> no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased even as population increased
Surely not based on any way of measuring it, since in some reasonable definitions you could say there's 1.5bn people living in poverty right now and only 1bn total humans existing two centuries ago.
I mean, If you want to be pedantic you could define poverty in such a relative way that we’re all poor compared to Musk and Bezos. But I think you’d be surprised how much you have to inflate the definition of poverty to still fit 1.5 billion people into it. It’d certainly be the richest definition of poverty the world’s ever seen, with the lowest numbers of starvation, malnutrition, infant mortality, etc
Just put off curiosity, it looks like only 689 million are "living in extreme poverty" but 1.3 billion people are "multidimensionality poor" which seems to be trying to capture some the things you're talking about.
Surely not based on any way of measuring it, since in some reasonable definitions you could say there's 1.5bn people living in poverty right now and only 1bn total humans existing two centuries ago.