Alston served during the apogee of the World Bank's triumphalist rhetoric on poverty reduction

It is still common to hear of a division between absolute and relative poverty. But poverty is always both relative and absolute. In a monetized economy, an individual’s relative lack of income can result in absolute deprivation. ($1.90, whatever it is worth in sub-Saharan Africa, can’t purchase three meals in most other parts of the world.) This is not reflected by the World Bank’s poverty line, one reason why its numbers are so low. In 2016, the economist Robert Allen proposed in an independent report that the World Bank instead measure poverty based on the resources needed to purchase basic necessities of subsistence. In theory, this would make the Bank once again recognize poor people in Thailand, Turkey, and Romania—countries where, according to the $1.90 line, poverty has been entirely banished.

the World Bank has been playing a shell game. It willfully concealed the real state of world poverty by legerdemain.

In July, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 30 million Americans don’t have enough to eat. The wealthiest large society on earth, built on perhaps its most favorable geography, is home to a mass of people living off tins of collected food. In the end, it is not the particularity of “Third World” poverty that matters, but the community of degradation the links the poor of the world’s periphery and of its developed metropolises. The Alston report is the most serious challenge yet to poverty triumphalism, to the political apologias that it has supported, and to the fiction that economies of massive inequality are destroying poverty rather than destroying the poor. The most dangerous effect of the happy talk about eradicating poverty is the complacency it encourages. It gives a blessing to the system that promises more of the same.

badly designed American sportswear made by East Asian factory workers is the uniform of the urban poor, a surer class marker than anything mandated by Medieval sumptuary laws.