Why would I need a citation? GDP has grown a lot, and yet there are more extremely poor people in the US. It is self-evident that were policy the same or similar now to the time before welfare "reform", that the proportion of people in extreme poverty would be similar. That's the thrust of your link, to boot. That's a policy problem if I've ever seen one.

No way that could have anything to do with what GDP measures? Does it tell us how big the cake is or how it is distributed? Does the logic of a capitalist economy have anything to do with concentration of wealth at all in your oppinion?

China has a lot of problems, for sure. But what's the alternative? Even Nick Kristof has acknowledged that sweat shops represent a step in the right direction when your only other means of survival is garbage picking.

Does that mean sweat shops are a step in the right direction or does it mean the alternatives suck?

Growth pangs of a modern economy hurt.

Yeah, sure. So do the contraction pangs. There's a lot of hurt built into the system, it seems. But even then, it doesn't hurt for everyone involved, does it? Almost as if the quite uneven distribution of pain and gain was somehow baked into the system.

I don't envy anyone who has to work in those conditions, but I'm sure they do it because they feel like it will provide a better life for their families.

Not starving is a better life than starving, so, yeah, sure.

I hope that going forward that labor standards and environmental protection become much more serious issues in Asia. I would love to see a day when goods cost the real cost, and not the highly externalized price that Walmart sells us shit for. But that's still a policy issue.

Why does "policy" always sound like something that has nothing at all to do with the actual economic framework it has to operate in? Last time I checked, it had already become quite obvious that policy largely follows the interests of the most successful economic actors. "Money = Power" is not some kind of unfortunate coincidence in a capitalist society.

Real economic development is a good thing for poor people. One doesn't have to be an adherent of trickle down economics to believe that.

No, but one can have very different ideas about what real economic development means.