Gates talks explicitly about World Bank’s international poverty line measured in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) dollars. It accounts for differences in the cost of living across countries (the PPP exchange rates).
example: PPP for India is 18.128. In India the international poverty line ($1.9 PPP) is $0.10 per day in USD.
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Gates writes:
> Still, the number of people living on less than $2 a day—$1.90 is the World Bank’s international poverty line—is over 700 million.
and links to article that defines the powerty line: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/10/04/w...
This may or may not be what the GP was trying to say.
That is a direct conversion. Where is the purchasing power conversion?
Philanthropy in a nutshell.
On a more serious note, I couldn't agree more. Any sort of international metric for poverty (like the $2 here) is downright useless because it ignores all the local context.
> I hope you will be touched by their stories, their challenges, and their dreams for better lives. I also hope that you’ll ask yourself what you can do to help the millions of people like them.
You could ask people in the US living below the poverty line and reach this same conclusion. Hell, you could give away 50 bucks directly to a person living in a country with a crappy economy and literally change their life, instead of filming them with thousands of dollars worth cameras to "inspire" people in the west. That's why I prefer GiveDirectly.org over any other charity that attempts to fight poverty.
I think that what philanthropist can do to help is to effectively replace the government: build infrastructure, educate people, provide healthcare, employ the locals for these jobs.
Any money you give to anyone for free will just get someone rich while the rest will continue suffering.
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Also, to directly answer your point, you can give those $50 to a person OR spend those $50 to get 50 people to donate instead. This is the point of this “expensive” documentaries.
That's where 95% of the problem lies. As someone whose origins are from a poor country, I can name you a lot of organizations that don't have this in mind. A huge chunk of your donation goes to some westerner going on a "spiritual journey" to teach locals, or whatever bullshit they tell to themselves that's needed. It very rarely "trickles down" to the poor people's pockets.
What they need is money. Like literally any single poor person in the world, that money will go first and foremost to securing basic life necessities (food, shelter, water, medical bills), and the rest is gonna get reinvested in their local town or village (either by starting a business or by paying for education).
> Any money you give to anyone for free will just get someone rich while the rest will continue suffering.
What's missing from your equation is taxes. Whatever they do with the money will get taxed, filling the local budgets. Thinking that westerners know more what's needed then people that actually live there is preposterous at best, superiority complex at worst.
> Also, to directly answer your point, you can give those $50 to a person OR spend those $50 to get 50 people to donate instead.
If you think this post without a direct call-to-action is gonna inspire people to donate more than it took to go there and film these documentaries, I honestly hope you're right. I personally don't buy that one bit.
Just because you solve their main issue it doesn’t mean that money will be “reinvested” by an uneducated person. You can still have grants for people with ideas, but handing out bills in villages isn’t going to change their lives.
I lived with less than $2 a day. The average salary in the country was less than $100 and this was in Eastern Europe, not in Africa. What changes the story completely is that the exchange rate makes all the difference in my case: we all had a fairly regular life, but the exchange rate was showing a very dark picture. Yes, we were not able to buy American cars in dollars, but a local built Renault copy was a few thousands dollars new. All the prices were extremely low in dollars, but meaningful in local currency. We had not just the basics (food, electricity, house), but an almost normal life.
25 years later, the average salary is more than 10 times more, in US dollars only. An iPhone is now 10 times cheaper, but the price structure is more or less the same and nothing changed, just the exchange rate. The food is 10 times more expensive in dollars, rent is 10 times more, the few things that are more expensive today in local currency are the ones that are heavily taxed, like gas and tobacco.