) violated that norm and rippled in headlines this week came in a World Bank report showing a broad reduction in deep poverty and concluding that the great global recession did not increase poverty in the developing world. Annie Lowrey’s article in The Times has this nut:  [F]or the first time the proportion of people living in extreme poverty — on less than $1.25 a day — fell in every developing region from 2005 to 2008. And the biggest recession since the Great Depression seems not to have thrown that trend off course, preliminary data from 2010 indicate.  The progress is so drastic that the world has met the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half five years before its 2015 deadline.  The article quotes Charles Kenny, the author of “Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding — And How We Can Improve the World Even More,” which I find an invaluable counterweight to the professional doomsaying that often dominates development discourse. The book happily caught the attention of David Leonhardt and, more recently, Mark Bittman, in his column on “The Glass-Half-Full Department.” (There was also a great discussion of the book hosted by Foreign Policy.)  After reading the story on the World Bank report, I sought more input from Kenny, who among other things is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, and here’s his “Your Dot” contribution:  The World Bank came out with new numbers on global poverty last week –- and they were full of good news: The proportion of people living on a less than $1.25 a day has halved since 1990. And every global region has seen poverty decline. Extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa fell from 55.7 percent of the population in 2002 to 47.5 percent in 2008.  Even the carefully constructed global poverty numbers of the World Bank need to be taken with a mid-size sea’s worth of salt, of course. Experts in the field argue the numbers for China and India might be too high. Others argue the overall number may be too low.  And everyone agrees that $1.25 is at best a measure of absolute poverty. People who live on $1.26 or $1.27 a day still face painful daily tradeoffs when it comes to spending their meager resources on food, shelter, health or education for their kids. The U.S. poverty line is, give or take, about $13 per day per person. We’re celebrating the success of halving the proportion of the planet that lives on less than one tenth that amount.  Still, the trend is clear: the world’s very poorest people are mostly a little bit better off in terms of income. And to add to that good news, they’re also better off in terms of health and education. In 1991, 44 percent of children in the world’s low-income countries (with gross national incomes under $1,000 per capita) completed primary school. Around half were vaccinated against measles. Today, about two-thirds of children complete primary education, and nearly four-fifths are vaccinated. Partially as a result, mortality rates of children under five in the world’s poorest countries has fallen from about 17 percent in 1990 to 11 percent in 2010, according to World Bank data.  Even better, we’re seeing progress in quality of life even in countries that have seen no or even negative income growth over the past decades. In my book I discuss twelve countries where average incomes in 2005 were lower than they were in 1960 (they include Zimbabwe, Haiti, Niger, and Liberia). On average, incomes across those countries have fallen by a quarter. Yet average life expectancy across those countries is ten years higher, and literacy rates have close to doubled since 1960. That suggests the same amount of money is buying a better quality of life across countries than it used to. And, in fact, that broad-based progress in the quality of life may be one factor behind the recent good news on global income gains: it is much easier to be productive if you are healthy and educated.  A world in which many countries see more than one out of every ten children die before their fifth birthday is a world where there is still an immense amount of unnecessary suffering. And there are real questions about the future of global progress against deprivation unless we deal with issues of sustainable development and the global commons. But the immense progress we’ve seen over the past twenty years is a signal that we can do better – which is surely the best argument for redoubling global efforts against deprivation and disease going forward.  I forgot to mention that the news article also noted that a second Millennium Development Goal — halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water — has been met five years ahead of its 2015 timetable. This news came in a joint report by the United Nations Children’s Fund and the World Health Organization.  In a briefing at the United Nations today, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, discussed the two achieved goals and these related points:  Third, the world has made progress in driving down tuberculosis, with 40 percent fewer deaths compared to 1990, and global malaria deaths have declined by nearly a third over the past decade.  Fourth, we now see near parity in primary education between girls and boys.  Fifth, we have achieved the MDG target of significantly improving the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers – ten years in advance of the 2020 deadline.  These are major achievements. Nonetheless, big challenges remain. The global figures mask massive disparities between and within regions and countries.  Only 61 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa have access to improved sources of water, while the level in most other regions is 90 per cent or higher.  Furthermore, with 2.5 billion people lacking improved sanitation, the world is unlikely to meet the MDG sanitation target. Lack of sanitation is also a major obstacle to girls’ school attendance.  Many people who have escaped extreme poverty are still vulnerable. Their incomes have not risen sufficiently to protect them from shocks, such as the impending food crisis in the Sahel region.  Hunger remains a global challenge. Hundreds of millions of children are undernourished. Stunting affects almost 200 million children worldwide.  And the absolute numbers of people living in slums continues to grow. But today’s figures tell us that the MDGs can be achieved – and more.  I do see another frontier. As you may recall, I’ve proposed that folks consider a new set of goals for the world’s top billion, as well.  In 2010, I ran that notion by Kenny, who responded this way:  I like that idea — moving somewhat towards a Hippocratic oath with regard to natural resources might be a start, and then maybe thinking more substantively about maximizing equality of opportunity, and then thinking about swapping out work for leisure…  You could call the trait “Whole Earth Discipline,” to purloin a phrase from Stewart Brand.  Essentially, and at the global scale, can we learn to reach for an apple when we crave a cookie?
An economist explores how deep poverty continued to shrink during and after the worst global downturn in decades.