Exaggerated or False Praise is Often Self-Defeating and Sometimes Pernicious

My wife grew up hating the sport of tennis. As a 1970s teenager, she naturally rebelled against any dress code, but she especially hated the pretentious theatrics of wearing all white on the tennis courts of the club her parents belonged to. But it was the tennis pro that really ruined tennis for her. My wife was a beginner, and the pro would give her effusive praise for virtually any shot she hit over the net. She would look at the players on adjacent courts, see what they were capable of, and conclude that the pro’s praise for her shots were so extravagantly phoney that it turned her stomach. She became the Holden Caulfield of the Sunningdale Country Club.

My son Andrew inherited some of my wife’s extreme disdain for phoniness. Once as a ten year old Little Leaguer playing third base, he fielded a normal ground ball and threw the runner out at first. The assistant coach praised his play. Andrew shrugged and said, “Routine Play.” The eager coach was startled at this response. “Routine Play! From now on, we’re gonna call you “Routine Play Andrew.” Of course, the ungainly nickname didn’t stick, but the incident can still make Andrew and I laugh twenty years later.

(I can’t recall a childhood story about myself receiving exaggerated praise. Perhaps praise was rare enough that my hunger for it led me to swallow it whole without any thought that it might be over the top.)

Sometimes unwarranted and false praise can make both the giver and receiver look ridiculous. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, George Bush’s errant praise for the FEMA leader’s disaster relief effort that was itself a disaster became infamously immortalized by the phrase “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”  (12 second clip at bottom)

Statistics as well can promote false praise, and here’s where I swerve (awkwardly, perilously) to consider a topic that approaches, if not topples over, the brink of dissonance given that this post began with an anecdote set at a country club.

The statistic I have in mind is the oft repeated claim that extreme global poverty is being eradicated and that it is one of the greatest human achievements of our time. Credit is usually given to the spread of Western capitalism. It is self-praise on a monstrous scale. As a beneficiary of and believer in the capitalist system, I had embraced this feel-good “fact” without questioning the statistical methods that lie behind it.

Then I came across a devastating 2020 report, “The Parlous State of Poverty Eradication” by Philip Alston (link at the bottom).

Alston was the UN Special Rapporteur for Extreme Poverty and Human Rights. While I don’t share all of his policy prescriptions, Alston opened my eyes to the bizarrely farcical way that extreme poverty is measured.

That measurement is “calculated” by the World Bank, it is accepted as the standard by the world community to assess extreme poverty, and it is set at about $2 per day. That amount was generated by taking the average subsistence needs (presumably to stay alive) of fifteen of the world’s poorest countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and then translating those subsistence needs into US dollar purchasing parity across the world.

If it sounds confusing and circular, that’s because it is.

It is this $2 per day standard that is used to gauge how many people live in extreme poverty. The $2 standard’s capriciousness is the lesser of its flaws, the main one being its heartbreakingly low threshold. This is the standard used to report that extreme global poverty has fallen from 36% in 1990 to 10% currently and that during that time a billion people have been lifted out of poverty (of which 750 million live in China.) This is the standard that compares to the American poverty threshold definition of about $35 per day, including $5 per day for food alone.

However you think about it, $2 per day is staggering low, a level of income and support that dooms human beings to live a dismal and dreadful existence devoid of dignity. As you might expect, when the extreme poverty line is raised to a more realistic, yet still subsistence level, the rate of global poverty eradication progress falls off drastically. Compared to a 1990 to 2020 decline from 36% to 10% and a billion people “lifted” using the World Bank’s $2 a day threshold, if one uses a threshold of $7 a day, during that same timeframe the number of extremely poor people stayed constant at about 3.5 billion with the percentage declining based on population growth.

In any event, poverty should never be measured solely, or even mainly, on absolute terms. It is human nature to compare our lot with that of others. It is also human nature to compare our lot with what is possible. So, no more false talk of mission accomplished in eradicating extreme poverty or self-congratulatory drivel about our great achievements for the global poor. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and face the truth: the majority of people on this globe live in a state of poverty that would be horrific to Americans. Let the reality chase away our complacency.

And let’s face this truth; the world is rich enough to do magnitudes more to address extreme poverty in the decades ahead.

Exactly how?  I don’t know.

But I know the right answers can only emerge once we’re honest about the facts.

Let me give Philip Alston, the UN Rapporteur, the last words, which are also the concluding words of his report.

“Poverty is a political choice and will be with us until its elimination is reconceived as a matter of social justice. Only when the goal of realizing the human right to an adequate standard of living replaces the World Bank’s miserable subsistence line will the international community be on track to eliminate extreme poverty.”

https://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Alston-Poverty-Report-FINAL.pdf