The criticisms against charity and progress seem to be politically motivated. Human suffering can be used as a commodity to influence elections or promote specific ideologies. If you start measuring the suffering and show progress, you take away their commodity and thus become a threat. I.e. "how dare you say you're improving? There's still plenty of suffering going on". This position is a shift from continuous scale to simple binary thinking. At which point, anyone without new clothes and an air conditioned SUV is "poor".