Designed by the rich for the rich, the national and international rules of our world are stacked against the poor, and they are falling ever farther behind. Our politicians keep telling us that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are the greatest concerted effort against poverty in the history of humankind and have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The truth is far less inspiring. Instead of taking pride in slight improvements, we should be ashamed of the massive persistence of severe poverty that is today so easily avoidable through small reductions in global inequality. The richest 1% of humanity now own 48.2% of global private wealth; the poorer half own just 0.7%, as much as the world’s 66 richest billionaires.

According to the World Bank, the success of the MDGs occurred mainly in China, where the number of those living on less per day than $2.50 could buy in the US in 2005 fell by 615 million even while it rose by 282 million in the rest of the world between 1990 and 2010. Moreover, the poorest 30% of humanity did far worse than they would have done if they had merely participated proportionately in global economic growth: their share of global household income fell from 1.52% in 1988 to 1.25% in 2008, while the share of the richest 5% increased from 42.9% to 45.8%.

The MDG top-line goal, to halve poverty by 2015, first came to prominence at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome. At that time, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) officially estimated the number of chronically undernourished people at 788 million, and the 186 assembled governments promised to reduce this number to 394 million by 2015.