World is getting dramatically better, not worse. Some charts that prove it

This belongs into every statistics class:

* Use guesstimated data from a time when the basis for the data was not even established ("money" in 1820, when lots of people where still exchanging goods or labor).

* Just go back far enough that you can claim the "overall trend is positive". Ten years increased poverty levels in the US? Stop whining, it is still better than 56 years ago!

* Expand the scope of data collection: Just look how well China and India did. Never mind that their definition of "poverty level" is not even comparable to most other countries.

* Correlation equals causation: In a time when, according to some metric, global poverty decreased, so did infant mortality and infectious diseases (using data going back to 1900, again). School enrollment increased (now back to 1820 again!)

* Bury a controversial point at the very end:

    "The World Bank cautions that these gains
     have been unequal across countries, and the 
     OECD reports that in many cases, the growth 
     that allowed for reduced poverty was 
     accompanied by increasing income inequality.

     Still, the World Bank has set a goal of 
     eliminating extreme poverty, currently 
     defined as living on $1.90 a day, by 2030. 
     That kind of goal would have been unthinkable 
     in 1950, to say nothing of a century earlier."
 

The author should try to live on that $1.90 a day in every country for a month and then make this same "all is good" statement again, with a straight face.

The world is getting dramatically better for the same reasons that it is getting dramatically worse for most of the people connected to those who are reading this: globalization, and the hegemonies that are currently arbitraging it.

>The greatest gains in poverty reduction have come in China and India, which, together, have lifted just short of 1 billion people out of poverty.

As per wikipedia[1],still a long way to go

world had 872.3 million people below the new poverty line, of which 179.6 million people lived in India. In other words, India with 17.5% of total world's population, had 20.6% share of world's poorest in 2011

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India

The definition of poverty is whatever the government wants it to be to maximize their benefit in 'fighting' it.