I can’t get on to the newint site for some reason so I don’t know if they say anything more in support of excluding China, but it doesn’t seem reasonable to ignore the progress made in a country that contains ~20% of the world’s population. But even if we do that, the progress made at the lower end of the income distribution is still significant, and ignoring it by adopting a higher poverty threshold doesn’t make sense to me (bear in mind that there would always be a higher threshold at which progress in poverty would look much weaker, and people suggest different ones all the time).
Of course, the choices about what countries/poverty lines to look at depend on what you are interested in. For instance, if you want to know the impact of global capitalism on poverty, you would not want to exclude China if you think that its rise was largely due to liberalization and trade with developed capitalist economies (I am agnostic about this). My sense of Rosling’s main point is that people were/are massively underestimating progress, even at lower poverty thresholds where it should be easier. This is true even if progress at higher thresholds has been less good. Whether Pinker’s book is misleading on recent changes in global poverty may depend a lot on how much China’s progress can be attributed to ‘enlightenment values’.
I can’t get on to the newint site for some reason so I don’t know if they say anything more in support of excluding China, but it doesn’t seem reasonable to ignore the progress made in a country that contains ~20% of the world’s population. But even if we do that, the progress made at the lower end of the income distribution is still significant, and ignoring it by adopting a higher poverty threshold doesn’t make sense to me (bear in mind that there would always be a higher threshold at which progress in poverty would look much weaker, and people suggest different ones all the time).
Of course, the choices about what countries/poverty lines to look at depend on what you are interested in. For instance, if you want to know the impact of global capitalism on poverty, you would not want to exclude China if you think that its rise was largely due to liberalization and trade with developed capitalist economies (I am agnostic about this). My sense of Rosling’s main point is that people were/are massively underestimating progress, even at lower poverty thresholds where it should be easier. This is true even if progress at higher thresholds has been less good. Whether Pinker’s book is misleading on recent changes in global poverty may depend a lot on how much China’s progress can be attributed to ‘enlightenment values’.
Also leaving this as a good summary of the debate https://www.cgdev.org/blog/12-things-we-can-agree-about-global-poverty