<i>&quot;Middle classes in the developed world are doing poorly relative to the richest in the developed world&quot;</i><p>This, I believe. Part of the driving force of the trends in global poverty is globalization. And despite what I said earlier about middle-class America, I don&#x27;t necessarily cry for the loss of overall wealth in this country, if it means greater equity for the rest of the world (I just wish the richest people in the world were paying a greater share).<p><i>&quot;global poverty is on a steep decline.&quot;</i><p>This is <i>highly</i> debatable. The data you linked to seems to be mostly based on the World Bank data -- a single, rarely modified, global metric of $1.25 (now $1.90) a day, using self-reported statistics. Meanwhile, regional context is critical -- for example, sub-saharan Africa has actually seen <i>increases</i> in poverty. In India and China, there&#x27;s good reason to believe that wealth inequality is <i>increasing</i> [1]:<p><i>&quot;the benefits of economic growth in many developing countries often accrue to the rich. In India and China, inequality has been increasing in recent years. From 1981 to 2010, the average poor person in sub-Saharan Africa saw no increase in their income even as economies expanded. Because there is no household data since 2012, it is impossible to know if these trends towards greater inequality have since changed.&quot;</i><p>Meanwhile, the metric itself is questionable (ibid):<p><i>&quot;Someone living today at the new poverty line does not necessarily enjoy the same standard of living as someone at the old line did in the past, however....Looking at national price indices rather than PPPs, half of the world’s population live in countries in which $1.90 buys you less now than $1.25 did back in 2005, according to a paper released this week by Sanjay Reddy of the New School for Social Research in New York.&quot;</i><p>Even the <i>World Bank itself</i> acknowledges that poverty is on the increase in sub-saharan Africa (a region, which, by the way, has over a billion people, or 1&#x2F;7th of the world&#x27;s current population) [2]:<p><i>&quot;However, despite its falling poverty rates, Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world for which the number of poor individuals has risen steadily and dramatically between 1981 and 2010. There are more than twice as many extremely poor people living in SSA today (414 million) than there were three decades ago (205 million). As a result, while the extreme poor in SSA represented only 11 percent of the world’s total in 1981, they now account for more than a third of the world’s extreme poor. India contributes another third (up from 22 percent in 1981) and China comes next, contributing 13 percent (down from 43 percent in 1981).&quot;</i><p>In other words: it&#x27;s great that more people are self-reporting as living on more than this bottom-of-the-barrel income metric, but it isn&#x27;t really a counter-argument to my point, except to say that we&#x27;ve made the absolute <i>poorest of the poor</i> a bit less poor. Maybe. And mostly in China.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;finance-economics&#x2F;21673530-number-poor-people-declining-data-are-fuzzy-tricky-work-measuring-falling" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;finance-economics&#x2F;21673530-num...</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldbank.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;news&#x2F;press-release&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;17&#x2F;remarkable-declines-in-global-poverty-but-major-challenges-remain" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldbank.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;news&#x2F;press-release&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;17&#x2F;re...</a>