The Divide

This book is like the movie Inside Job, but for world poverty.

It'll also leave you feeling angry and helpless to fix the problems, as Inside Job did.

A bleak look at the capability of humans to exploit one another on a mass scale. And the systems in place to mask and obscure the exploitation, twisting it into positive PR.

The author does suggest solutions to world poverty and the systematic exploitation of developing countries, but these solutions are not even remotely realistic and he knows it. This is because the aggressive capitalist system that's doing the exploiting has no incentive to change, even in the face of a huge social uprising. It has huge incentives to push even harder on exploitation, especially on developing countries where it can exploit remotely, from a distance, with debt and tariffs.

Those living in poverty in developing countries will sadly keep getting f*&ked.

Learned a lot about world economics, the IMF, world bank, and trade deals like NAFTA.

I think the argument he makes applies primarily to African countries. His arguments skew heavily to this demographic which the author then applies to “global” south. His arguments aren't wrong, just his generalizations.

For example, if you had resources to help the poorest people in the world, how would you employ it? Help the very poorest and the expense of other less poor? Help all poor people equally, albeit a little? Or help the most number of people? Many of the programs and efforts have been focused on helping as many people as possible. This means a disproportionate amount of aid will be in countries that have the most density of impoverished people to make that a aid the most impactful. Where are those people? India and China - the countries data which he often discounts and excludes to make his numbers more convincing. But organizations like the gates foundation focus most of their efforts there.

In fact, if you look at the data by country, it's difficult to say any country is getting worse - only that some countries are improving faster than others (eg China having improved dramatically). It might not come off as that in this book, but the authors own recent blog post agrees and poverty rates have been dropping - just not as much as he world like.

In regards to the World Bank's Metric itself, I think there is good reasoning why it could be changed, but it's less useful year to year if you change the metric (the World Bank's adjustment accounts for individual purchasing power, but tries to keep it unchanged). Also the metric improved by 4%/yr and not 2%/yr as described. The world bank also added other benchmarks with higher daily cost of living (the highest being $5/day).

There's one thing that I wonder, Keynesian Economic policies seem to help individual countries. But it doesn't stop foreign tampering. While Western Countries can and should stop this practice, it doesn't stop other countries from doing this (eg China and Russian). Because there are benefits to the country that tampers. The trade policies of the WTO or the World Bank are an attempt to minimize foreign countries from employing military action against smaller nations.

But overall, a good book to make you think.