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There is a strong consensus among scholars that the $1.25 line is far too low, but it remains in official use because it is the only line that shows any progress against poverty--at least when you include China--and therefore is the only line that justifies the present economic order.

[...] global poverty headcount increased during the 1980s and 1990s, while the World Bank was imposing structural adjustment across most of the global South. Today, the extreme poverty headcount is exactly the same as it was in 1981, at just over 1 billion people. In other words, while the good-n…

[...] Poor countries don't need our aid; they need us to stop impoverishing them. Until we target the structural drivers of global poverty--the underlying architecture of wealth extraction and accumulation--development efforts will continue to fail, decade after decade. [...]

[...] the discourse of aid distracts us from seeing the bigger picture. It hides the patterns of extraction that are actively causing the impoverishment of the global South today and actively impeding meaningful development. The charity paradigm obscures the real issues at stake: it makes it seem a…

[...] It's not that the $128 billion in aid disbursements doesn't exist--it does. But if we broaden our view and look at it in context, we see that it is vastly outstripped by the financial resources that flow in the opposite direction. [...]

[...] in 2012, the last year of recorded data, develo…