Re:How to Eat on a Dollar a Day
by jonknee on Wednesday August 19, 2009 @12:44PM
(#773052)
Naming one's career is suddenly irrelevant on a personal website? I would imagine one of the most common questions you'd get if you set out to eat for $1 a day is "What do you do?". That's a way of asking if they are doing it because they have to without appearing rude.
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Yes, but it's pretty clear they're doing it to make some kind of political point.
The point, of course, is pretty iffy, because the people out there who truly are living on "less than a dollar a day" live in places where a dollar has very different buying power to what it does in a US supermarket -- thus their experiences are probably pretty incomparable.
When you hear those "dollar a day" stats for world hunger don't kid yourself into thinking that $1 converted into the third world is somehow generous. They use purchasing power parity power to calculate the numbers relative to what it would be in the USA. When they say $1 a day they mean a $1 a day in America. That means they actually have less than a buck to spend, depending on the country significantly less.
Re:How to Eat on a Dollar a Day
by potatolicious on Wednesday August 19, 2009 @01:39PM
(#773212)
"When they say $1 a day they mean a $1 a day in America."
Citation required. I've seen these numbers and I've never seen one quoted in terms of purchasing power parity. The $1 a day that's often trotted around is real dollars - i.e. $1 USD.
The article authors would have had a far more accurate (and less biased towards their cause) result if they had accounted for this. By no means am I saying that $1 USD in a third world country is a lot of money, but it certainly does a lot more than $1 USD in the USA.
Do you have a source on that? I've always been curious about how those sorts of numbers are calculated. Do they, for instance, include subsistence farmers, who may have plenty to eat but no actual money?