The Lie of Global Prosperity: How Neoliberals Distort Data to Mask Poverty and Exploitation - Softcover

Donnelly, Seth

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9781583677650: The Lie of Global Prosperity: How Neoliberals Distort Data to Mask Poverty and Exploitation

Synopsis

A deconstruction of the neoliberal placations about global capitalism, exposing the inequalities of global poverty

“We’re making headway on global poverty,” trills Bill Gates. “Decline of Global Extreme Poverty Continues,” reports the World Bank. “How did the global poverty rate halve in 20 years?” inquires The Economist.

Seth Donnelly answers: “It didn’t!” In fact, according to Donnelly, virtually nothing about these glad tidings proclaiming plummeting global poverty rates is true. It’s just that trend-setting neoliberal experts and institutions need us to believe that global capitalism, now unfettered in the wake of the Cold War and bolstered by Information Technology, has ushered in a new phase of international human prosperity.

This short book deconstructs the assumption that global poverty has fallen dramatically, and lays bare the spurious methods of poverty measurement and data on which the dominant prosperity narrative depends. Here is carefully researched documentation that global poverty—and the inequalities and misery that flourish within it—remains massive, afflicting the majority of the world’s population. Donnelly goes further to analyze just how global poverty, rather than being reduced, is actually reproduced by the imperatives of capital accumulation on a global scale. Just as the global, environmental catastrophe cannot be resolved within capitalism, rooted as it is in contemporary mechanisms of exploitation and plunder, neither can human poverty be effectively eliminated by neoliberal “advances.”

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About the Author

Seth Donnelly is a public high school teacher in the Bay Area of California, where he has taught social studies for nearly two decades. This is his first book.

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Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9781583677667: The Lie of Global Prosperity: How Neoliberals Distort Data to Mask Poverty and Exploitation

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  1583677666 ISBN 13:  9781583677667
Publisher: Monthly Review Press, 2015
Hardcover