11 ms·

Global absolute poverty has plummeted from 40% in 1985 to less than 10% in 2015: https://ourworldindata.org/slides/world-poverty/#/declining-world-poverty-1820

Global absolute poverty has plummeted from 40% in 1985 to less than 10% in 2015: https://ourworldindata.org/slides/world-poverty/#/declining-world-poverty-1820-2015-step2 https://ourworldindata.org/slides/world-poverty/#/declining-...

yomly 9y ago
I see this fact touted around a lot, often in the context of stagnating/eroding wages. It 100% goes without saying that global poverty decreasing is cause for celebration, but eroding quality of life for a economic bracket of people should not be ignored. If you look at both facts together however (global poverty is down, wealth has concentrated at the top) then it would suggest that the wealth of the non-wealthy has merely been redistributed. Indeed, this is intuitive if you consider the trend of moving your labour to a cheaper country. Having travelled to many developing nations, it also (admittedly anecdotally) feels evident that most the wealth reaching developing nations is concentrating with the already wealthy / those in power. So what it feels to me is like that local inequality is increasing while global inequality is decreasing - the rich are getting richer everywhere while the working and middle classes are slowly converging everywhere. Unfortunately, as history has so far told, the notion that the erosion of the quality of life has led to improvements of life to someone very far away is a hard sell.
- prostoalex 9y ago
  The wages are a proxy for buying power. Starting at the bottom of the Maslow’s pyramid and moving up, do today’s wages buy less of food, shelter, water, clothing, transportation, etc. than someone receiving wages 30/50/100/200 years ago?
  - observation 9y ago
    Wages really do buy less house than 100 years ago. This would have been about 1920 when the Sears kit houses were invented. Look at this: http://eastsidehill.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/1927_p13049a-p13049b.jpg http://eastsidehill.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/1927... The inflation calculator here: 32,424.83 in today's dollars for a respectable, quality 8 room house. Sure it doesn't include land or labour but there's no way an 8 room house costs 32k today. Today that would buy you a Tiny House on the low end of that market. In my opinion, and I know we are far richer than our great-grandparents, but anybody arguing we're quantitatively richer than our parents has a long row to hoe. If this is progress it sure is lumpy. As Peter Thiel says the most likely explanation is we've had an nearly completely unacknowledged (by Western intelligentsia) stagnation technologically.
    - gnicholas 9y ago
      > Tyler Cowen points out that there's not a single thing in your list of kitchen appliances that didn't exist in the 50s. People have highly temporally displaced notions, believing that things like washing machines or dishwashers are recent mass consumer items but they're not, they're nearly a century old. Economists know that GDP measures are skewed by the fact that “a car is not a car” — that is, a new car today is much more than a new car from 30 years ago. It is safer and more comfortable, and consumers who pay the same amount in real dollars for a new car today are better off than consumers who bought a new car in years past. So the “house” from the Sears catalog isn’t likely comparable to a house today with the same number of rooms. For example, the size of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, closets, and garages has increased greatly in the last 100 years. New homes are more energy efficient and have safer wiring. Does this close the gap with a $32k house? Not in Silicon Valley, but there are parts of the country where the house (excluding the land, which Sears didn’t include either) is worth around $50k.
      - EliRivers 9y ago
        For example, the size of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, closets, and garages has increased greatly in the last 100 years. Have you been to the UK recently? :) I don't know how much of an increase there was from about a century ago, but for the last few decades it's very much been going the other way. But the UK is something of a basket case when it comes to housing; people want to spend all their money on a mortgage. Tangentially related, not long ago a minister suggested that people could keep a "jerry can" or petrol in their garage and was roundly mocked not only for the fire hazard, but for the casual belief that everyone has a garage.
        observation 9y ago
        Personally I've always felt the existence of the garage to be an underrated contribution to American innovation. I don't mean Americans aren't aware of it, I mean that sort of thing never comes up when Europeans discuss how to increase innovation. They will produce 'e-centers' and 'hubs' but I think most of the good stuff just comes from some people screwing around, probably with some things that don't rate much fanfare or seem adequate for a proposal.
- pm90 9y ago
  I don't think we have seen anything like this in history before, and it will be interesting, to say the least, at how all the millions of people elevated from destitution will contribute to the world and change it.
  - atomi 9y ago
    "You can't hold the tide with a broom."
  - vannevar 9y ago
    Don't get too excited. The chart only shows that fewer people fall below the $2/day line. They could all be living on $2.01/day now and it would still be valid.
QAPereo 9y ago
When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out... once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant... once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity...
vannevar 9y ago
Great news, for sure. But was that a result of the tech boom, or government policies? I'm betting on the latter. And the fact that the lowest rungs of the economic ladder aren't fixed in an absolute sense doesn't change the fact that an increasingly enormous share of the wealth produced by humanity globally is going to just 1% of the population.
jressey 9y ago
What is your assertion? Let me help: "The accumulation of wealth amongst the top % is cool because the ratio of absolute poverty has decreased." I mean, that's awesome. The problem is just about everybody else is moving downwards.
PatchMonkey 9y ago
Meanwhile, when poverty numbers are both a mark of shame for a country and fail to keep pace with the inflation of either consumer goods or housing? We have a growing population of homeless folks too "rich" for public assistance. A lot of them already have jobs: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/nyregion/in-new-york-having-a-job-or-2-doesnt-mean-having-a-home.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/nyregion/in-new-york-h... And it has only gotten worse since that was published. The Hoovervilles that showed up before the great depression are back: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/05/america-homeless-population-2017-official-count-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/05/america-home... Dude, you have to either be drowning in kids or make nothing to fall under the official poverty line. But what catches people's eyes is the rise of those officially falling below that line. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/15/america-extreme-poverty-un-special-rapporteur https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/15/america-extr...

