What has changed is our idea of what wealth is, and what poverty is, and I think these notions will continue to change.
> Extreme poverty, abject poverty, absolute poverty, destitution, or penury, was originally defined by the United Nations in 1995 as "a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services."
IMHO, this is a very timeless definition as well.
To be clear, if you earn $760 a year, by the World Bank’s definition, you’re not extremely poor. By that definition homeless beggars in the US don’t live in extreme poverty, because they make more than that panhandling.
I really do think it’s worth considering the degree to which this definition is designed primarily to produce “victories” like the ones being celebrated here.
@carlosdp: So one of the richest humans of all time approves of a book telling people that the world he helped to create is better than they think? Hm.
This is the book by Hans Rosling right? The one that cherry picks data shamelessly to make the point he clearly wanted to make before he researched it? The one panned by Business Insider, not the most notably loon left publication ever?
According to Business Insider, Rosling "misses critical wrinkles in the data" and has not presented "the whole story".
From Wikipedia:
Although Rosling argues that the future will be better than expected because birth rates are stabilizing, life expectancy around the world is increasing, the gender gap is nearly closed, and the extremely impoverished population is shrinking, others point out that populations are still expanding (with many still under-nourished), life expectancy in the US is decreasing, the gender gap is only nearly closed in education and not in employment, and extreme wealth has become more extreme.
It seems like being a bit skeptical of people selling Panglossian visions, given how much people want to believe them, might not hurt. That’s not to advocate the kind of doom and gloom which forgets that we have antibiotics, indoor plumbing, and electric lights. It is however worth keeping an eye on worrying trends like antibiotic resistance, climate change, and just how many people don’t have indoor plumbing, safe water, and electric lights.
I highly recommend reading Factfulness.
This should be obvious even without the book. :)
You can tell from the percentage of the labour force who worked on farms that most people couldn't have been wealthy, and the industrial revolution changed everything.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agriculture-value-added-p...
Shocking that corn and cow producers in India are 90% less productive than in the US.
Being a peasant was awful too, mind.
But it's also ethically skewed. I have friends who have travelled through the poorest parts of Africa, and they universally return with stories about how "poor" Africans are some of the happiest, friendliest, most generous, and most contented people they've met.
That may be rose-tinted, but it's naive to dismiss it out of hand.
Economic metrics aren't necessarily humane, and the Western economic treadmill - with its precariousness, acquisitiveness, and narcissism - isn't necessarily the ideal destination for any culture.
But - their lives are incredibly hard. No protection from the state, no future, at mercy of anybody more rich than them (=anybody else), it doesn't matter how good you are, you will never be given a fair chance to achieve anything in society. Nobody cares if you live or die, how you suffer, how unfair your life is. There isn't even such a basic mentality that 'I deserve more in life than this', because countless generations before never achieved anything.
And specifically for India, the effin' idiotic caste system makes all others content with the situation, because 'this is how things are supposed to be', 'they accrued bad karma in their previous lives' and so on. It's extremely good that this system is slowly dying, but it will take far too long in my opinion, especially in rural areas.
Their life is reduced to day-to-day survival, which makes everything simpler. They don't have lofty goals for life, and surviving OK yet another day is a success. Is this a simplicity you want to have compared to western style of life? I don't think so.
There is a huge difference between making 2 dollars a day and making 4 or 8. This is long before we get to the rich end of the scale.
However, people can be rich in relationships and materially poor, or incredibly wealthy and yet have a string of broken relationships. Look at divorce rates, or even simply people living together, then breaking up and finding new partners in the United States, where economically speaking people live in one of the richest countries in the world.
Does anyone know of economic metrics that attempt to measure and/or account for relational and/or community richness or poverty?
Edit: Evidence suggests thst it is indeed, semantic fuckery. The World Bank is really only saying that three quarters of a billion people earn less than $757 a year.
Based on my own experience of living in a poor neighborhood in a very poor country for a long time now, I am always skeptical of these claims for reasons that would be too long to list out. Inflation and increases in the cost of food and rent here have far outpaced the World Bank metrics ($1.25 in 2005, $1.90 as of 2015) and the incomes of the average person (~$100-150 a month).