This is an issue where there is widespread misunderstanding. Here is a great opinion piece about how the way news is reported contributes to this chronic misinformation:
"One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years. Another 29 percent believed that the proportion had remained roughly the same.
"That’s 95 percent of Americans — who are utterly wrong. In fact, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty hasn’t doubled or remained the same. It has fallen by more than half..."
That's because the experience for the American middle class has during this same period been wage stagnation coupled with inflation in food, energy, housing, medicine, and tuition. The American middle class finds it difficult to believe things are getting better around the world because for them it's been getting worse since about 1970.
We are seeing global inequality fall to unprecedented lows. If you're in the top 5% (which the American middle class definitely is), then less inequality feels bad to you.
Global wages growth is quite high, it's just happening in places that need it way more than rich westerners do, as much as that sucks for rich westerners.
One of the biggest lags on wage growth for the bottom half of Americans is the fact that the rest of the world is now competing with them for jobs, and able to do so via price.
This won't last forever, because as those places get richer their wages go up, and "low wages" is their primary competitive advantage.
Some would argue that the two are linked... wealth from the middle classes being transferred to the extremely poor. The wealth of the rich doesn't seem to be shrinking.
Correct! Because of increased trade low skill workers in rich and poor countries more and more compete for the same work. This raises the value of low skilled workers in poor countries where their incomes gone way up but lowers their value in rich countries where their incomes have stagnated.
In my opinion this is a clearly a good thing as their are many more low skilled people in poor countries and they are much much poorer. So a few hundred million forego raises to lift more than a billion out of abject poverty. Seems like good deal.
The numbers I've seen are adjusted for inflation and show that real wages have been largely stagnant since the early 70s. There have been periods of modest gain, usually when the economy is absolutely roaring like the late 90s, but the general trend has been flat to downward. The lower you are on the totem pole the worse it's been: the upper middle has seen some gain, the middle none, and the lower middle has lost ground.
I'm also not sure that I fully believe the inflation numbers. It's not necessarily that I think they're fraudulent, but I don't think the methodology for calculating inflation has caught up with reality. The models I've seen assume inflation to be consistent across the economy, which may have been largely true in the 20th century but is true no longer.
The problem is that inflation since the early 2000s has been extremely uneven. We've had massive deflation in some areas, like manufactured goods. But necessities -- especially real estate, health care, and college tuition -- have almost hyper-inflated.
You can go without gadgets and toys but not without food and a place to live. We've had near-hyperinflation in necessities but it doesn't show in the stats because the stats average those numbers in with the deflationary numbers you get if you look at TV sets, appliances, and computers.
Real estate is utterly insane. I cannot even comprehend how it can possibly be so high. How can you have a market for real estate at these prices? Who's buying it and what parallel universe of limitless wealth do they come from?
I'm not talking about areas like the Bay Area, which has peculiar circumstances at work, or always-hot areas like Manhattan. There will always be "bubbles" of high prices vs. the rest of the market. If you look across the average of the market, real estate is crazy when compared to wages. I suppose it may be a function of historically cheap money causing larger home loans and jacking up prices, but it's essentially locked anyone out who isn't rich or willing to sign up for a crazy mortgage.
Some real estate is a positional good, which has the price set by how much money the richest people have.
There is no way around this. If everyone wants to live as close to (say) Times Square as possible, that land will be expensive.
But you don't have to enter that zero-sum rat race. There are lots of places to live that aren't the only places the very rich want to live. They still enjoy decent schools and low crime.
Some college education is positional, too. If you want "Ivy League Education" for your kid, well, there are just about as many slots as there were 30 years, but a lot more rich people, so the price will get bid up to infinity. Here the real shame is that the non-gold-star educational system is still getting more and more expensive, for many many reasons.
Interestingly, most of the Ivy League has incredibly generous financial aid packages, enough that most middle-income people pay zero. When I went to college, having had 2/3 of my tuition paid for by the college, I remarked that higher ed in elite universities was basically socialism subsidized by a very capitalist minority that was willing to pay any amount. Not a bad system, but it unfortunately only works at those institutions where rich people will enroll their kids at virtually any price.
Each of these markets is at the intersection of two or more inflationary forces.
Real estate and colleges are often positional goods - you can spend as much money as you can afford to live in a nicer house than your neighbor, or go to a better school than other job applicants.
Health care and college tuition are victim to increasing efficiency in making things like manufactured goods. If you're ambivalent between apple farming and practicing medicine, then the price of 2 hour doctor's visit is going to be approximately buyable with two hours of apple farming. And since apples per farmer is going up faster than apples per dollar, the cost of health care is going to increase over time relative to other goods.
College loans and mortgages are the debt society has decided it has to pay in order to fund retirement. There really isn't another way to save on a long enough timeframe for enough people (unless you're Norway, and you can just decide to sit on oil reserves). If you make things, they fall apart, become outdated, or require ongoing maintenance - either way, when society stops making them, they stop having them. They can trade these things for promises to make them later, which basically works.
>Real estate is utterly insane. I cannot even comprehend how it can possibly be so high. How can you have a market for real estate at these prices? Who's buying it and what parallel universe of limitless wealth do they come from?
From what I've read, the wealthy across the globe, especially from corrupt or unstable countries, are parking their money in stable Western real-estate. Some of it they proceed to rent out.
Anglo countries are particularly vulnerable since their real-estate taxation regimes hit buildings and improvements so heavily compared to raw land-value.
Wage stagnation would be expressed in constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars, but it's also quite possible that not all products are subject to the same rates of inlfation.
Energy, food, and housing costs have increased. Electronics, especially on a capabilities-based scale, have become profoundly less expensive, though when factored into the end-use impacts (communications, information, entertainment), the cost reductions are far less substantial.
Healthcare is another area in which exceptional inflation has lead to only modest improvements in overall outcomes, particularly life expectancy for those already receiving good results: white females and males. Much of the improvement in health outcomes in the US since 1970 has been focused on bringing minority populations' standard of care and health closer to that of privileged majority populations. Not that this isn't a good thing, but it's different from saying that the _overall_ improvements in delivery have been evenly distributed.
Don't pretend the other side is blameless for this widespread misconception.
The liberal rhetoric that paints a picture of a world full of poor people being sacrificed so that the rich can buy more private jets also contributes.
Upvoted this. Vast majority of people on "the street" are not your typical software devs/engineers who continuously use their brains to get ahead and have an analytical perspective on things.
I think another pertinent point would be that until currency existed poverty did not exist. Humans have managed to exist (and in many cases thrive) on this planet for at least hundreds of thousands of years, and by some accounts millions of years. Only the smallest fraction of that time has currency (and thus poverty) existed. Not that barter / exchange did not happen, but official fiat currency certainly didn't exist. And even if people possessed a commodity for trade, they didn't need to use it to survive.
I don't have numbers on it, but would love to know if any studies have been done. My hunch is that, at the lowest levels of income across the planet, actually "needing money" to survive probably hurts their livelihood more than it helps.
There might be people who think reducing extreme poverty is more important than telling the truth about it. That is certainly the case with several other issues...
It is far from clear that such a course of action is effective. Decision-making is rarely improved by inaccurate information. The belief that global poverty is worsening could easily lead to the conclusion that the problem is intractable, or that our efforts to reduce poverty are not in fact effective; conversely, the belief that poverty is being reduced can lead to the conclusion that what we are doing is effective, and we should do more of it.
It's quite possible for organizations to maintain two sets of "truth", one known to senior management and used for decision-making, and one known to the public and used for influence.
However, you cannot fool all the people all the time. At least I find the credibility of money-collecting NGOs and GONGOs so much reduced that I prefer to give my money to ones that speak the truth to me, not just the inner circle.
