Bergoglio's numbers on the world's rich and poor
ignore the dramatic decline in poverty in the past few decades
January 25, 2019
The day Pope Francis left for Panama for World Youth Day, the who’s who of world finance were meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the “Magic Mountain” of the novel by Thomas Mann, a grandiose fresco of the twentieth-century bourgeoisie.
A glaring contrast, one would say - because this pope thinks himself to be quintessentially the pope of the poor, of the revolt of the excluded against the powerful.
In fact, however, the richest men on the planet and the powers of finance clamor to be received by him at the Vatican and to offer their farthing. And he receives them with open arms, heaping them with praises: from the magnates of Google or Apple to the president of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde whom he described as “an intelligent woman who maintains that money must be at the service of humanity.”
But that does not at all affect the dominant narrative, which sees this pope always and only on the side of the poor and the excluded. With a special preference for what he calls the “popular movements,” that are anti-capitalism and anti-globalization, especially in South America. He has convened and met with them repeatedly, regaling them with interminable speeches, thirty pages or so each, that constitute the true political manifesto of his pontificate.
For some time, this pope has been addressing the same message to young people. He calls them the “discarded of society,” the victims of a gradual impoverishment of the world, in which “the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer,” harping insistently on the concentration of wealth into the hands of the very few, while deliberately attributing poverty to ever-wider swaths of the world's population.
Of course, the Vatican media are acting as a megaphone for this narrative, especially now that
L’Osservatore Romano has also been brought back into line, and is now in everything and for everything with the pope.
The new editor of the pope's newspaper, Andrea Monda, gave ready proof of this alignment with Francis’s economic-political vision, in an interview with the famous American Protestant theologian Harvey Cox, in which Monda expresses full harmony with the pope's vision. The interview was headlined
“Popular religion, the only hope against the dominion of the god Market.”
The interview, published in the leadup to Francis’s Panama journey, is interesting for the replies, but even more so for the questions, all of them devised to support the thesis that
“the Market [always in uppercase] is a genuine empire against which men, or rather the people, must rebel and resist.”
But is that really the case? How do things stand in the cold light of numbers, those numbers which never appear in the discourses of the pope and of his communications personnel?
Because as it turns out, in reality there has never been, in the history of humanity, such a stunning decline in poverty as in the past few decades. [And the figures come from the international agencies with which Bergoglio has been in lockstep on vision and policy. One would think he ought to be, at least, consistent - but he always tinkers around with the truth )even Jesus's own words - to suit his purposes.]
Setting the threshold of extreme poverty at a daily income of $1.90, the World Bank has calculated that the number of those who are below this threshold plunged from 1.895 billion in 1990 to 736 million in 2015, in spite of the fact that in the meantime world population grew from 5.3 to 7.3 billion. Or in percentage terms,
those extreme poor who in 1990 were 36 percent of world population, have dropped to 10% twenty-five years.
Even raising the threshold of poverty to $5.20 per day, the drop is extraordinary. Especially in Asia, where those below this threshold in 1990 were 95.2 percent, while by 2015 they had fallen to 35 percent.
No need to mention that “the god Market” so stigmatized by the pope's newspaper and its editor has played a very noteworthy part in the reduction of poverty.
Of course, the inequality remains dramatic between that one percent who “keep getting richer” and the leftover 99 percent of the population.
But here as well things are not how they are said to be, at least in the United States, held to be one of the Western countries with the strongest inequality.
In America, the Congressional Budget Office has ascertained that if taxes and public subsidies are taken out of the equation, even the poorest quintile - the 20 percent of the population lowest down on the social scale - saw a 79 percent improvement in its income between 1979 and 2015. Just as much as the wealthiest quintile, if one does not include that one percent of the super rich which in effect saw its income rise by 242 percent.
If one then looks at the years closer to us, between 2000 and 2015, the figures belie the current rhetoric even more. In the USA, the income of the poorest quintile grew in these fifteen years by 32 percent, while that of the wealthiest quintile, including the one percent of the super rich, grew by 15 percent, more or less like the other quintiles of the population in between.
But the real figures are one thing, and the widespread perceptions another. The Ipsos Mori research center has conducted a survey in 28 countries from which it emerges that the widespread opinion is much more pessimistic than what the real figures say.
Just one out of five interviewees, in fact, is convinced that poverty has diminished.
This on average. But in Italy only 9 percent think that the poor are on the decline, a figure like that in Argentina. Where vice-versa, in both countries, fully 64 percent are convinced that the numbers of the poor are on the rise.
In developing countries, widespread perceptions get closer to the real figures. In China, for example, 49 percent are convinced that poverty is decreasing, only 21 percent think that it is growing.
As a result the expectations for future living conditions worldwide are better in developing countries, with respect to those in wealthier Western countries.
In Kenya the optimists are 68 percent, in Nigeria 67, in India 65, in Senegal 64, in China 58. In Italy the optimists are 18 percent, in Belgium 14, in France 13, in Japan 10.
Corriere della Sera's statistics editor Danilo Taino comments on this “crosseyed pessimism on the past and the future”: “We have before us a serious cultural problem. For the West and the countries of old wealth.”
He forgot to mention the Vatican and this pope.