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No... The point of the survey is that 95% of Americans thought things were getting worse or staying the same. Regardless of what metric you are using, they ar

No... The point of the survey is that 95% of Americans thought things were getting worse or staying the same. Regardless of what metric you are using, they are dead wrong. Things are getting much, much better. You are arguing about the specific definitions and qualifications of the terms. You are ignoring what the results of the survey are actually saying about the perception of Americans.

notahacker 11y ago
I'll ask you this: how many of the ~1.5 billion additional people living in the world compared with 20 years ago wouldn't be considered to be living in "extreme poverty" by US standards? (I'll give you a hint: more than half the world's present population lives on less than $5 PPP per day, few of them by choice, and it's not the richer countries where the rapid population growth is happening) If you think people earning as little as the equivalent $5 of US-equivalent purchasing power per day are extremely poor[1], that's more[2] people in extreme poverty than there were in the 1990s, despite all the incremental improvements to poor people's average incomes across the developing world and stark improvements in a few rapidly-industrialising regions. Where you draw the line matters. And the survey, notably, didn't draw a line. I'm the last person to defend Americans' knowledge of world affairs, but their belief that poverty is actually getting worse in terms of absolute numbers of people subject to it is not unreasonable. [1]which isn't exactly an unreasonable point of view for anyone used to earning more than that per hour even whilst on minimum wage, even if there's a lot of people in developing countries on that level of PPP-adjusted income that think they're doing pretty well compared with their neighbours. [2]edit: having had a play with the World Bank's model, it suggests that you end up with more people in poverty in 2012 than the early nineties if you set your threshold for extreme poverty somewhere between $5 and $6 per day of US purchasing power. The number of people below that threshold in sub-Saharan Africa - where much of the poverty relief narrative has focused - has almost doubled.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  You keep talking about something completely different. The question wasn't based on the US standard and it didn't ask about absolute numbers. It asked about the proportion of people living in extreme poverty as defined by the WB, and their answers are completely wrong. And I don't think it's an American thing, ignorance about development issues is pretty widespread. Ask people how much they think the government spends on humanitarian/development aid and they'll say something like 25-30%, when it's about 0.18% of gdp in the US. But again it's not uniquely American. In the Netherlands they say ±6% when it's really about an order of magnitude less (just under 0.7%) for example, most people are unaware it's that low or that it has been lowered in recent years. Better yet though, the study that shows that only 5% of Americans knew the right answer was done in Sweden and Norway, too. While they do a bit better, not by much getting it right about 20% of the time, and wrong 80% of the time. (and as Hans Rosling would say, a monkey doing this test would be about 50% more accurate as an average Norwegian or Swede). Now it's a fair point, we can argue about the definitions of income all day and change definitions and have different answers that may not be very meaningful, I agree with you there. But just look at one indicator of poverty which has much less ambiguity as a statistic: child mortality under five. Kids who die, there's not a lot of room to juggle with definitions or semantics here. It's caused by societies with deeply entrenched poverty, societies that due to their poverty struggle to provide adequate healthcare, food, clean drinking water, education to parents, safe living environments etc etc. And if we look at child mortality, it more than halved since 1990, despite a much bigger population. It's now around 16 thousand per day, an astonishing number, but think about what it means, it means compared to 1990, about 6 million people (a holocaust-scale parallel is easily made) do not die every single year, year after year, that did die in 1990. That's an insane achievement and it's contrary to our public sentiment that looks at Ebola and ISIS and thinks the world is on fire and on the decline, when it's never been better. There are many more of such statistics we can look at, and they're not all expressed in some definition of poverty that changes to suit our desires. We also measure poverty in things like literacy rates, in things like the proportion of the population that has access to a toilet, or electricity, or a loan. Across the board the improvements are substantial, obviously never good enough and perpetually unable to meet our desire to solve every problem yesterday, but in the context of enormous challenges the progress we're seeing on tons of development indicators is truly inspiring and optimistic.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    The question asked didn't mention the World Bank or any other definition of poverty, at least not judging from the results presentation. The World Bank, incidentally, has multiple definitions of extreme poverty, although all of them are lower than reasonable industrialised-world thresholds. When around half the world's population's weekly purchasing power is, according to official World Bank approved statistics, equivalent to the purchasing power an American obtains after a five hours work on federal minimum wage[1] I don't think that Americans are unjustified in not knowing the "correct" conclusion that numbers or proportions of people in extreme poverty have "nearly halved" in recent years. If you think the unspecified extreme poverty bracket ought to include the ~50% of the population still stuck at $5 per day, it would have been literally impossible for the proportion of people in that bracket to have already halved in recent years. I'd have accepted that it might appear a bit ridiculous for them to think that extreme poverty had doubled - especially given that it is so pervasive - except... they could have been inferring it from a doubling of "extreme poverty" reported in some studies focusing on their own country[2]. I assume results of papers like this get more mainstream coverage in US media: http://npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief28/policybrief28.pdf http://npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief28/poli... So perhaps some Americans don't think the world extends beyond the boundaries of their country; perhaps as you suggest they guessed on a multiple choice question based on having seen lots of reports on epidemics and war in the news. As I said, I'm the last person to defend the wisdom of Americans or any other type of crowd. But frankly, it's no less ignorant to insist that everybody should know "extreme poverty has halved" when the basis for that "fact" is predicated on the assumption that people earning $1.30 a day no longer qualify as extremely poor, even if other factors like working conditions have got worse. They're certainly right not to take that stat at face value. We know medicine and access to it is getting better and that's having effects in lives saved. We know some of the GDP per capita increases are trickling down, even though our methodology for estimating how that affects the base of the pyramid is necessarily imperfect. But I don't think we're anywhere near the level of confidence of sustained global reduction in absolute poverty - as opposed to amelioration of its most acute symptoms - to be in a position to start celebrating how few people are really poor, never mind criticising the public for not being aware of it. Not when - I really can't stress this enough - most of the world's population still have to survive for a week on the notionally equivalent purchasing power of an American working less than a full day's shift at Walmart.