Rational people can't improve decision-making ability by losing information, but irrational people can. For instance, I may be less likely to do the dishes if I'm keeping score and realize I do them much more than my roommate, but if I don't keep score, I might only consider whether or not they need to be done when making the decision.
Of course, you can't really justify such a thing if you're trying to make a rational argument.
I'm not sure that there is a "high ground" for complicated issues like this. Everyone comes to the issue with preexisting opinions and will use measurement methods that conform to those opinions. So it is in a sense a reasonable shortcut to just ignore distractions like "truth".
That's just giving oneself an excuse for lying. "It's ok if I lie, because everyone else does it, even unconsciously".
Lying is one of the most insidious form of harm one can inflict on another human being - poisoning their ability to reason about the world. Lies add up, and also deal recursive damage - people spread them believing they've been told the truth, and spread inferences based on them.
Lies should never be treated lightly and excused with trivialities.
A baseball bat to the head makes your head hurt for a while. Lying makes hundreds of thousands of people refuse to vaccinate, which puts millions in more danger of diseases. Lying makes people die from refusing cures that owrk and going for glorified sugar pills.
And I mean lies from both sides - from those who will sell you the sugar pill and from those who represent the medical world and by lying and bullshitting made it hard to trust it.
Lies are toxic and accumulates in society. In an increasingly complex world that depends on mutual trust between people and organizations, this is an existential threat. I think that what's most likely to end our civilization is not war or disease, but this bullshit 'the world runs on' spilling over and drowning us all.
I agree that lots of lies will probably die out without causing direct harm, though honestly, IMO it's akin to most bullets shot in battle missing their targets. But people today have a habit of spraying lies on full-auto, and some of them (you don't know which ones) actually do hit something and start recursively propagating. Maybe if people had a much stronger reaction to being lied to, we could reduce the occurences of lying to only those cases where it doesn't matter in the long run.
I mean, look at the current state of science. At this point I think it's safe to assume that most (like 90%+ most) of recent soft science results is bullshit, and probably most of medical research is wrong too. And it all starts with some scientists fudging results, and then other believing them and building on wrong research. Pretty scary thing - it seems like we have so much, but in fact we have very little reliable results, and it's getting harder to tell the right from the wrong apart.
> A baseball bat to the head is far more harmful than most lying.
Only in the short term. In the long term, lies undermine your confidence, destroy your relationships, ruin your reputation, and can make you completely cynical about the world around you.
There's certainly a set of lies that each culture has deemed acceptable, but acceptable is not the same as harmless.
> I'm not sure that there is a "high ground" for complicated issues like this.
Well... yes, there is? In a situation where the facts are reasonably clear, such as this one, the "high ground" would be the one that's most in alignment with those facts.
Global poverty is both complicated, and isn't as bad as it used to be. There's no need to pick one or the other.
Other threads here are talking about "accounting tricks". Even if we could exclude that sort of thing, there are still questions of why press releases are issued, who issues them, when they are issued, etc. If politics are involved (and they are whenever taxes or donations come from one place and go to another) truth is a mirage.
My response to this is not to lie myself, or to myself... too often. b^) My response is to assume that everything I hear from everyone is bullshit, unless the source has obvious interests in telling the truth, and until I can confirm the story through other means. What choice do I have? I'm from Missouri.
Also it seems that many fans of "truth" have a hard time dealing with any truth that happens to be somewhat subtle.
Once you start lying, you have no way of knowing if your goal is even worth pursuing. You are creating an institution which will have the primary goal of perpetuating itself.
I'd say the 95% of Americans were utterly right if you define poverty as "a standard of living which anyone raised in America would consider to be extreme poverty", as opposed to "below the income threshold of the latest World Bank redefinition", in which a person earning 10 cents per hour needs only the energy to work 90 hours per week to bootstrap their way out of extreme poverty...
The point of the survey is that 95% of Americans thought things were getting worse or staying the same.
Regardless of what metric you are using, they are dead wrong. Things are getting much, much better. You are arguing about the specific definitions and qualifications of the terms. You are ignoring what the results of the survey are actually saying about the perception of Americans.
I'll ask you this: how many of the ~1.5 billion additional people living in the world compared with 20 years ago wouldn't be considered to be living in "extreme poverty" by US standards?
(I'll give you a hint: more than half the world's present population lives on less than $5 PPP per day, few of them by choice, and it's not the richer countries where the rapid population growth is happening)
If you think people earning as little as the equivalent $5 of US-equivalent purchasing power per day are extremely poor[1], that's more[2] people in extreme poverty than there were in the 1990s, despite all the incremental improvements to poor people's average incomes across the developing world and stark improvements in a few rapidly-industrialising regions.
Where you draw the line matters. And the survey, notably, didn't draw a line. I'm the last person to defend Americans' knowledge of world affairs, but their belief that poverty is actually getting worse in terms of absolute numbers of people subject to it is not unreasonable.
[1]which isn't exactly an unreasonable point of view for anyone used to earning more than that per hour even whilst on minimum wage, even if there's a lot of people in developing countries on that level of PPP-adjusted income that think they're doing pretty well compared with their neighbours.
[2]edit: having had a play with the World Bank's model, it suggests that you end up with more people in poverty in 2012 than the early nineties if you set your threshold for extreme poverty somewhere between $5 and $6 per day of US purchasing power. The number of people below that threshold in sub-Saharan Africa - where much of the poverty relief narrative has focused - has almost doubled.
How could you spend so much effort typing all of that without even bothering to read what I just said? Or are you literally incapable of understanding how irrelevant what you are saying is to the point that is being made?
You keep talking about something completely different. The question wasn't based on the US standard and it didn't ask about absolute numbers. It asked about the proportion of people living in extreme poverty as defined by the WB, and their answers are completely wrong. And I don't think it's an American thing, ignorance about development issues is pretty widespread. Ask people how much they think the government spends on humanitarian/development aid and they'll say something like 25-30%, when it's about 0.18% of gdp in the US. But again it's not uniquely American. In the Netherlands they say ±6% when it's really about an order of magnitude less (just under 0.7%) for example, most people are unaware it's that low or that it has been lowered in recent years. Better yet though, the study that shows that only 5% of Americans knew the right answer was done in Sweden and Norway, too. While they do a bit better, not by much getting it right about 20% of the time, and wrong 80% of the time. (and as Hans Rosling would say, a monkey doing this test would be about 50% more accurate as an average Norwegian or Swede).
Now it's a fair point, we can argue about the definitions of income all day and change definitions and have different answers that may not be very meaningful, I agree with you there. But just look at one indicator of poverty which has much less ambiguity as a statistic: child mortality under five. Kids who die, there's not a lot of room to juggle with definitions or semantics here. It's caused by societies with deeply entrenched poverty, societies that due to their poverty struggle to provide adequate healthcare, food, clean drinking water, education to parents, safe living environments etc etc. And if we look at child mortality, it more than halved since 1990, despite a much bigger population. It's now around 16 thousand per day, an astonishing number, but think about what it means, it means compared to 1990, about 6 million people (a holocaust-scale parallel is easily made) do not die every single year, year after year, that did die in 1990. That's an insane achievement and it's contrary to our public sentiment that looks at Ebola and ISIS and thinks the world is on fire and on the decline, when it's never been better. There are many more of such statistics we can look at, and they're not all expressed in some definition of poverty that changes to suit our desires. We also measure poverty in things like literacy rates, in things like the proportion of the population that has access to a toilet, or electricity, or a loan. Across the board the improvements are substantial, obviously never good enough and perpetually unable to meet our desire to solve every problem yesterday, but in the context of enormous challenges the progress we're seeing on tons of development indicators is truly inspiring and optimistic.
