RON BAILEY LOOKS AT Global Poverty Decline Denialism.

Some gloomsters perversely refuse to acknowledge when a glass is even half empty, especially when doing so cuts against their ideological sensitivities. One ploy is to pour the data into a bigger glass and hope that no one notices. London School of Economics anthropologist Jason Hickel has given us a near-perfect example of this sort of sleight-of-hand in Guardian column headlined “Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong.”

At this month’s meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davis, Gates cited data that show the proportion of people living in extreme poverty declining from 94 percent in 1820 to only 10 percent today. “The claim is simple and compelling,” asserts Hickel. “And it’s completely wrong.”

Actually, it’s Hickel who gets it entirely wrong. . . .

So what do the “real data” on poverty tell us? Starting with that $1.90-per-day measurement, the level of extreme poverty fell from 42.2 percent of the world’s population in 1981 to 8.6 percent in 2018. In 1981, 1.9 billion people lived on less than $1.90 per day; in 2018, the number was around 660 million.

Don’t like that metric? The World Bank has adopted two additional poverty threshold measures at $3.20 and $5.50 per day per person. They too are falling.

Lefties need poor people, which is why they never actually do anything useful about eliminating poverty. It also explains their bitter hatred of the middle class.