According to it, if you are malnourished and physically stunted because of it, you can still be classified as not poor if you have a phone.

Next the US will claim to have solved homelessness because you can’t possibly be homeless if you have a phone.

That post is extremely unserious. They have one dubiously sourced graph and a couple of numbers thrown in with zero explanation of how they arrived at them. It’s about the same level of effort as your average Reddit post.

I mean they don’t even bother to define what they mean by “extreme poverty” whereas the paper that i linked does. Of course if you play definition games you can adjust the poverty line until your data says what you want it to say. They’re also talking about percentages of population in poverty rather than absolute numbers.

You can go to the website of the World Bank yourself where they claim to have gotten their data from (though they never specify exactly which World Bank data set they used) and look at the charts, what they are depicting, whether they specify total numbers of people in poverty or percentage poverty rates, and how they change depending on where you set the poverty line:

https://pip.worldbank.org/home

For instance if you use a slightly higher cutoff line then suddenly the story becomes even worse without China, and the global number of people in poverty actually becomes higher rather than lower while the rates barely decline. On every chart you see one striking feature: the sharpest decline occurs in the East Asia Pacific region, most of that is of course China.

If raw population size were the only thing explaining why China has such a big impact on the statistics you would expect to see similar effects coming from India, but you don’t. And this is all assuming that the World Bank is an objective and neutral source of data whose pro-capitalist ideological bias doesn’t affect how they measure and define certain things.

Also, another thing to consider: a problem with just looking at the poverty rate decline is that you can have a “global poverty reduction” simply by population growth in the developed world. What you’d really need to do is exclude China and the developed countries.

(Figure 1: Simple Area chart)

After doing the math (below) and calculating the absolute values ONLY by using what was provided in the graph by OurWorldInData (pixel counting), I can get the above graph. I used a simple area chart for Figure 1 because it’s close in content and character to what they posted. The reason the left side of Figure 1 appears proportionally different to theirs is because their Y-axis is %, mine is an absolute value. The world population Changed which is not captured in their graph, but is captured in mine. A “simple” area chart is effectively a line chart, as each individual point is with reference to 0, and is therefore it is not suitable to showcase a relationship of each individual part to a whole over time.

Figure 1 can also be represented as Figure 2 simply by subtracting the two quantities to calculate for “Only China” and switching to a stacked area chart. A stacked area chart is what is used in the OP, and it is used to show relationships between two different quantities and also their relationship to the whole over time. On the contrary, a line chart/“simple” area chart is better used to look at different quantities in isolation.

(Figure 2: Stacked Area chart)

So, using ONLY their graph, and converting it to absolute values, we get basically the same graph as in the OP (only with 2 points over time instead of however many there are in the full dataset).

In effect, they’re using two clever tricks in the OurWorldInData graph - one trick is that they calculate from the perspective of World and World-minus-China and use a line chart two draw an equivalence between them. Another trick is that they use Share of Population (%) as the Y-axis, which is inherently problematic for comparisons, as (a) the world population changed (b) the chinese population stayed basically the same. This means that although the share might decrease, the absolute value (the raw number of people in extreme poverty) may stay the same (or even increase! though it didn’t), and finally © it’s easier for people to conceptualize an absolute count of individuals who were lifted out of poverty rather than thinking of percentages of population.

Their conclusion is that China was not solely responsible for poverty alleviation. No shit. Even the OP says China accounts “only” for 75% of world poverty alleviation, and uses $1.90 as benchmark for extreme poverty whereas this uses $2.15. If we do the math, using their benchmark and their data, China accounted for 62% of poverty alleviation.

For a website called OurWorldInData, they sure can’t represent data for shit.