Max Roser is right - we need to make the world bourgeois

Max Roser - of Our World in Data - suggests in the New York Times that we should start to have a different poverty measure. We disagree with one word there, poverty - the new measure is absolutely fine by us.

Taking these references into account, my suggestion is to set a higher poverty line at $30 per day.

The aim, of course, is to set a target that we all then strive to beat. As with that Millennium Development Goal of halving $2.15 per day absolute poverty. You know, the one MDG over achieved and early by allowing free market capitalism to go out and forcefully prod butt.

Now, we’re a bit nervous about the $30 a day becoming the new “poverty”. Because we’ve all seen how renaming poverty has led to disaster. Poverty used to be, domestically, an absolute measure, like that $2.15. Then it got changed to a relative measure of 60% of median household income. Which isn’t a measure of poverty, at all, it’s a measure of inequality. And no, for all the bleating, it is not true that poverty and inequality are the same thing. We can, now, as a result of this change, end up with poverty being recorded as decreasing even as all get poorer. A truly decent recession would do that, collapse inequality so lower recorded poverty even as the poor themselves actually had less.

So, let’s not call that $30 a day poverty, let’s call it what it is - petit bourgeois. For that is the realm of that state, three squares, change of clothes, roof over head, the petit bourgeois lifestyle aimed at by millennia of human effort.

Of course, as with the MDG, once we achieve that we’re going to have to set ourselves another target. Which we suggest is the Bourgeois Line. $100 a day. Per person, PPP adjusted, for everyone on the planet. Roughly, and approximately (very approx) the average British lifestyle today, perhaps a little ahead, for all 8 billion humans. We do think it will be a better world. And just think of the joy at insisting to all the socialists that we’re only trying to make the world entirely bourgeois, eh?

And there is another little joy here too. This is entirely and wholly achievable. We get that from the IPCC models about climate change in the SRES. If we have globalised capitalism and free markets then we might have climate change problems and we might not - that depends upon fossil fuel use or not (A1FI or A1T in the scenarios). But what we’ll definitely get is everyone on about current British living standards - no, really, globally.

So, you know, we let rip with that globalised capitalism, free markets and reach the Bourgeois Line. Probably better to do it without the climate change but that’s eminently possible. Isn’t that a plan?

And think how many socialist, communist, degrowth and doughnut noses we can put out of joint by insisting on this nefarity, the aim of making all of everyone as rich as we are.

Tim Worstall