I&#x27;ll ask you this: how many of the ~1.5 billion <i>additional</i> people living in the world compared with 20 years ago <i>wouldn&#x27;t</i> be considered to be living in &quot;extreme poverty&quot; by US standards?<p>(I&#x27;ll give you a hint: more than half the world&#x27;s present population lives on less than $5 PPP per day, few of them by choice, and it&#x27;s not the richer countries where the rapid population growth is happening)<p>If you think people earning as little as the equivalent $5 of US-equivalent purchasing power per day are extremely poor[1], that&#x27;s more[2] people in extreme poverty than there were in the 1990s, despite all the incremental improvements to poor people&#x27;s average incomes across the developing world and stark improvements in a few rapidly-industrialising regions.<p>Where you draw the line <i>matters</i>. And the survey, notably, didn&#x27;t draw a line. I&#x27;m the last person to defend Americans&#x27; knowledge of world affairs, but their belief that poverty is actually getting worse in terms of absolute numbers of people subject to it is not unreasonable.<p>[1]which isn&#x27;t exactly an unreasonable point of view for anyone used to earning more than that per hour even whilst on minimum wage, even if there&#x27;s a lot of people in developing countries on that level of PPP-adjusted income that think they&#x27;re doing pretty well compared with their neighbours.
[2]edit: having had a play with the World Bank&#x27;s model, it  suggests that you end up with more people in poverty in 2012 than the early nineties if you set your threshold for extreme poverty somewhere between $5 and $6 per day of US purchasing power. The number of people below that threshold in sub-Saharan Africa - where much of the poverty relief narrative has focused - <i>has</i> almost doubled.