5 ms·

> In the "poverty" regime of approximately $0-$15k/year (I put "poverty" in scare quotes because in India this would be considered "rich") Cost of living is wh

> In the "poverty" regime of approximately $0-$15k/year (I put "poverty" in scare quotes because in India this would be considered "rich") Cost of living is what makes $0-15k/year poverty in the US. It's disingenuous to suggest that one can equate the US dollar amount poverty level designation with that of India.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Nope. Here are numbers which are adjusted to cost of living, and which show that the bottom 5% of America is about as rich as the top 5% of India. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have-nots/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t... THESE NUMBERS ARE ADJUSTED FOR COST OF LIVING. (Since this keeps coming up, I added a link to that article to the post.)
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  This comes up a lot. And like the similar "poor people in America are richer than medieval kings" thing, it weirdly always seems directed at the lower ranks in society, when it applies much more so to the wealthiest.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    That's a funny criticism of a post which is "directed at" the wealthiest people, namely Americans.
- marvin 10y ago
  This only gives part of the picture, economic wealth is only a partial proxy for quality of life. The poorest 5% in the US are e.g. disproportionally affected by disease, mental illness and various forms of economically oppressive arrangements such as high debt or the requirement to work multiple minimum-wage jobs. Your link is interesting from a pure economic wealth perspective. But it is certainly not correct to claim that the poorest 5% of the US is better off than the richest 5% of India, which is easy to misread from these statistics. In a sense, we are all kings compared to the Middle Age. This is truly wonderful and well worth remembering. But not everyone is living the life of kings.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    No, the poor are not oppressed by the requirement to work even one job. 60% of poor adults didn't work at all in 2014. http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p60-252.pdf http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication... If you want to claim that poor Americans have diseases and mental illness (which might be the cause of their poverty - i.e., I'm not letting a crazy person be my maid), I'd love to see evidence of that. Do you have any?
    - p4wnc6 10y ago
      Many people feel healthier when they are working, because it affords self-actualization and a sense of accomplishment. When employment conditions are so abject that they render it a bad idea to accept employment, that doesn't necessarily mean people are happier not working. It just means they are happier not working vs. whatever the available working options are. If instead of trying to cut off their option to not work, forcing them to take jobs they hate whose mental health side effects in their lives aren't worth the money made, we instead cut off the option of offering jobs with properties that would be hated, then they may decide working is worthwhile. There are also a lot of status effects you don't explore. Being poor in America means that even if you have the purchasing power of the richest 5% in India, you're a total scumbag nobody for privileged people to shit on, hate, call lazy, etc. The effects of being embedded in that sort of social situation are significant. I'm even thinking of Robin Hanson's article "Cut Medicine in Half" and also "Showing That You Care" -- which indicate that status effects for health are very real. Being the richest person in a poor neighborhood can be better than being the poorest person in a rich neighborhood, even if your overall consumption ability is higher in the second case. I suspect this is likely true in this 5% American vs. 95% Indian example. Merely by having the status of being in the lowest 5% of the relevant social group you frequently interact with, that alone engenders negative life outcomes that can't be overcome just by raising the absolute consumption available to that 5% person. So I would definitely not characterize the overall quality of life of a 5% American as similar to that of a 95% Indian. It would be way more complicated than that. There are probably many 5% Americans with roughly better lives than 95% Indians. There are also probably many 5% Americans with absolutely worse lives than 95% Indians. And some with lives that are as bad as 5% Indians (in fact, I know some of those people in my home region of Appalachia). Regarding your last comment, I think drug use might be a relevant topic, because it is related to poverty (though, as always, it's complicated, good new data is hard to get [0]), and like mental illness, often creates a stigma against employment. There are many people in America who on paper may appear to have an amount of income that, in a worldwide sense, is very privileged, yet who nonetheless live lives that in some mental health or addiction adjusted QALY sense are some of the worst lives on the planet. [0] http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11165.pdf http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11165.pdf
- steakandpeas 10y ago
  I am not so sure about the validity of that graph. Even a quick google search search provides http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/calculator.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/calculator.cms which is also from 2011. 8500 dollars (the cutoff for the bottom 5% of the US according to http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-percent-map.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-p...) a year gives a person in the top 16% of India. But this is without any adjustment whatsoever. And I checked, the calculator is in terms of USD not INR according to the survey it comes from. The other argument to consider is how much India's top ventile has increased by compared to the bottom ventile of the US since 2011. Just by economic growth numbers it would have relatively increased. If you can provide what your article's base income numbers were and how they adjusted them to get the graph, it would be much more convincing.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    This is probably a good primer: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOVRES/Resources/477227-1142020443961/Module5_chap9_10.pdf http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOVRES/Resources/47722... Yearly statistics on India are not very good. Realistically if you have accurate info on what happened in the past 5 years (form what I've seen, they've been great!), you should keep quiet about it and just rake in crores in the shares markets.
    - steakandpeas 10y ago
      The paper you have cited not only uses data from 1998, it also splits India into rural and urban India. The passage in the paper that I can find to support you claim is as follows: "Now, consider mean income of the people belonging to the top decile or ventile, in countries ranging from rural India to Cameroon. Their income puts them between the 51th and 69th percentile of world distribution. Therefore, these two distributions, e.g. Japan’s and rural India’s, practically do not overlap. Or to give another example: a Frenchman on welfare or unemployment benefits (who would presumably belong to the bottom decile of income distribution in France) would still be better off than a top decile person in Madagascar." Note that it only talks about rural India. In fact all the charts in the paper, including the chart on top decile/ventile of poor vs bottom decile/ventile of rich on page 47 do not even include Urban India. I would be curious to see this study repeated with current numbers and without splitting India into urban and rural. Especially because of the amount of urbanization and economic growth that India has seen since 1998.
- acaloiar 10y ago
  Needless to say, as others have pointed out, there is nuance.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

yummyfajitas 10y ago

Nope. Here are numbers which are adjusted to cost of living, and which show that the bottom 5% of America is about as rich as the top 5% of India. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have-nots/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t... THESE NUMBERS ARE ADJUSTED FOR COST OF LIVING. (Since this keeps coming up, I added a link to that article to the post.)