The question asked didn't mention the World Bank or any other definition of poverty, at least not judging from the results presentation. The World Bank, incidentally, has multiple definitions of extreme poverty, although all of them are lower than reasonable industrialised-world thresholds.
When around half the world's population's weekly purchasing power is, according to official World Bank approved statistics, equivalent to the purchasing power an American obtains after a five hours work on federal minimum wage[1] I don't think that Americans are unjustified in not knowing the "correct" conclusion that numbers or proportions of people in extreme poverty have "nearly halved" in recent years. If you think the unspecified extreme poverty bracket ought to include the ~50% of the population still stuck at $5 per day, it would have been literally impossible for the proportion of people in that bracket to have already halved in recent years.
I'd have accepted that it might appear a bit ridiculous for them to think that extreme poverty had doubled - especially given that it is so pervasive - except... they could have been inferring it from a doubling of "extreme poverty" reported in some studies focusing on their own country[2]. I assume results of papers like this get more mainstream coverage in US media:
http://npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief28/poli...
So perhaps some Americans don't think the world extends beyond the boundaries of their country; perhaps as you suggest they guessed on a multiple choice question based on having seen lots of reports on epidemics and war in the news. As I said, I'm the last person to defend the wisdom of Americans or any other type of crowd. But frankly, it's no less ignorant to insist that everybody should know "extreme poverty has halved" when the basis for that "fact" is predicated on the assumption that people earning $1.30 a day no longer qualify as extremely poor, even if other factors like working conditions have got worse. They're certainly right not to take that stat at face value.
We know medicine and access to it is getting better and that's having effects in lives saved. We know some of the GDP per capita increases are trickling down, even though our methodology for estimating how that affects the base of the pyramid is necessarily imperfect. But I don't think we're anywhere near the level of confidence of sustained global reduction in absolute poverty - as opposed to amelioration of its most acute symptoms - to be in a position to start celebrating how few people are really poor, never mind criticising the public for not being aware of it.
Not when - I really can't stress this enough - most of the world's population still have to survive for a week on the notionally equivalent purchasing power of an American working less than a full day's shift at Walmart.[3] That proportion certainly hasn't "nearly halved" and it's really not stupid or ignorant to think that the label "extreme poverty" could still apply to all those people
[1]if you believe PPP calculations, which are inadequate for this sort of thing since the weighting basket tends to include luxuries and so doesn't account for how cheap food and living has to be in most of the developing world. But again I don't think the inadequacy of measurement detracts from my point about poverty statistics being very much open for debate.
[2]using a different World Bank definition of extreme poverty.
[3]It's not that there's no validity to arguments that these people aren't extremely poor; I just don't see any reason why the argument that some of them are not should form the basis for widely accepted "facts". I've met people on that level of income in developing countries I wouldn't consider extremely poor of course. Then again, I've also met people literally killing themselves to earn $10 a day who I wouldn't consider anything other than extremely poor, even after accounting for it being considered a good income locally. Adjusted income-based measures of poverty don't really have anything going for them other than relative convenience.
Notably, assuming the linked PDF report of the survey is correct, when asking the question they appear to not have given any supplemental information such as a definition of extreme poverty. Which means the only thing the survey is good for is measuring peoples perception of what will likely be a very nebulous concept for most of them (e.g. I have no idea how much essentials you could get for $1.9 a day if you were actually forced to be cautious)
"More and more analysts, though, are pointing out that this claim is little more than an accounting trick: UN officials have massaged the numbers to make it seem as though poverty has been reduced, when in fact it has increased."
http://ssir.org/articles/entry/using_design_thinking_to_erad...
That article is highlighting deeply misleading facts. For example: "between 1990 and 2010 there was an increase of 371 million people living on less than $5 a day". But during the same time period, the world added 1.6 billion people, and even using your source's own data, that implies that the fraction of people living on less than $5 a day dropped from 75% to 60%.
In short, the claim that poverty is getting worse is utter bullshit. It requires either climate-change-denialist levels of willful ignorance, or a xenophobic definition of "poverty" that only counts people living in your own much-richer-than-global-average country.
Agan it probably depends how you define poverty. If you live somewhere where the land provides enough food for your needs every day, you probably don't need $2 per day.
If you define poverty as never knowing if you will have enough for the next meal then the $2 cutoff is again probably fairly irrelevant.
Did you factor in inflation into your calculation? By 2010 that 1990 $5 is worth $8.80. So you'd have to look at how many people were living on below that number to get your equivalent.
If i remember correctly, a 1981 $1 is now worth $2.50 if you factor in inflation so the fact they've chose to lower the bar at $1.90 reeks of politics.
You're implying that your baseline scenario is a constant absolute number of poor people in the world.
But that scenario is not really constant. If things are getting neither better nor worse, the children of the poor are as poor as their parents, and the absolute number of poor people keeps climbing.
If nothing got better, the number of additional poor people would have been at least 611 million, and that is an under-estimate because poorer people have higher fertility rates.
So yes, "only" 371 million more people in poverty necessarily means things are getting better, when sheer demographics without economic growth would have pushed the number 2x higher.
When it comes to policy that drives the funding of social programs and wealth redistribution, everything is an accounting trick.
One example is that the US Census Bureau's reporting of poverty statistics based on income has changed to NOT include the income of many benefits including food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit. If you include these benefits prior to counting the poor, the poverty rate falls to nearly zero.
This is why the director of the Census Bureau's report now answers to the White House instead of the Director of Commerce. Bending the numbers is essential to maintaining and expanding institutions.
The switch was made when Obama nominated Rebuplican senator Judd Gregg as Commerce Secretary. Given that Gregg had previously voted to abolish the Commerce department, it is likely that his influence would have brought the numbers in line with the facts. But, had Gregg accepted the nomination, it would have opened up a senate seat that would have been filled by the Democratric governor of his state. So to have his cake and eat it too, Obama took control of the number reporting. Gregg did not accept the nomination.
Talk about accounting tricks.
Another example is the disparity between counting income vs. consumption. Again in the US, when the money spent by poorer classes that are studied is counted it is far greater than what is calculated as their income (which is what policy is based on) This indicates that in-kind gifts and other non-reported income is substantial, but not counted.
Source? Because the Census Bureau also releases the Supplemental Poverty Measure [1], which amongst other breakdowns includes numbers that adjusts for taxes (if you're going to count for tax credits, you also need to account for taxes paid if the numbers are to make sense), housing benefits, and various in-kind benefits. It also includes various other costs. Table 4a on page 9 gives a breakdown on how different aspects of the Supplemental Poverty Measure affects the total number.
The lowest version you can get from that table is 11.8% - if you remove medical out of pocket expenses from the income subtractions before calculating the rate (in other words: if you assume people are perfectly healthy, directly contradicted by evidence, you get a more favourable number of how many people can afford to put food on the table).
I'm curious what elements you'd add/remove to the SPM to get to "nearly zero".
That does not at all support your claim "that the US Census Bureau's reporting of poverty statistics based on income has changed to NOT include the income of many benefits including food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit".
In fact, it specifically says that the definition has not changed.
It does claim as you do that the rate should be near zero, but it does not address the Supplemental Poverty Measure, that does provide a number of scenarios accounting for benefits in kind, and does not end up with numbers near zero when that is taken into account.
A good example is in medications. Lots of people go off medication because they feel better. But they feel better because of the medication. So they no longer feel better after they go off it.
Similarly, if all poverty reports in the US included benefits, many conservatives would say: see, we have no more poverty. We can get rid of these programs. But these programs were why we had no-one under the poverty line. We now have poverty again.
I hear what you're saying and with accurate numbers and transparent assumptions there can be a good debate about that.
