Well that's half his argument on the stats: the other half suggests that even assuming modern figures are accurate it's tendentious to claim that people are no longer in poverty simply because their estimated incomes have reached the heady heights of ~$2 in US purchasing power per day, and implies the low level of poverty line has been deliberately selected to paint a rosy picture. There's little doubt that many other indicators are moving in positive directions but it's rather less clear that education and healthcare improvements are the product of the benefits of increased local market competition and global capital mobility (the author attributes them to state spending and [slow] adoption of technological advances the developed world saw a long time ago). That becomes important when one notes that the proportion of the world earning less than $10 per day is actually rising (due in part to population growth being boosted by increased survival rates) despite developing and middle income countries being better educated and more productive than ever before. Again, there are tenable arguments that due to the weaknesses of PPP calculations, many living on $10 per day live lifestyles that certainly don't resemble poverty, but others do and the unavoidable shortcoming of methods comparing people with vastly different living conditions, expectations and means of earning them is part of the problem with pure Pinker optimism.

I'm also suspicious of apocalypse narratives and suspect I'd disagree with the blog author on many things, but I'm also suspicious of unqualified feelgood narratives in order to promote support for a particular world order