I think this is a good change, but maybe would be better to leave the old standard alone in real terms and then make a new category? "the poor will always be with you"
"the poor will always be with you"
If you look back in 200 years, poor people starving to death was simply an accepted fact of life. Today, poor people get fat. Do their lives suck? Absolutely! Just look at the craziness around housing. But in terms of resources per person available to the poor? Very few of us realize how good we've got it.
The extreme poverty line has remained essentially the same (adjusted for inflation) for a few decades. Projecting backwards in time, most people in every country used to be in extreme poverty. We are on track to eliminating extreme poverty within our lifetimes. They've adjusted the poverty line upwards. But just watch, life keeps on improving.
That is not "fat" in the same way that someone with cirrhosis isn't fat, that is diseased
>The name, introduced by Williams in 1935, was derived from the Ga language of coastal Ghana, translated as "the sickness the baby gets when the new baby comes"
Christ that's sad.
But poor people do in great numbers in many countries. For example there are many obese Americans on food stamps.
Thanks to social services, the number of Americans who are in extreme poverty is approximately zero. When I compare to history, I far prefer this state of affairs to what used to be the norm.
I wish I could make myself have such confidence in any government entity as much as you seem to have in US social services
All of their own fault. I recently saw a youtube compilation of tiktok clips of Americans on food stamps making videos flaunting their overfull supermarket shopping carts and it was all name brand junk food made up of refined carbs, fats and sugars, and to no ones surprise, they were all obese. No vegetables, no fruits, no leafy greens, no legumes, but all junk food which costs more than the healthy stuff. Who's fault is that? At what point is personal accountability supposed to kick in?
If you can afford a roof over your head, a car, and entire shopping carts full of name brand junk food(which is more expensive than healthy food) to make yourself obese, you are anything but poor, you are just stupid and glutenous.
Edit: I see the downvotes, but notice nobody is saying that I am wrong? ;) So then we agree that I'm right.
Which part was "incendiary"?
>you’re saying like the simplest thing
The truth is often simple, people are just too scared to confront it. So they call it "incendiary".
>Is it, perhaps, the cheapest way to get something tasty?
Healthy food is also tasty and cheaper than highly processed junk food. But it's easier to blame externalities than take accountability.
>Maybe there are underlying social problems, and that’s more interesting to discuss than “poor people are stupid and gluttonous.”
Why aren't poor people in poorer countries fat despite suffering even bigger social issue like war, slavery, rapes and famine?
>Why aren't poor people in poorer countries fat despite suffering even bigger social issue like war, slavery, rapes and famine?
Famine
People on food stamps have a lot of free time.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/most-working-age-snap-particip...
>Over half of individuals who were participating in SNAP in a typical month in mid-2012 were working in that month.
Let’s be generous and say that the other half have a lot of free time (they don’t, many are searching for a job while taking care of a family), and that the tiktok you saw only showed that other half. The parts of my comment you didn’t respond to may still be the explanation, rather than the sheer gluttony of the poor or something.
Do you think a banana is 10 dollars too? Grains and bread are cheaper. Rotisserie chickens sold as loss leaders are a cheap source of meat. But fruits and vegetables?
Those are more expensive per calorie than junk food. Especially when you take into account spoilage
> Edit: I see the downvotes, but notice nobody is saying that I am wrong? ;) So then we agree that I'm right.
No we do not agree. You’re incorrect and vindictive about it
or 4.19 million, if you wanted to spend 2 minutes and look up [the source](https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=li...) actually listed in the main article
Sure, someday soon the global definition of extreme poverty will allow for clean water, adequate nutrition, clothing, and safe housing. Isn't this why we're doing... gestures around this?
For 2025 only
Global People | Dollars
1,183,873,832 | above $40
389,144,677 | $30-$40
681,087,495 | $20-$30
1,647,364,177 | $10-$20
1,134,291,724 | $7-$10
1,170,170,455 | $5-$7
1,185,828,184 | $3-$5
700,440,541 | $1-$3
107,765,635 | <$1
It means absolutely nothing that 1.1B people live on $3-5/day and a different 1.1B live on $5-7. Can you survive in the local economy on $2/day? Then $4/day is not that bad, and $7/day is doing pretty well.
Because the nicely shaped bell curves used in TFA are not at all what the distribution actually looks like. There is a significant right-skew. Don't miss the log-scale on x-axis in the first few graphs as well.
According TFA the number of people in extreme poverty dropped when using the old IPL value, and went up with the new value.
So politically, no NGO wants to say poverty decreased, because that might reduce urgency, and thus priority. So moving the goalposts means a 50% increase in poverty instead of a 20% decrease in poverty. Which one benefits your mission more?
That's not to say the revision of the IPL was wrong. But it does further the mission. Did the improved statistical methods trigger the IPL revision? It's hard to tell without internal world bank docs. I'll bet it did.
You said "the only measures that are consistently improving are those around governance and control not the well being of people". Can you point out an example from the report of what you mean?
A friend of mine once said
"If the problem weren't so valuable, they would have solved it by now"
The Big4 never wanted EVs with there being a documentary [1] on how much they hated them. However, a company that isn't the big-4 has no issue with creating one.
Same with a cure-for-cancer. Sure, maybe Pfizer doesn't want to cannabalize their market but anybody that isn't Pfizer would love to.
I don't think IT-security fits into the same model though. There's a lot of money in theft so you need a lot of money into anti-theft to counter-act it.
Poverty imo fits the IT-security model more-so than cure-for-cancer. Each dollar you don't pay somebody in Madagascar to farm vanilla is a dollar you get to keep.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
Unless, of course, they're faking their deaths and transplanting their consciounesses into younger, healthy bodies. Then I got nothing.
The article goes into detail about why the poverty line changed. You must have skimmed past the secrion titled "How the World Bank sets the International Poverty Line".
The TLDR; is that it is at root based on the median poverty line set by the government of very poor countries (which is calculated in a complex way that is explained in footnotes and cited articles.)
At root, it isn't NGOs that caused the number to change, but it was inderectly caused by changes in how poor countries measure poverty themselves.
However in cases of poor people and poverty there must be an ulterior motive.
It’s not everyone or even a majority but because of the VC backing it’s going to be more than the general population
> However, the IPL has also increased substantially, even after inflation adjustments. The poverty line has increased in real terms.
cbeach•5mo ago
Any other kind of adjustment (like, for example, this latest intervention by the World Bank) is political in nature.
We should disregard any statistical data whose collection is politically biased.
isbwkisbakadqv•5mo ago
automatic6131•5mo ago
This is stupid for many reasons, including (but not limited to): non-monetary, in-kind benefits being excluded, perverse outcomes such as a decline in median wages "reducing poverty" and just about guaranteed continuation of this "poverty". So left wing politicians LOVE it. It's an everlasting cudgel that can never be fixed.
kingkawn•5mo ago
DiogenesKynikos•5mo ago
automatic6131•5mo ago
DiogenesKynikos•5mo ago
abdullahkhalids•5mo ago
This seems sane. The real question one should ask is, how many people can earn a living that allows them to meet basic needs, without state support?
You can have a separate figure that out of the number of poor people (like defined in the last sentence), how many are no longer poor with state support?
dudeinjapan•5mo ago
duskwuff•5mo ago
ivape•5mo ago
owebmaster•5mo ago
ivape•5mo ago
$3 buys you various foods in various parts of the world, which would not put you in abject poverty.
owebmaster•5mo ago
ivape•5mo ago
Does the person buy food and basics per day? Then don’t worry about what the dollar amount equates to. It’s a ridiculous metric when it comes to measuring abject poverty.
Hilift•5mo ago