The definition of extreme poverty is living under $1.25/day (2005 dollars). You'll note that the chart cited in the article is backfilled to 1820. What does it mean to be living in extreme poverty in 1820? Was 95% of the world starving every day? It's an extraordinary claim that would require extraordinarily good analysis to make, but hey, it's a statistic so it must be true! One way in which this statistic is almost completely likely to be bullshit is that most of the world was no where near industrialized in 1820 and comparing means of living under an industrial mode of production versus a subsistence mode of production is suspect.
Furthermore, much of the misery associated with unindustrialized parts of the world in the time period the chart measures was directly introduced by industrialized nations. One looks at unindustrialized areas of the world today and sees constant conflict, famine, and systemic societal dysfunction and extrapolates it backwards under the assumption that it is the absence of capitalist industrialization that sustains these conditions when in fact these conditions were created in the process of capitalist expansion that largely benefited a few hegemonic nations. Neoliberal ideology rewrites human history so that it can blame preindustrial societies for the misery capitalism and imperialism visited upon them.
> Isn't neoliberalism all about being free to be racist (or not racist)? Feel free to correct me about this.
Neoliberalism is specifically a reprogramming of the elements of liberalism to reduce all human activity to the actions of rational, atomized economic actors in a private market. The erasure of the commons, the marketization of social structures such as education, family structures, personal beliefs, cultural expression, the erasure of power relationships (because everyone is voluntarily participating as a rational economically minded being in everything they do), and the depoliticization of human interactions (there is no political, only the economic) are all hallmarks of neoliberalism. Another aspect of neoliberalism is a technocratic view of government which is antithetical to enlightenment ideals: The point of government is to manage and regulate markets and nothing more. Neoliberalism also paints its mechanisms, which are often driven by heavy regulation, police actions, and military invention as inevitable natural outcomes of human nature: in particular globalization is seen as an organic growth of human economics when in fact it has been fostered and directed by deliberate government actions, not laissez-faire economic development.
I don't know what you think neoliberalism is.
> I'm biased as a supporter of neoliberalism; but isn't the fundamental ideological goal of neoliberalism maximization of human freedom?
Sure, and the Party in 1984's ideological goal was to maximize freedom too. The material goals of neoliberalism are ultimately the class interests of the capitalist and owning class. The ideological goal of neoliberalism is to frame the world so that those who control most of its resources are naturally and inevitably the ruling class and that any objection to the sacred, natural law of the market is invalid. So, freedom is framed not as a political concept, but a purely economic one, and ultimately "I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve" (Isaac Asimov). Because the market is natural and inevitable, any structure it may have that disadvantages anyone to the benefit of another is natural and thus not an impingement of freedom.
> Neoliberalism is all about minimizing the coercive power relationship between the people and the government.
Somehow it does this by increasing the power of the police state, increasing military intervention in weaker countries, staging coups for violent neoliberal dictators in nations that reject it (e.g. Pinochet), increasing regulations to the benefit of the largest corporations, consolidating industries into fewer and fewer independent entities and creating a close relationship between politician, bureaucrat, security officer, and businessman.
