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

This is an important book. It systematically examines and deconstructs the World Bank and dominant narrative that global poverty has been declining. While there have been other critiques of the World Bank’s methodology of measuring poverty, this book unifies them into a broader, accessible critique that will be of use to revolutionary social movements and activists the world over.

—Christopher Feise, Professor Emeritus, Washington State University

The Lie of Global Prosperity convincingly exposes the spurious arguments used to justify economic policies that exacerbate hunger, misery, and environmental degradation worldwide, revealing the absurdity of the claim that poverty has been dramatically declining under global capitalism in the new millennium. This book is much needed in the struggle for a world truly free from poverty, exploitation, and the denial of basic human rights.

—Pierre Labossiere, Co-Founder of the Haiti Action Committee; Board Member, Haiti Emergency Relief Fund; Labor and Human Rights Activist

In this short, incisive, no-nonsense, and easily accessible book, Seth Donnelly demonstrates the great lengths taken by international organizations, such as the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, to disguise the dire realities of global poverty and world hunger through the flagrant misuse of statistics. Unable substantially to reduce world poverty under the current imperialist system, the dominant interests of the capitalist world economy seek to do “the next best thing”: to define it away, even while world hunger and deprivation increases. Reading The Lie of Global Prosperity will leave you shocked, angry, and, most important, informed.

—John Bellamy Foster, coauthor, The Endless Crisis

A bleak look at the propagandistic world of development goals and the international comparisons of poverty, hunger, housing, and health on which they rest. Global statisticians have ways of making the data talk, but as with all forms of torture, the result is not the truth. It is, merely, what the sponsor would like to hear, and what he would like the rest of us to believe.

—James K. Galbraith, author, Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know

Donnelly shows how militarism and neoliberal trickle down capitalism are continually putting millions in extreme misery and deprivation, part of the policies leading to the phenomenon of massive displacement and forced migration. It’s a book complex in its analysis, yet accessible to academics and activists alike. The Myth of Global Prosperity is a great contribution to all those struggling to make a different world.

—Judith Mirkinson, President of the Comfort Women’s Justice Coalition; author, “The Lasalin Massacre and the Human Rights Crisis in Haiti Today,” 2019 National Lawyers Guild report

Exceptionally well written, The Lie of Global Prosperity will prove to be of immense informative value for both professional economists and the non-specialist general reader with an interest in the subject. An iconoclastic and exceptionally informative study; unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library collections.

—Midwest Book Review