But I don't think the census should be a political tool. If a person did not, in fact, spend a decade living in poverty thanks to the resources she had (either earned or given to her), why should the census report show that she lived in poverty?
Your basic assumption is that a housing subsidy from HUD is equivalent to cash on hand. Which would imply the US government is as efficient as individuals when it comes to allocating resources which I find highly suspect.
In the end a lot of 'government assistance' really lines other peoples pockets and only indirectly assists the poor.
The US government is a massive bureaucracy, which is bad for efficiency, but they also control the bureaucracy, which gives them an advantage in cutting through red tape, and they can get an economy of scale that an individual can't.
P.S. : This sort of argument would not go well on HN.
But you are right. Poverty is an accounting trick for everyone depending on how it suites those who are calculating it. In reality it is a hard thing to measure. But even the back of the envelope calculations would show that Poverty is substantially lower in India, China and many other countries which are known to be very poor.
No, I read it says that welfare systems successfully alleviate poverty, which is why quoting numbers prior to the application of those welfare systems is not giving a realistic assessment of poverty.
I.e. if a worker gets $5 in salary and $5 in welfare subsidies, it is somewhat dishonest to argue that because his income is only $5, the welfare subsidies are insufficient.
It's the net income after taxes and transfers that should be looked at when considering poverty, not pre-tax pre-transfer income (which quite astonishingly seems to be used fairly often).
I am saying that to the extent that poverty gets better, it puts at risk the funding (or at least the growth of it) for the social institutions and economic policy that exist for that purpose. Since social programs make up half of US government spending, I am pretty sure that makes them collectively the largest institution in the world. And they're going to defend their jobs and their turf proportionately.
Unfortunately I fail to replicate the assertions of the article, using the World Bank's povcal tool. [0] ( Linked in the article.) As far as my clicking around goes, it seems that a strong reduction in poverty is independent of the precise poverty line used. In particular, if I use a poverty line of $2.5/day (2005 PPP), the data shows a reduction from 75% of global population to 46%, contrary to the claim of the article.
So just a bit playing with the data seems to imply that the claim of a strong reduction in global extreme poverty seems to be warranted. (This is certainly not a sciency study...)
You need to switch to 2005 PPP [1] in order to replicate the number from the article.
The numbers then does show increasing absolute numbers of poor until 1999, and then a decline getting to slightly below 1981 levels in 2011. As percentage of the worlds population it looks a bit better.
Doesn't this basically just show that there has been inflation?
Why not use some stuff like infant mortality or literacy or deaths from starvation or deaths from communicable disease? You know, stuff that actually indicates whether someone is impoverished or not.
Doesn't this basically just show that there has been inflation?
No, because the poverty lines are all expressed in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Why not use some stuff like infant mortality or literacy or deaths from starvation or deaths from communicable disease? You know, stuff that actually indicates whether someone is impoverished or not.
Those measures are all improving dramatically too.
> the Bank shifted the IPL from the original $1.02 (at 1985 PPP) to $1.08 (at 1993 PPP), which, given inflation, was lower in real terms.
I don't understand this, and they don't explain. What is PPP, if not "real terms"? Plus I hate it when somebody makes a claim like this without actually showing the numbers, or creating a graph - it makes the claim less plausible than what they are complaining about.
Otherwise the article has valid points, mostly about watering down goals, and the lack of real progress in poverty reduction.
Note also that the OP is about the poverty rate, not about poverty being in decline, which is in fact increasing all too quickly.
I believe what he's saying is that 1.02 1985-dollars (PPP adjusted) is greater than 1.08 1993-dollars (PPP adjusted).
Clicking the first two inflation calculators I found on Google and assuming their numbers are right (they both gave the same result), it does seem that if they had inflation adjusted the number using US rates, the original USD 1.02 should have been USD 1.37 by 1993.
EDIT: It's of course important to keep in mind that inflation rates are different across the world, and presumably the world bank at least will insist that they accounted for real term price changes for the relevant goods, so I still don't know how relevant this point in the article actually is.
Hmm... seems like if you move a large number of people out of "extreme poverty" which was originally defined by the UN, and set at $1.90 a day by the World Bank, they're still going to end up under the "poverty line" of $5.00 a day as defined by your article.
So I'm not sure how this constitutes a "trick". You'd have to move those people directly out of extreme poverty over the $5.00 a day in your article in order to drop the number of people in poverty.
It's still frankly an improvement to move such a large number of people up the poverty scale. I'm sure i'd rather be living on $4 a day rather than $2.
Does not make sense. As someone who grew up in poverty in India which is also home to 17% of world population the poverty has reduced substantially over last 20 years post economic reforms.
There is no possible way I could think of how poverty could have increased. If we just look at China an India which is home to 33% of world population extreme poverty is down by 50% in whatever way you measure it.
For all the discussion (i.e.: heated biased arguing) about poverty, seems nobody has addressed an objective definition of what constitutes "poor". Why is the world poverty line at $1.25/day, but the US poverty line is 20x that? We need a quantitative analysis, starting with basic caloric/nutritional/BTU/water/power/data/etc needs (independent of arbitrary numbers imputed by fiat/floating currencies) for cost of bare sustenance, then work from there recognizing that varying geography, demographics, et al adjusts that cost, then admitting that different cultures further adjust those basic costs.
Without such objective analysis of basic sustenance, fudging numbers is trivial.
That's more or less what the World Bank is doing. The dollars per day are PPP adjusted, which attempts to account for all of those things you are talking about.
I guess there is lots of room to quibble over how objective it is, but it is at least starting from the idea of doing an objective quantative analysis of the issue.
Yes, exactly. The numbers I would like to see measured would be:
- percent of people who can afford 2,500 calories of food and 60 grams of animal protein a day (where afford has some standard definition, such as can pay for the consumption using less than half of their income).
- percent of people who have access to clean water
- percent of people with indoor plumbing
- percent of people with access to electricity in the home.
- percent of people who can access and afford 500MB of internet data a month
It is impossible to know what "$2 a day" actually means. The number gets adjusted for purchasing power, but there is an infinite amount of room in that calculation for governments to fudge the data. Many people in the third world can afford a cell phone, but not afford enough protein in their diet, does that mean they are richer or poorer than someone one hundred years ago without a cell phone but who can afford meat? There is no objective way to answer that question. Since I do not know all the subjective decisions made in doing the purchasing power adjustment, the ultimate number tells me nothing.
> percent of people who have access to clean water
This number is actually measured, because it is target 7.C of MDG(Millennium Development Goals). Lots of data at http://mdgs.un.org/.
Summary is that we are doing very well on this number. In 1990 it was 76%, now it is 91%. In the absolute number, 2.6 billion people gained access to clean water in the period.
Well, ideally we could measure and track the stats for both. Animal protein is generally a more complete protein. If we tracked just "protein" do we count incomplete proteins? Do we count textured vegetable protein?
Animal protein is generally both more desirable and more expensive. Generally animal protein is a complete protein source, whereas most plants are not.
You're right here. I don't think I'd use it for extreme poverty. I might use it as a way to measure 'the poor' though. Although, the relative adjusted cost of 500MB of internet data is going to vary greatly depending on the networking infrastructure of their country. It may not accurately describe the wealth of the people.
Honestly, I would take out the internet requirement. All the others can significantly improve quality of life in a home, but I can't truely say the same about internet access.
I'd love to hear the counterpoints, but I just can't imagine a farmer needing internet access to live a comfortable lifestyle, as opposed to clean water and electricity, which is necessary.
