Addressing the Structural Causes of World Suffering

Abstract

Is human suffering increasing or decreasing, in aggregate? One way to answer this question is to look at trends in global poverty and hunger. The World Bank and the United Nations tell us that poverty and hunger have been decreasing over the past few decades. But this narrative relies on misleading statistics. In reality, the problem is much greater than we have been led to believe, with around four billion people in poverty today, and around two billion people in hunger–and the numbers have been rising over time, not falling. In other words …