[3] That proportion certainly hasn't "nearly halved" and it's really not stupid or ignorant to think that the label "extreme poverty" could still apply to all those people [1]if you believe PPP calculations, which are inadequate for this sort of thing since the weighting basket tends to include luxuries and so doesn't account for how cheap food and living has to be in most of the developing world. But again I don't think the inadequacy of measurement detracts from my point about poverty statistics being very much open for debate. [2]using a different World Bank definition of extreme poverty. [3]It's not that there's no validity to arguments that these people aren't extremely poor; I just don't see any reason why the argument that some of them are not should form the basis for widely accepted "facts". I've met people on that level of income in developing countries I wouldn't consider extremely poor of course. Then again, I've also met people literally killing themselves to earn $10 a day who I wouldn't consider anything other than extremely poor, even after accounting for it being considered a good income locally. Adjusted income-based measures of poverty don't really have anything going for them other than relative convenience.
- BookmarkSaver 11y ago
  How could you spend so much effort typing all of that without even bothering to read what I just said? Or are you literally incapable of understanding how irrelevant what you are saying is to the point that is being made?

notahacker 11y ago

I'll ask you this: how many of the ~1.5 billion additional people living in the world compared with 20 years ago wouldn't be considered to be living in "extreme poverty" by US standards? (I'll give you a hint: more than half the world's present population lives on less than $5 PPP per day, few of them by choice, and it's not the richer countries where the rapid population growth is happening) If you think people earning as little as the equivalent $5 of US-equivalent purchasing power per day are extremely poor[1], that's more[2] people in extreme poverty than there were in the 1990s, despite all the incremental improvements to poor people's average incomes across the developing world and stark improvements in a few rapidly-industrialising regions. Where you draw the line matters. And the survey, notably, didn't draw a line. I'm the last person to defend Americans' knowledge of world affairs, but their belief that poverty is actually getting worse in terms of absolute numbers of people subject to it is not unreasonable. [1]which isn't exactly an unreasonable point of view for anyone used to earning more than that per hour even whilst on minimum wage, even if there's a lot of people in developing countries on that level of PPP-adjusted income that think they're doing pretty well compared with their neighbours. [2]edit: having had a play with the World Bank's model, it suggests that you end up with more people in poverty in 2012 than the early nineties if you set your threshold for extreme poverty somewhere between $5 and $6 per day of US purchasing power. The number of people below that threshold in sub-Saharan Africa - where much of the poverty relief narrative has focused - has almost doubled.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago
You keep talking about something completely different. The question wasn't based on the US standard and it didn't ask about absolute numbers. It asked about the proportion of people living in extreme poverty as defined by the WB, and their answers are completely wrong. And I don't think it's an American thing, ignorance about development issues is pretty widespread. Ask people how much they think the government spends on humanitarian/development aid and they'll say something like 25-30%, when it's about 0.18% of gdp in the US. But again it's not uniquely American. In the Netherlands they say ±6% when it's really about an order of magnitude less (just under 0.7%) for example, most people are unaware it's that low or that it has been lowered in recent years. Better yet though, the study that shows that only 5% of Americans knew the right answer was done in Sweden and Norway, too. While they do a bit better, not by much getting it right about 20% of the time, and wrong 80% of the time. (and as Hans Rosling would say, a monkey doing this test would be about 50% more accurate as an average Norwegian or Swede). Now it's a fair point, we can argue about the definitions of income all day and change definitions and have different answers that may not be very meaningful, I agree with you there. But just look at one indicator of poverty which has much less ambiguity as a statistic: child mortality under five. Kids who die, there's not a lot of room to juggle with definitions or semantics here. It's caused by societies with deeply entrenched poverty, societies that due to their poverty struggle to provide adequate healthcare, food, clean drinking water, education to parents, safe living environments etc etc. And if we look at child mortality, it more than halved since 1990, despite a much bigger population. It's now around 16 thousand per day, an astonishing number, but think about what it means, it means compared to 1990, about 6 million people (a holocaust-scale parallel is easily made) do not die every single year, year after year, that did die in 1990. That's an insane achievement and it's contrary to our public sentiment that looks at Ebola and ISIS and thinks the world is on fire and on the decline, when it's never been better. There are many more of such statistics we can look at, and they're not all expressed in some definition of poverty that changes to suit our desires. We also measure poverty in things like literacy rates, in things like the proportion of the population that has access to a toilet, or electricity, or a loan. Across the board the improvements are substantial, obviously never good enough and perpetually unable to meet our desire to solve every problem yesterday, but in the context of enormous challenges the progress we're seeing on tons of development indicators is truly inspiring and optimistic.