It's not so much about internet access, but information access (to wit: why public libraries were invented). Using his example of 500MB/month, that could easily cover a box set of the Foxfire books (extensive details on how to live off the land) one month, canonical classic literature in one's language the next, etc. Part of being "not poor" is qualitatively having the means to improve one's living condition, which very much includes means to learn how to improve.
A farmer who strives for self-sustainability will not need Internet access for comfortable life. But a poor person living in a city - trying to escape poverty by getting closer with society, not further from it - might find it pretty useful. Such people often spend big amounts of time dealing with government institutions, trying to enroll and stay enrolled in the local welfare and jobs programmes - in some countries having Internet access can significantly speed up/streamline this process.
In general, a lot of extremely poor people in urban areas suffer more from the lack of predictable time slots than lack of money. When doing multiple temporary jobs with flexible hours, adjusted at a moment's notice, you can't really plan anything ahead. You barely have enough time to do groceries, let alone pick a shop that has a given item cheaper, and forget about any service that requires an appointment. Internet access solves a lot of these issues by allowing you to do things a) at random hours, and b) without having to physicly go somewhere.
Also on-line ordering usually gives you cheaper everything; hell, even groceries may be worth getting delivered if it frees up a time slot during the day that could be better spent taking care of something else, or even playing with one's kid.
Then there are things like Craigslist and other benefits of instant, pretty much free long-distance communication. One could list on and on. But the main point is - in all but the few least developed countries, Internet access can give huge quality of life improvements to the poor.
Internet access could certainly help, for example, a farmer, as it could give access to information on better farming techniques, where to source better value fertilisers, where to get the best price for produce etc.
But I certainly agree that it doesn't play any part in the definition of 'extreme poverty'.
I was going to make a similar comment, but this boils down to information asymmetry. For how cheap it is to deliver reasonable Internet access to everyone, I put it up there with the same importance as most utilities. If you're building out electricity to a farmer, you can certainly add Internet infrastructure onto that for very little relative cost.
Why should giant corporations buying the farmers products have access to nearly limitless amounts of information, while the farmer is relegated to maybe an industry periodical and the local cafe gossip. That worked before the 1900's, but these days information moves too quickly.
So yes, I think Internet is probably not quite yet essentially a basic need to participate in the economy and society - but it's pretty damn close. And it's only going to continue to get more important as "old world" services are turned off in favor of those on-line. In my lifetime I will see the DMV close it's last in-person renewal desk. And the private world is already there in requiring online-only transactions to do certain forms of business.
I was going beyond measuring just "extreme poverty" to measuring general economic development. In the modern world, internet is really important because you can need it to do business, order products, look up information, get reading material, get educated, etc, etc. Many developing countries never had public libraries, or homes filled with books, so the internet is way of granting access to essential information in a digital form.
Mostly agree, but I would argue that requiring animal protein could be optional, especially with the follow-on climactic effects that raising so much animal meat causes. There are a number of cultures and sub-groups that are perfectly healthy without animal protein.
Where are your references that this, or some similar methodology, isn't how the World Bank arrived at its figures? Don't you think they would have thought pretty seriously about what an objective measure for "extremely poor" is? Perhaps $1.90/day is a statistically valid proxy when thinking globally based on their methodology, perhaps it isn't ~ I don't know and I'm none the wiser from your comment. And where's your evidence that the numbers were "fudged"?
You're asking me to prove a negative in response to me asking for establishment of positive standards. Sure, the WB probably has some well thought out criteria - and I don't know where to find them, and have reason to believe most everyone else pontificating on the subject aren't sharing those criteria. I've not seen evidence ANYONE has worked out basic human needs to the point that anyone being given such satisfying resources can, and is, declared "not poor".
Of course you're none the wiser from my comment. It was a question (admittedly not bluntly phrased as such): what objectively constitutes "poor"?
Many in this thread decry the fudging of numbers in the discussion; I'd like something objective which can't really be fudged.
ETA: following another posters' suggested link, seems the WB admittedly arrived at that $1.90/day number by averaging the declared poverty lines of low-GDP/capita countries. That's not the quantitative objective analysis I'm looking for.
You make some great points that measuring could be improved. Never the less so long as their method remains consistent, it shows the world getting richer or poorer relatively speaking.
For all the antiglobalization sentiment, I can't imagine this happening without globalization. If the workers of the developed world had put an economic moat around themselves and preserved their trend in rising purchasing power and had wages increase undeterred by labor competition from both shipping jobs overseas and allowing mass immigration of unskilled labor, we'd not have seen these improvements and those places, given the pop growth they experience over the last sixty years, would have been severely more impoverished.
Sure, the poverty line is somewhat arbitrary. Poverty and general well-being are multi-dimensional concepts that are hard to reduce to a single number.
I think you're being a bit pedantic, though. The absolute number of those living in poverty can change with the stroke of a pen according to an arbitrary definition, sure. My interpretation is that the point of the article, and the thing that should be celebrated, is that life is on average getting better for the world community (even if only according to one metric).
I'm sure the data scientist in all of us wants to see "well-being" broken down by vertical. For one, I'm sure the data you're looking for exists, is likely accessible, and it would be intellectually satisfying to our curiosity (who wants to do the legwork? :)). Two, I'd be skeptical of the assumption that they'd show anything but a trend in the same direction (though maybe not all at the same rate).
Indeed, my next question would involve objectively differentiating the two. I'm starting with the presumption that being above the bottom line at least constitutes a sustainable[1] existence, if not a comfortable one.
[1] "sustainable" as in one can live indefinitely unto a normal lifespan, assorted diseases & incidents aside; don't confuse with "green" energy & resources.
Just guessing here, but it would seem reasonable to define extreme poverty as deprivation that substantially impedes one's ability to maintain a decent life expectancy. I might also include very poor access to (say) basic education.
'Poverty' is a rather broader definition, including issues like housing affordability, decent food variety, access to secondary/higher education, perhaps life stability (for example, no access to permanent employment).
Very good point, still, what does this include. I would think of extreme poverty as those who have extremely limited access to food, water and shelter. Fortunately that is legitimately becoming a smaller and smaller portion of the world I believe so this is a useful stat to track. Still, I have no idea if that's what's being represented here.
One could conceivably figure out a reasonably not-out-of-thin-air number for each country by cross referencing the items in an arbitrary basic basket package and supermarket food prices in each country.
I think a per-capita statistic is a bit flawed in this case, although I understand why they use it -- the math is very simple.
The problem with per-capita measurement of income for very poor people is that what you really care about is per-family income because of the economies of scale involved in so many of the goods they consume -- cooking fuel, etc.
In places where poverty like this exists, a family of 8 living on $8/day ($1 per capita) is often better-off than a family of 4 living on $5/day ($1.25 per capita).
Regardless of whatever methodological flaws exist in various metrics, this is a positive trend that is (hopefully) only going to get better as technology increases the efficiency of various systems of distributing goods and services.
It's incredibly exciting to think that an end to global poverty could be in sight.
Shameless plug: GiveWell [0] and Giving What We Can [1] are non-profits that evaluate the effectiveness of development and global poverty charities. Some are hundreds or thousands of times as effective as others when it comes to saving and extending lives.
Those groups help you decide where your money should go to maximise your impact.
Is this the primary force behind a change such as this?
After watching the documentary called 'Life and Debt', I found the idea of "free trade" in poorer countries to be very different than i would have first thought. It seems free trade in the case of Jamaica resulted in a large import of goods, to the point where local Jamaica could not compete with the huge multinational corps from other countries.
People tend to complain about the obvious effects of free trade (i.e., businesses folding to competition), but they overlook the less obvious, more spread out effects (i.e., people being able to afford more goods, and other businesses being able to purchase more materials and having access to larger markets).
As in the 1800s, it's a good deal for rich countries and a bad deal for developing countries since their infant industries can't compete and so never get off the ground.