ZeroGravitas 10y ago
This comes up a lot. And like the similar "poor people in America are richer than medieval kings" thing, it weirdly always seems directed at the lower ranks in society, when it applies much more so to the wealthiest.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  That's a funny criticism of a post which is "directed at" the wealthiest people, namely Americans.
marvin 10y ago
This only gives part of the picture, economic wealth is only a partial proxy for quality of life. The poorest 5% in the US are e.g. disproportionally affected by disease, mental illness and various forms of economically oppressive arrangements such as high debt or the requirement to work multiple minimum-wage jobs. Your link is interesting from a pure economic wealth perspective. But it is certainly not correct to claim that the poorest 5% of the US is better off than the richest 5% of India, which is easy to misread from these statistics. In a sense, we are all kings compared to the Middle Age. This is truly wonderful and well worth remembering. But not everyone is living the life of kings.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  No, the poor are not oppressed by the requirement to work even one job. 60% of poor adults didn't work at all in 2014. http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p60-252.pdf http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication... If you want to claim that poor Americans have diseases and mental illness (which might be the cause of their poverty - i.e., I'm not letting a crazy person be my maid), I'd love to see evidence of that. Do you have any?
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    Many people feel healthier when they are working, because it affords self-actualization and a sense of accomplishment. When employment conditions are so abject that they render it a bad idea to accept employment, that doesn't necessarily mean people are happier not working. It just means they are happier not working vs. whatever the available working options are. If instead of trying to cut off their option to not work, forcing them to take jobs they hate whose mental health side effects in their lives aren't worth the money made, we instead cut off the option of offering jobs with properties that would be hated, then they may decide working is worthwhile. There are also a lot of status effects you don't explore. Being poor in America means that even if you have the purchasing power of the richest 5% in India, you're a total scumbag nobody for privileged people to shit on, hate, call lazy, etc. The effects of being embedded in that sort of social situation are significant. I'm even thinking of Robin Hanson's article "Cut Medicine in Half" and also "Showing That You Care" -- which indicate that status effects for health are very real. Being the richest person in a poor neighborhood can be better than being the poorest person in a rich neighborhood, even if your overall consumption ability is higher in the second case. I suspect this is likely true in this 5% American vs. 95% Indian example. Merely by having the status of being in the lowest 5% of the relevant social group you frequently interact with, that alone engenders negative life outcomes that can't be overcome just by raising the absolute consumption available to that 5% person. So I would definitely not characterize the overall quality of life of a 5% American as similar to that of a 95% Indian. It would be way more complicated than that. There are probably many 5% Americans with roughly better lives than 95% Indians. There are also probably many 5% Americans with absolutely worse lives than 95% Indians. And some with lives that are as bad as 5% Indians (in fact, I know some of those people in my home region of Appalachia). Regarding your last comment, I think drug use might be a relevant topic, because it is related to poverty (though, as always, it's complicated, good new data is hard to get [0]), and like mental illness, often creates a stigma against employment. There are many people in America who on paper may appear to have an amount of income that, in a worldwide sense, is very privileged, yet who nonetheless live lives that in some mental health or addiction adjusted QALY sense are some of the worst lives on the planet. [0] http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11165.pdf http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11165.pdf
steakandpeas 10y ago
I am not so sure about the validity of that graph. Even a quick google search search provides http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/calculator.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/calculator.cms which is also from 2011. 8500 dollars (the cutoff for the bottom 5% of the US according to http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-percent-map.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-p...) a year gives a person in the top 16% of India. But this is without any adjustment whatsoever. And I checked, the calculator is in terms of USD not INR according to the survey it comes from. The other argument to consider is how much India's top ventile has increased by compared to the bottom ventile of the US since 2011. Just by economic growth numbers it would have relatively increased. If you can provide what your article's base income numbers were and how they adjusted them to get the graph, it would be much more convincing.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  This is probably a good primer: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOVRES/Resources/477227-1142020443961/Module5_chap9_10.pdf http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOVRES/Resources/47722... Yearly statistics on India are not very good. Realistically if you have accurate info on what happened in the past 5 years (form what I've seen, they've been great!), you should keep quiet about it and just rake in crores in the shares markets.
  - steakandpeas 10y ago
    The paper you have cited not only uses data from 1998, it also splits India into rural and urban India. The passage in the paper that I can find to support you claim is as follows: "Now, consider mean income of the people belonging to the top decile or ventile, in countries ranging from rural India to Cameroon. Their income puts them between the 51th and 69th percentile of world distribution. Therefore, these two distributions, e.g. Japan’s and rural India’s, practically do not overlap. Or to give another example: a Frenchman on welfare or unemployment benefits (who would presumably belong to the bottom decile of income distribution in France) would still be better off than a top decile person in Madagascar." Note that it only talks about rural India. In fact all the charts in the paper, including the chart on top decile/ventile of poor vs bottom decile/ventile of rich on page 47 do not even include Urban India. I would be curious to see this study repeated with current numbers and without splitting India into urban and rural. Especially because of the amount of urbanization and economic growth that India has seen since 1998.
acaloiar 10y ago
Needless to say, as others have pointed out, there is nuance.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]