https://www.politifact.com/global-news/statements/2016/mar/2... . You can debate how to define "poverty", and I'd certainly agree that somebody making $1.91/day isn't terribly well off, but real income has been consistently rising especially in the last 30 years.
Except a number of researchers and academics dispute that fact. Many say that it's a PR campaign for the World Bank and that it doesn't tell the whole story. If you raise the poverty line just a little higher to $5 then abject poverty has been increasing.
True. I'm very anti-capitalist but no modern anti-capitalist disagrees that capitalism has (and must, to work) given people what Marx called double freedom.
Because I view capitalism (or, strictly speaking, capital) as authoritarian (mandating human energy be expended to its ends, working in tandem with welfare states towards administered living), exploitative (the labour produced by wage labourers in aggregate is less than the aggregate profit created due to their labour) and allowing only an ever-shrinking space for genuine human expression (it degrades art by forcing it to be marketable and commodified).
I'm not alone in this; even pro-capitalists agree that a relationship can be exploitative even if both parties benefit in some way - they just disagree that capitalism is the cause of such a relationship which we can see the world over.
I think the argument for capitalism improving peoples' lives by measurable degree is a valid one, but it is only as valid as the argument that feudalism (for instance) improved the lives of those without any sustenance or access to land at all. I think we have the capability to do better than pursuit of profit.
But how specifically do you think we can do better? Can it be done without a different kind of human being that does not pursuit his own self-interest?
Really?
I've seen this claimed but I've never seen it substantiated.