Sage

You're completely wrong as usual, because you're driven by ideology & never do sufficient research to substantiate the myths you subscribe to . 1. The United States - the global superpower of free-market capitalism and home to the tech billionaires, Wall Street CEOs, and think tanks that promote this (false) narrative you're articulating - has some of the most severe poverty and economic insecurity in the developed world. 2. Over the last four decades, the vast majority of people lifted out of absolute extreme poverty lived in China. And China's economy is not a standard free-market capitalist model. Its poverty alleviation was driven by aggressive, state-directed industrial policy, massive public funding for state-owned enterprises, universal public education, heavily controlled capital markets, and centralized infrastructure planning. 3. If you subtract China from global data over the past 40 years, the remaining drop in global poverty rates is remarkably slow. In fact, outside of China, the absolute number of people living under realistic poverty lines across the capitalist Global South (this used to be called the 'Third World') has actually risen over certain periods due to population growth outstripping structural improvement. 4. If we use the World Bank's Baseline of 10% of people globally living under the official extreme poverty line, then about 700 to 800 million people are counted as poor. But a more realistic threshold of 50-60% is based on using a metric of $7.40 to $10 a day income - considered the minimum needed for a basic life expectancy, proper caloric intake, and infant survival. So, if we use this metric, then the number of people counted as poor is between 4.2 billion and 4.6 billion people. >>>When critics state that over 4.2 billion people live below a realistic poverty line of $7.40 to $10 a day, they mean that more than half of the entire human population is currently living in poverty. And the capitalist system is all but global - end of argument!