China was wise not to follow this path. As was Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong.
I skimmed that article for evidence of your claim that free trade caused the Irish potato famine, but couldn't find any. It seems to discuss "[the assumption] that, had this event [the Irish Potato famine] not happened, Britain would not have repealed the Corn Laws at that time, and thus, would not have taken steps towards free trade in subsequent years" and concludes that "Britain would have moved towards Free Trade in 1846-1860 even if the Irish Potato Famine had not occurred".
The article doesn't seem to concern itself with that aspect at all? And the famine predates the repeal of the corn laws, to the point where the famine was an explicitly cited motivation for the repeal.
It's not just beats headphones we're talking about here. When you visit a school classroom, you expect to see books, pens, paper, chairs, desks, art supplies... those are all 'goods'. Affordable access to them is a very positive thing.
that's a completely fair and valid perspective. i just want to make sure that generic "goods" aren't what we think are going to cure the ailments of those who are dealing with poverty. additionally, poverty can also be a symptom of systematic class/social warfare (though not always). in these countries that we're hoping free trade can infuse with goods, we need to make sure that we've addressed the ruling structures such that these goods are permitted for appropriate use.
What you seem to say in a somewhat roundabout way is that there's badness in the world that isn't poverty, or directly caused by poverty. Which is correct and totally uncontroversial.
It only benefits consumers if they still have jobs, and assuming the jobs still pay well enough for the cheaper goods to actually also be cheaper in relative terms.
That may be the case, and one would hope the local businesses are able to adjust or that new jobs follow. But it is certainly not automatically the case that having your local market flooded with cheaper goods is better for consumers.
Choose your favorite country that isn't Zimbabwe or North Korea, and then find a good or service that people (choose your favorite %-ile) have less of today than they did before free trade.
If you can't find such a good or service, then free trade has helped consumers.
You can only validly make that assertion if you can find somewhere where all else has held equal. Otherwise you'd be making a logical leap without accounting for a bunch of confounding factors.
I also said nothing about whether or not free trade in general is beneficial. What I addressed was the unsupported blanket assumption that free trade will automatically benefit consumers without any kind of qualifications.
As I said: It very well may do, but for that to be true in any specific case, then a number of other factors needs to line up as well.
Even if the competition beat you on everything. Freeing the economy and focusing on the product you make best, even if competition beat you on that product it is still better overall.
I don't know the answer to the convenience of free trade, but I think there is different kinds of international trade and we talk about all them as if they are the same thing.
For instance, the more successful economies Japan, Germany, China, Korea didn't follow the same model of free trade that has been "suggested" to the South American countries. In fact, in the eighties everybody complained how difficult was to access to the Japanese markets.
The other thing is that is very different free trade of commodities vs. free movement of capitals but normally it's sold like it's the same. If you are in Peru is probably a bad idea get a lease denominated in U.S. dollars, no matter how good the deal looks now.
The real question is, how did this change the overall population's well being in Jamaica? I think most of the time some suffers from the results of the free trade but much more go to a better state than before.
>Is this the primary force behind a change such as this?
I read this in many places, granted, they all may have some bias (You can make a search with "reasons declining extreme poverty"). But, I personally do believe it is the main reason.
Free trade is not the primary force. It's secondary behind more foundational liberal economic policies, those being property rights, rule of law, fair enforcement of private contracts.
Nay, a huge role. People who were far outside major economic activity can now participate in global markets, improving their ability to sell goods & services (and obtain tools & connections).
A few days ago I ordered & received a cheap scarf via mail. US$0.95 - delivered! from China! obviously whoever was involved didn't make much off the transaction, yet they WERE able to make & sell & deliver something to an idiot on the other side of the planet. Where there was no market before, Amazon & USPS & other businesses have pursued "globalization" to the point that a manufacturer & buyer a world apart could engage in profitable transactions.
The way out of poverty is capitalism, sellers & buyers making mutually profitable agreements, and globalization eliminating barriers of distance & borders.
Globalisation is absolutely vital in reducing poverty -- particularly in countries that used to be very poor because they were excluded from the world market, e.g. China and India, where a very large proportion of the world's poor used to live. Not any more.
Two days ago we had an article about this topic, maybe the same article?
This article claims they just changed the baseline poverty rate. I think they changed other numbers, but can't prove it.
Two days ago, I went to the world bank calculator and the poverty calculations were based on $1.25. I and other HN'ers noticed the calculator didn't seem to account for inflation.
Two days ago I played around with the calculator and used $1.90 and $2.00 as a "the input for the poverty line". I was getting final poverty levels that were doubling. With my numbers the poverty level was not below 10%.
I did the same experiment today, and someone updated all the numbers, or just changed them? Or, I my memory is wrong. (I have not confirmed this on The wayback machine.)
My point is two days ago at $1.90 the poverty rate was close to 20%? Today, my calculations are not close to what they were two days ago?
I'm always wary of the numbers that are put out. There has been long history of fudging numbers to fit a narrative. The unemployment numbers in the US comes to mind as such an example.
So, the question is how realistic is the extreme poverty line. And this doesn't help it much:
The World Bank first introduced a global poverty line in 1990,
setting it at $1 a day.
It was adjusted last in 2008, when the group raised it to $1.25 a day.
$1 seems like such a convenient number to pick!
An interesting graph will be to plot the extreme poverty threshold against inflation _in_emerging_countries_.
With the falling emerging market currencies and extreme inflation (hyper-inflation perhaps), I don't think that $1.90 a day cuts it.
WB fixed it in terms of constant International $, with base year 2005 - if I can remember correctly. So it's already inflation adjusted because it's at constant prices and not nominal prices.
Having said that, in most developing countries, being on the poverty line would mean that you have just enough for clothing and feeding yourself.
Nevertheless, it's exciting to see millions graduating out of it in just a decade. Specially for me, because I'm Indian.
Moreover, the choice between $1.00 a day and $1.25
a day (or even higher lines) makes no difference to
the Bank’s claim that measures of absolute poverty
have fallen in the developing world over 1981-2005.
Your point about the semi-arbitrary nature of the poverty line is good, but the figure is already inflation-adjusted. There is a general confusion on HN when it comes to real vs. nominal statistics. [1]
I find it's generally safe to assume that most of the well-respected development organizations are made up of smart people that know what they are doing and will not overlook something so fundamental as inflation, even if they do use statistics to advance their agendas from time to time.
Would the incentives of people working in well-respected development organisations be equally twisted to those of S&P etc before 2007? I don't think so.
> The unemployment numbers in the US comes to mind as such an example.
The unemployment numbers in the US are reported as such (ie: only reporting the number of people looking for jobs vs people employed) because they've been consistently reported like that since the late 1800s.
The "real" unemployment numbers are still taken from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
Thats a good measure, but I am pessimistic about poverty ever being rooted out completely (absent of a technological invention that creates abundant energy for very cheap, e.g. fusion, antimatter later on).
The reality is, poverty can be cultural. In the west a saying like "they can pay me little but I'll work even less" would be considered absurd. In certain countries - its a folk tradition.
Another problem is a self-inflicted brain drain. Smart people with potential don't want to live in festering shitholes where property rights are not respected, rule of law unexistant and hence economic opportunity absent.
According to this article what's the extreme poverty threshold for World Bank, after all? It says first:
"Extreme poverty has long been defined as living on or below $1.25 a day, but the World Bank’s adjustment now sets the poverty line at $1.90 a day."
And then, at the end:
"The World Bank first introduced a global poverty line in 1990, setting it at $1 a day. It was adjusted last in 2008, when the group raised it to $1.25 a day."
