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

Seth Donnelly’s new book The Lie of Global Prosperity: How Neolilberals Distort Data to Mask Poverty and Exploitation deconstructs the assumption that global poverty has fallen dramatically, and lays bare the spurious methods of poverty measurement and data on which the dominant prosperity narrative depends. Donnelly analyzes just how global poverty, rather than being reduced, is reproduced by the imperatives of capital accumulation on a global scale. Just as global environmental catastrophes cannot be resolved within capitalism, rooted as it is in mechanisms of exploitation and plunder, neither can human poverty be effectively eliminated by neoliberal “advances.”

Seth Donnelly is a public school teacher and long-time radical activist. He will be speaking about The Lie of Global Prosperity and discussing the current situation in Haiti (a primary focus of his book) with Pierre Labossiere of the Bay Area-based Haiti Action.