Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?
by AdrianB1 on Saturday September 07, 2019 @03:45AM
(#20902406)
Not true. The article is not about living with the equivalent of $2 in USA, but a few African countries and values converted in dollars.
A few years ago some colleagues of mine spent a month in rural, mainland China, trying to see how people live with a few dollars a day. While those people were poor, the numbers are very misleading when you convert in dollars.
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Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?
by xyzzyz on Saturday September 07, 2019 @04:57AM
(#20902647)
No, you’re wrong. It’s not about converting what they earn to dollars using direct exchange rate, it’s about converting it to dollar’s purchasing power.
Re:What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?
by strken on Saturday September 07, 2019 @06:22AM
(#20902918)
It's hard to convert PP directly because it's different for different goods - the measurements usually use a basket of multiple goods and services. It's possible that e.g. eggs in India are relatively expensive, while lentils are cheaper, but if we calculated PP using the two items then it would be somewhere in the middle: a PP-adjusted $2 portion of lentils would still be bigger in India than we would expect from looking at overall PP.
This may or may not be what the GP was trying to say.