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A comment on What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?.

Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by H8crilA on Saturday September 07, 2019 @12:40AM (#20901820)
It's important to remember that the world has been unbelievably successful at getting people out of extreme poverty (inflation-adjusted $1.9 per day). We went from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 0.65 billion in 2018. Ways to go, but it is a truly amazing achievement of humanity. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the past 30 years.

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by RcouF1uZ4gsC on Saturday September 07, 2019 @02:41AM (#20902179)
And it's not just money. Very tangible measures such as mortality before age 5 have greatly improved.

From https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#global-decline-of...

In 1800 the health conditions of our ancestors were such that 43% of the world’s newborns died before their 5th birthday. These estimates are shown in the visualisation below.

In 1960 child mortality was still 18.5%. Almost every 5th child born in that year died in childhood.

Over the last decades we have seen a very rapid decline of child mortality globally. In 2015 child mortality was down to 4.3% – 10-fold lower than 2 centuries ago. You have to take this long perspective to see the progress that we have achieved.

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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by peteretep on Saturday September 07, 2019 @01:00AM (#20901877)
I think this number is marginally misleading, because a huge amount of that is China:

> According to the World Bank, more than 850 million people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015

China was not historically poor, and this is a reversion to the mean once minimal free trade was allowed.

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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by jngreenlee on Saturday September 07, 2019 @01:04AM (#20901895)
It's still a true story...nothing diminishes the significance of this.
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by peteretep on Saturday September 07, 2019 @01:05AM (#20901898)
The achievement is ... Mao died?
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by H8crilA on Saturday September 07, 2019 @01:10AM (#20901916)
And probably Deng Xiaoping's re-architecture of China.

Still, what caused the advance does not diminish the success of humanity. Progress is progress.

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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by hutzlibu on Sunday September 08, 2019 @07:29PM (#20914045)
"Progress is progress. "

It is? Don't you think, there can also be progress in the wrong direction?

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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by luckylion on Saturday September 07, 2019 @01:37AM (#20902006)
Wouldn't "bad leader dies, next one has better economic policies" make the situation improve by a lot in most poor places?
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by imtringued on Saturday September 07, 2019 @05:01AM (#20902663)
Yes and this is not exclusive to developing countries either.
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by peteretep on Saturday September 07, 2019 @04:05AM (#20902476)
Nah, you threw the baby out with the bath water there; the other East Asian countries that embraced the west became much much richer much much faster after WWII.

China just managed to dramatically shit itself from the Great Leap Forward through to the early 90s, and is now undergoing the growth spurt that it’s Eastern neighbours experienced decades previously.

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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by legulere on Saturday September 07, 2019 @04:47AM (#20902613)
They are also much smaller. If you compare China to India it didn’t do that badly after all
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by Symmetry on Saturday September 07, 2019 @08:21AM (#20903328)
I think that if I had to live through the second half of the 20th century in either place I'd take India's moderate socialism followed by a slight loosening over China's extremes. Even if China is in a better position right this moment, it lost a lot of people getting there.
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by selimthegrim on Saturday September 07, 2019 @12:06PM (#20904630)
You might want to tell the BJP voter base that
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by tryptophan on Saturday September 07, 2019 @10:49AM (#20904063)
This is not true. The same trend holds across the rest of the world.

https://ourworldindata.org/the-global-decline-of-extreme-pov...

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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by anovikov on Saturday September 07, 2019 @05:18AM (#20902715)
Still it means world ex-China went from being 30% poor to 10% poor (1050M out of 3400M in 1980 and 640M out of 6400M now). Great achievement nonetheless. While yes, most spectacular in China. That's what happens when you scrap Communism and manage to not break everything else in the process (and yes, also hack your way there quite a bit, creating quite a few long-term liabilities that will backfire soon).
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by rvn1045 on Saturday September 07, 2019 @06:22AM (#20902916)
Even if you look at the last 500 years fewer people live at near subsistence level today than they did in the past.
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by murukesh_s on Saturday September 07, 2019 @02:00AM (#20902079)
Which country is historically poor? I don't understand. If we consider a native, self sustaining civilisation as "poor" because they don't have the technology (whether that is a horse cart or a computer) that we have and they can't buy it at the currency rate that we fix, I dont think it qualifies as poor. I think it's time we should get comfortable with the fact that happiness is not always material things but it's relative material things. We may have eased our physical effort with technology but most of us spend in gym or track to probably spend the same amount of energy. Of course we can't go back once we are lifted out of the "poverty " except to spend half our savings as that vacation on the hut at an exotic beach or wildlife safari, cursing our hectic career & life :)
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by peter303 on Saturday September 07, 2019 @08:00PM (#20907547)
This is the point of Steve Pinkers last two books Enlightenment Now. He has many graphs of social progress in recent centuries. He attributes this to a society run much more on human reason than in the past, including science, laws, and large governments.

We still have a great deal more room for improvement.

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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by JSavageReal on Saturday September 07, 2019 @01:55AM (#20902062)
The article mentions this in the beginning, what's your point?

I love how every time there's talk of povery, some first world beneficiary jumps in to point out how much better poor people are compared to the past. Why they think that's relevant is beyond me.

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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by falcongod082 on Saturday September 07, 2019 @12:51AM (#20901851)
Well, it's not nothing...but making the ridiculously poor slightly less poor isn't something I'd call an "amazing achievement" since it's stupid easy to make them not poor.
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by jngreenlee on Saturday September 07, 2019 @01:01AM (#20901883)
That's not true at scale. We're not talking share-shifting of dollars, but making a more anti-fragile system overall that lifts everyone.
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by TaylorAlexander on Saturday September 07, 2019 @01:25AM (#20901968)
I’m gonna need you to cite a source for that claim.
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by pdonis on Saturday September 07, 2019 @01:02AM (#20901888)
> it's stupid easy to make them not poor

Really? How so?

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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by jlawson on Saturday September 07, 2019 @01:38AM (#20902011)
Which rich people do you think all that money came from exactly?

This is an absurd fixed-pie view of reality.

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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by luckylion on Saturday September 07, 2019 @01:39AM (#20902015)
And you'll also need a set of policies to keep that going in perpetuity, otherwise the money is going to accumulate in a few hands again.
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? by username90 on Saturday September 07, 2019 @01:57AM (#20902071)
The problem is that every country that is still very poor is also full of corruption, so we have already solved all the simple cases you talk about.
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