You keep talking about something completely different. The question wasn&#x27;t based on the US standard and it didn&#x27;t ask about absolute numbers. It asked about the proportion of people living in extreme poverty as defined by the WB, and their answers are completely wrong. And I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s an American thing, ignorance about development issues is pretty widespread. Ask people how much they think the government spends on humanitarian&#x2F;development aid and they&#x27;ll say something like 25-30%, when it&#x27;s about 0.18% of gdp in the US. But again it&#x27;s not uniquely American. In the Netherlands they say ±6% when it&#x27;s really about an order of magnitude less (just under 0.7%) for example, most people are unaware it&#x27;s that low or that it has been lowered in recent years. Better yet though, the study that shows that only 5% of Americans knew the right answer was done in Sweden and Norway, too. While they do a bit better, not by much getting it right about 20% of the time, and wrong 80% of the time. (and as Hans Rosling would say, a monkey doing this test would be about 50% more accurate as an average Norwegian or Swede).<p>Now it&#x27;s a fair point, we can argue about the definitions of income all day and change definitions and have different answers that may not be very meaningful, I agree with you there. But just look at one indicator of poverty which has much less ambiguity as a statistic: child mortality under five. Kids who die, there&#x27;s not a lot of room to juggle with definitions or semantics here. It&#x27;s  caused by societies with deeply entrenched poverty, societies that due to their poverty struggle to provide adequate healthcare, food, clean drinking water, education to parents, safe living environments etc etc. And if we look at child mortality, it more than halved since 1990, despite a much bigger population. It&#x27;s now around 16 thousand per day, an astonishing number, but think about what it means, it means compared to 1990, about 6 million people (a holocaust-scale parallel is easily made) do not die every single year, year after year, that did die in 1990. That&#x27;s an insane achievement and it&#x27;s contrary to our public sentiment that looks at Ebola and ISIS and thinks the world is on fire and on the decline, when it&#x27;s never been better. There are many more of such statistics we can look at, and they&#x27;re not all expressed in some definition of poverty that changes to suit our desires. We also measure poverty in things like literacy rates, in things like the proportion of the population that has access to a toilet, or electricity, or a loan. Across the board the improvements are substantial, obviously never good enough and perpetually unable to meet our desire to solve every problem yesterday, but in the context of enormous challenges the progress we&#x27;re seeing on tons of development indicators is truly inspiring and optimistic.