Their definition of poverty is earning below a certain dollar amount ($1.90/day).
Their measure of poverty has nothing to do with the access to quality water, quality food, land, quality of life, freedom, personal autonomy, health, safety, etc.
Many indigenous people lived on $0.00/day yet had a higher quality of life; before outside influences (i.e. civilization, imperial, western) disrupted their ecosystems & way of life.
As some of the quantitative metrics improve, many of the metrics (particularly of qualitative nature) degrade. Think ecosystems, our usage of resources, quality of life for the average person, etc.
> There are many other indications (such as infant death ratio) supporting this.
This is one of the many metrics that matter; much more than the percentage of people making > $1.90/day.
I would like to see some kind of metrics/information showing that quality of life of a person has been declining. Because I do believe quality of life has also been increased globally.
Edit: "quantitive" is replaced with "some kind of metrics"
Not really, if you look at the statistics of people who have had difficult births they're not much more likely to grow up to be disabled. Especially if you exclude certain categories.
Understand that information is lost in its translation to numbers. It's also interpreted to have meaning.
Also understand that values of those assigning the scores plays a large role. For example, an indigenous persob rating quality of life as a score is probably nonsensical to him/her.
all true -- scores are quantitative metrics though. And yes, rather imprecise and subjective, and a lot of information is lost at all stages. Is there a better way to compare things like a quality of life though? Hmm, perhaps something could be inferred from pairwise comparisons? There are many people out there who have experienced multiple lifestyles; alleviating biases would be really tricky though...
Right, but I think that's partially the point. When you try and boil things down to a simple number, you lose a ton of information. Perhaps it's not wise to do this extreme metric-izing as it will probably just lead to the metrics being gamed rather than actual improvements.
They were also living as hunter gathers in very sparsely populated areas. The earth can't support 8 billion people with berry gathering and deer hunting.
Very skeptical of this idea. Were more than 10% of humans were in "extreme poverty" when we lived as hunter-gatherers? Were all humans in "extreme poverty" at that time?
"Extreme poverty" is caused when capitalism invades an area, appropriates all assets, and then the people basically either have to sell themselves into extremely-low-paid labor or starve.
Agreed! First time below 10% since mankind's creation of poverty. I can't comment on the causality of capitalism, but I agree with Mandela that poverty is manmade.
In all seriousness, I'm interpreting poverty as lacking the basic capacity to participate in society. In that sense, the average score of something like the human development index is not relevant to whether or not systemic exclusion of classes of people in society is prevalent. The organization of resource-controlling groups in industry and government are generally what determines the social and economic mobility of a population. Before some point in civilized history, these constructs did not exist to create such vast disparity in human dignity and wealth. In other words, neither the cause nor the existence of poverty is measurable by the average standard of living.
Before the industrial revolution, 90%+ of people lived in "extreme poverty" (as we would describe it today). Note, "extreme poverty" does not mean "extreme misery" nor does it necessarily mean "hungry". People can be in poverty and fairly happy (or the reverse).
Two comments: You could make the same point about nobility, all the way back to the rulers of the first cities. And hunter-gatherers too live in dire poverty when the hunting and gathering fails, as it does some years. Fewer than 10% of years?
While the statistics are updated, the definition of "extreme poverty" just fails to keep up.
The moment people have food, they want lots of food, then they want delicious food, then they want more exclusive food, and so on.
There'd be no problem if the supply of food (resources) can keep up with human's greed, which never happens.
you solve property by having governments that respect citizen's property rights, having good rule of law, and a sound money policy usually with freedom of exchange. government managed economies tend to only benefit those in power or already well off.
in other words, you create an environment where entrepreneurs can successfully operate as people tend to strive more when they see their efforts pay off and those pay offs are not subject to the whims of others
Obviously, yes, this is the preferred long-term solution. This doesn't buy anything for the people suffering at this very instant. Also, if you are struggling to survive, how are you going to even think about getting education?
Give a man a fish, he becomes dependant on your fish. Yes, teaching him to fish takes longer, but it's better.
> how are you going to even think about getting education?
You start with an education on how to survive better. You don't need to start with an advanced education.
life's not fair ... but expecting someone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they have no boots is cruel and denies the advantage that "you" (the teacher) most likely started with a pair of boots, at least.
Unless he starves while you are teaching him because you didn't give him the fish. Or he's so famished that he can't realisitically pay enough attention to learn.
Many people are already dependant in "the fish", whether or not you give it to them.
the whole teach-a-man-to-fish thing is a nice saying that really helps with things outside of the jurisdiction of macroeconomics. at its core, it makes more sense to me to interpret it from the one lending aid than the one being aided. in other words, it's advice given to the teacher to seek systematic justice and fairness and not simply engage in simple, punctiliar acts of mercy.
however, neither of these should exist in a vacuum. act with mercy and work toward justice. the hard part about this is that there needs to be more of an emphasis on understanding and contextualizing justice within any given culture. "fishing" in guyana may look very different than "fishing" in guinea which may look very different than "fishing" in the philippines.
Unless of course that man is competing against heavily subsidized large scale fishing companies from industrialized countries, that export to his own country and can undercut his prices.
Free trade and free markets are truly amazing, aren't they?
this is both a long term and short term solution. The issue is that far too many of the poor are in countries with little or no respect of private property rights. These people stay poor because they and their property is not protected.
nothing you give them will mean anything when someone else can simply take it because of their position of power. we see this everyday, aid goes to the powerful except for a few select media staged events.
all comes back to the rule of law, not the rule of man.
It's easy, from a conceptual standpoint: Make sure everyone has enough to eat, a place to live, and access to healthcare etc. Basically, make sure no one is in a position where they have to bargain away something of value in exchange for their life or to avoid pain.
A 'position of power' in this case means not bargaining to avoid death or pain. ALL people should be in such a position; no need to pick and choose.
That is also how you decide -- just ask 'Will lack of this cause someone physical pain or death?' If the answer is 'yes' society should do its best to provide it to those who are not in a position to get it for themselves.
The goal is to make sure when people engage in a transaction that everyone walks away with more value than they brought to the table. That's the magic of the market. But when people either need to strike a bargain or pay a dreadful price -- well, that's why muggings don't lead to market efficiency, isn't it?
That isn't from a 'position of power'. That's avoiding transactions where the other party has a position of power. Two countries wishing to operate from a position of power may engage in a cold war or the like.
Not to say a social safety net to ensure life never hangs in the balance wouldn't prevent some unfair transactions from occurring...
To help you answer that literally: according to Simon Mann who did it successfully twice and failed once [1], a successful mercenary invasion and peace-keeping effort in a country like Sierra Leone cost around 1 million GBP in the mid-1990s.
Responsibly throwing money at problems is exactly how you solve them. There are a lot of factors that we know of that contribute to continued poverty and cause suffering for those subject to it. This would include, among other things:
Obviously the extreme lack of money, also known as "poverty", can be solved with money. Assuming that you don't throw the money at "something" but at "somebody", this "somebody" will by definition not be poor any more.
If the criteria for "poverty" is "to not be able to get at least x quantity of money per month", to "solve" this you'll need at least to provide that x quantity of money every month.
But your definition of "solution" will still be crazy if you do that.
The point was to make it clear why it is obviously possible to solve poverty by throwing money at it. Now you have a worst case cost. Then the question is how much cheaper can you make it.
E.g. how much investment and in what would it take before the network effects and increased trade will ensure there are enough jobs to lift those who can work out of poverty, and provide enough tax revenues for governments in question to care for those who can't work.
Does the "Amish" fit into the poor or Extreme poverty category? (by US standard)
I believe they are happier than most of the population. Gov might not like them too much as their contribution to gdp/Tax might be less than the "normal" folks. On the other hand, their demand on "gov service" should be a lot less too.