- notahacker 11y ago
  The question asked didn't mention the World Bank or any other definition of poverty, at least not judging from the results presentation. The World Bank, incidentally, has multiple definitions of extreme poverty, although all of them are lower than reasonable industrialised-world thresholds. When around half the world's population's weekly purchasing power is, according to official World Bank approved statistics, equivalent to the purchasing power an American obtains after a five hours work on federal minimum wage[1] I don't think that Americans are unjustified in not knowing the "correct" conclusion that numbers or proportions of people in extreme poverty have "nearly halved" in recent years. If you think the unspecified extreme poverty bracket ought to include the ~50% of the population still stuck at $5 per day, it would have been literally impossible for the proportion of people in that bracket to have already halved in recent years. I'd have accepted that it might appear a bit ridiculous for them to think that extreme poverty had doubled - especially given that it is so pervasive - except... they could have been inferring it from a doubling of "extreme poverty" reported in some studies focusing on their own country[2]. I assume results of papers like this get more mainstream coverage in US media: http://npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief28/policybrief28.pdf http://npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief28/poli... So perhaps some Americans don't think the world extends beyond the boundaries of their country; perhaps as you suggest they guessed on a multiple choice question based on having seen lots of reports on epidemics and war in the news. As I said, I'm the last person to defend the wisdom of Americans or any other type of crowd. But frankly, it's no less ignorant to insist that everybody should know "extreme poverty has halved" when the basis for that "fact" is predicated on the assumption that people earning $1.30 a day no longer qualify as extremely poor, even if other factors like working conditions have got worse. They're certainly right not to take that stat at face value. We know medicine and access to it is getting better and that's having effects in lives saved. We know some of the GDP per capita increases are trickling down, even though our methodology for estimating how that affects the base of the pyramid is necessarily imperfect. But I don't think we're anywhere near the level of confidence of sustained global reduction in absolute poverty - as opposed to amelioration of its most acute symptoms - to be in a position to start celebrating how few people are really poor, never mind criticising the public for not being aware of it. Not when - I really can't stress this enough - most of the world's population still have to survive for a week on the notionally equivalent purchasing power of an American working less than a full day's shift at Walmart.[3] That proportion certainly hasn't "nearly halved" and it's really not stupid or ignorant to think that the label "extreme poverty" could still apply to all those people [1]if you believe PPP calculations, which are inadequate for this sort of thing since the weighting basket tends to include luxuries and so doesn't account for how cheap food and living has to be in most of the developing world. But again I don't think the inadequacy of measurement detracts from my point about poverty statistics being very much open for debate. [2]using a different World Bank definition of extreme poverty. [3]It's not that there's no validity to arguments that these people aren't extremely poor; I just don't see any reason why the argument that some of them are not should form the basis for widely accepted "facts". I've met people on that level of income in developing countries I wouldn't consider extremely poor of course. Then again, I've also met people literally killing themselves to earn $10 a day who I wouldn't consider anything other than extremely poor, even after accounting for it being considered a good income locally. Adjusted income-based measures of poverty don't really have anything going for them other than relative convenience.
BookmarkSaver 11y ago
How could you spend so much effort typing all of that without even bothering to read what I just said? Or are you literally incapable of understanding how irrelevant what you are saying is to the point that is being made?