I don't think the GP was saying the Amish are poor per se.
I think the GP's point is that, from the perspective of the survey, the Amish's income and/or expenditures might look the same as someone in poverty, even though their quality of life is much better.
The line they use isn't "what percentage of people can't afford a TV". It's more along the lines of "what percentage of people can afford adequate food and clean water".
I hate to sound cynical here, but is it possible that "extreme poverty" is expected to drop below 10% because many of those unfortunately in such a bracket have low life expectancy due to poor diet and living conditions? I hope not.
That's the thing though: in the US, inequality between rich and poor is widening, but globally, it is narrowing. There are more global middle class now than ever before. It's hard to have this both ways until we approach closer to a post scarcity economy.
The problem with "wealth inequality" complaints is "poor" has an absolute brick-wall bottom value ($0/yr), but there is no upper limit (short of $WorldGDP/yr). This isn't a zero-sum game, so the fact that one person is financially far above others doesn't necessarily mean things must be worse for others.
I completely agree but some (most?) people tend to look at their quality of life on a relative basis. How much better or worse off they are than others they see. So despite the fact that there's probably never been a better time to be poor in the US, there is increasing political pressure to narrow the wealth gap. Someone told me once that he'd rather have pride than money and pride was what being on the wrong side of a large inequality gap slowly destroyed.
I don't think post scarcity is a precondition of post poverty.
The more economically advanced nations need to reach income and worker/environmental protection parity with less economically advanced nations.
I'd prefer that be done by raising the level of the less advanced nations rather than lowering the level of the more advanced nations but that's a different discussion.
I don't think it's a different discussion, I think it's the discussion we should be having, because it cuts straight to the heart of the matter. Due to globalism other nations are rising, it's true, but the argument I keep hearing is that, "well, now they are rising they are going to compete with us and America just has to get used to a lower level of living standards than it's used to..." and I have major issues with this point of view, largely because of the pretense that globalism was good for America and just now suddenly won't be.
I think that NAFTA (and the soon to pass travesty that is the TPP) are globalization tools that negatively affect the American worker, and largely this is due to the undermining of the idea of national sovereignty and the dismissal of protectionism that I think is premature. I think protectionism should be a duty of a nation-state to it's citizens, because until I can call myself a citizen of the world, I think my own government has a duty to protect it's and my self-interests, one of those being economic stability and growth.
In this case this is my primary issue with the supranational oligarchy. They operate on a global scale, without regard to borders, and while they formerly exploited the third world, now that the third world has been ravaged so much, they are turning inward to their own populaces, and have begun eating us from the inside out, extracting wealth.
Corporations have a charter from the government, and corporations that undermine national sovereignty and interests should have their charters revoked (as Max Keiser would say,executed). If we don't curtail these powers now we are going to wake up with a global government of oligarchy unaccountable to the people. (who are sure to say "but look at how much better off everyone is now! it was all for the greater good!")
The key element to remember is is that class warfare is real, and the rich are winning. Globally. It's not just about money either, it's about freedoms and liberties.
The TPP was supposed to be the lever that pushed governments that have comparatively weaker worker and environmental protections to higher standards.
We won't know until we read it in a month, but it sounds like corporations were over-represented in the negotiations and a lot of that leverage has been lost. If true, that makes the agreement very dangerous.
People will argue that the third and second world are better off now than they were but that is a low bar, IMHO. We need to catapult them to our modern standards. Workers must be represented more in these negotiations. We must rethink the 'exploitation is ok as long as it is profitable and legal' idea that underlies a lot of our policy both at home and between nations.
It is not a 'free trade or nothing' discussion as so many free trade advocates would like to paint it.
In short, I think I agree with you but there is a lot of changing of minds that will have to happen to foster support of these ideas.
Yes, and poverty is more than just the purchasing power of extremely low wages. Let me give you an example of ravaging a third world country, as talked about by John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hitman. I countries wealth should be in their natural resources and labor, but we have undermined that principle in favor of exploitation. Not to mention that the article itself starts out saying that once the rate of poverty is adjusted less people are in poverty! Magic!
"One of my jobs as an economic hit man was to identify countries that had resources like oil and arrange huge loans for those countries from the World Bank and sister organizations. But the money would never go to the actual country; instead it would go to our own corporations to build infrastructure projects in that country like power plants and industrial parks; things that would benefit a few very wealthy families.
So then the people of the country would be left holding this huge debt that they couldn't repay. We would come back and say, "well, since you can't repay your debt, you have to restructure your loan." That's when the IMF comes in. So the World Bank makes the original loan and IMF shows up and says, "We'll help you restructure your loan, but in order to do that you have to meet certain conditionalities. You have to sell your oil or whatever the coveted resource is at a cheap price, to the oil companies without restrictions." Or they would suggest the country sell electric utilities, water and sewage, maybe even your schools and jails to private multi-national corporations. Or maybe allow military bases to be built; these sorts of things."
The middle class in America is still extremely rich by global standards. The reduction of global poverty is exactly this: other nations have come to compete on the world market, and that means that whole industries have moved elsewhere. It doesn't happen without consequences.
The main problem of American middle class, and even more so the problem of American poor, is actually obesity. Think about that.
The poverty and extreme poverty line are adjusted in each country according to purchasing power.
You are right that somebody making $200/month in the US would be classified as extreme poor (and someone in India would not be considered extreme poor if he earns $200/month). I don't see the problem with this.
The world literacy rate and trend is supposedly pretty good. However, there are large differences in how literacy is measured and huge uncertainties in the numbers.
In some countries you're considered to be literate if you can sign your name, in others they just report 99-100% without doing any measurements.
UNESCO have plans for a better test to be applied globally, but I'm not sure any test that would lower the numbers would ever be welcomed.
It's not misleading. Malnutrition is going down, lack of education is going down, lack of access to healthcare is going down. The more you read the Guardian, the more you have misconceptions about how bad the world is developing.
That article paints rich Americans as pretty awesome people. First they lift millions of Chinese out of poverty and reduce inequality by shipping jobs in China. Then they donate some of the profits to less valuable causes like reducing relative poverty in the US.
The author of that article is kind of clueless, though - US-style "poverty" is not remotely like Zimbabwe poverty.
Actually it is. Having worked with NGOs in Africa as well as in Baltimore now - it's pretty much the same. Life expectancy, purchasing power and income inequality. Sad to say!
In Zimbabwe, 33% of the country has a flush toilet and over 10% of the country does open defecation. 75% have access to clean water. (Stats from the first hit on google.)
Are you asserting that Baltimore has less than 99% flush toilet usage or 99% clean water access?
That's crazy. Inflation is enourmous (and inflation is not the same as GDP variations). Any criteria that uses dollars cannot have any value in a historical series.
If you get a chart of how many people live with less than $2 per month you'll probably see a continuous steady decline. Why? Inflation.
The World Bank periodically adjusts the threshold upwards for this reason. In 1990, they used $1/day. In 2008, they adjusted it to $1.25/day. Now they are adjusting it to $1.90/day.
Why shouldn't be you explaning why do you believe in their methodology? That's crazy. You don't even know what methodology they use and you are taking your time to defend them here.
I don't know, but your previous comment implied that they weren't adjusting for inflation at all.
It's possible that they are failing to adjust for inflation sufficiently, but that claim needs support. How much inflation was there between 1990 and 2015? Why does it differ from their calculation?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/opinion/nicholas-kristof-t...
"One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years. Another 29 percent believed that the proportion had remained roughly the same.
"That’s 95 percent of Americans — who are utterly wrong. In fact, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty hasn’t doubled or remained the same. It has fallen by more than half..."