yomly 9y ago

I see this fact touted around a lot, often in the context of stagnating/eroding wages. It 100% goes without saying that global poverty decreasing is cause for celebration, but eroding quality of life for a economic bracket of people should not be ignored. If you look at both facts together however (global poverty is down, wealth has concentrated at the top) then it would suggest that the wealth of the non-wealthy has merely been redistributed. Indeed, this is intuitive if you consider the trend of moving your labour to a cheaper country. Having travelled to many developing nations, it also (admittedly anecdotally) feels evident that most the wealth reaching developing nations is concentrating with the already wealthy / those in power. So what it feels to me is like that local inequality is increasing while global inequality is decreasing - the rich are getting richer everywhere while the working and middle classes are slowly converging everywhere. Unfortunately, as history has so far told, the notion that the erosion of the quality of life has led to improvements of life to someone very far away is a hard sell.

prostoalex 9y ago
The wages are a proxy for buying power. Starting at the bottom of the Maslow’s pyramid and moving up, do today’s wages buy less of food, shelter, water, clothing, transportation, etc. than someone receiving wages 30/50/100/200 years ago?
- observation 9y ago
  Wages really do buy less house than 100 years ago. This would have been about 1920 when the Sears kit houses were invented. Look at this: http://eastsidehill.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/1927_p13049a-p13049b.jpg http://eastsidehill.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/1927... The inflation calculator here: 32,424.83 in today's dollars for a respectable, quality 8 room house. Sure it doesn't include land or labour but there's no way an 8 room house costs 32k today. Today that would buy you a Tiny House on the low end of that market. In my opinion, and I know we are far richer than our great-grandparents, but anybody arguing we're quantitatively richer than our parents has a long row to hoe. If this is progress it sure is lumpy. As Peter Thiel says the most likely explanation is we've had an nearly completely unacknowledged (by Western intelligentsia) stagnation technologically.
  - gnicholas 9y ago
    > Tyler Cowen points out that there's not a single thing in your list of kitchen appliances that didn't exist in the 50s. People have highly temporally displaced notions, believing that things like washing machines or dishwashers are recent mass consumer items but they're not, they're nearly a century old. Economists know that GDP measures are skewed by the fact that “a car is not a car” — that is, a new car today is much more than a new car from 30 years ago. It is safer and more comfortable, and consumers who pay the same amount in real dollars for a new car today are better off than consumers who bought a new car in years past. So the “house” from the Sears catalog isn’t likely comparable to a house today with the same number of rooms. For example, the size of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, closets, and garages has increased greatly in the last 100 years. New homes are more energy efficient and have safer wiring. Does this close the gap with a $32k house? Not in Silicon Valley, but there are parts of the country where the house (excluding the land, which Sears didn’t include either) is worth around $50k.
    - EliRivers 9y ago
      For example, the size of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, closets, and garages has increased greatly in the last 100 years. Have you been to the UK recently? :) I don't know how much of an increase there was from about a century ago, but for the last few decades it's very much been going the other way. But the UK is something of a basket case when it comes to housing; people want to spend all their money on a mortgage. Tangentially related, not long ago a minister suggested that people could keep a "jerry can" or petrol in their garage and was roundly mocked not only for the fire hazard, but for the casual belief that everyone has a garage.
      - observation 9y ago
        Personally I've always felt the existence of the garage to be an underrated contribution to American innovation. I don't mean Americans aren't aware of it, I mean that sort of thing never comes up when Europeans discuss how to increase innovation. They will produce 'e-centers' and 'hubs' but I think most of the good stuff just comes from some people screwing around, probably with some things that don't rate much fanfare or seem adequate for a proposal.
pm90 9y ago
I don't think we have seen anything like this in history before, and it will be interesting, to say the least, at how all the millions of people elevated from destitution will contribute to the world and change it.
- atomi 9y ago
  "You can't hold the tide with a broom."
- vannevar 9y ago
  Don't get too excited. The chart only shows that fewer people fall below the $2/day line. They could all be living on $2.01/day now and it would still be valid.

QAPereo 9y ago

When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out... once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant... once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity...

vannevar 9y ago

Great news, for sure. But was that a result of the tech boom, or government policies? I'm betting on the latter. And the fact that the lowest rungs of the economic ladder aren't fixed in an absolute sense doesn't change the fact that an increasingly enormous share of the wealth produced by humanity globally is going to just 1% of the population.

jressey 9y ago

What is your assertion? Let me help: "The accumulation of wealth amongst the top % is cool because the ratio of absolute poverty has decreased." I mean, that's awesome. The problem is just about everybody else is moving downwards.

PatchMonkey 9y ago

Meanwhile, when poverty numbers are both a mark of shame for a country and fail to keep pace with the inflation of either consumer goods or housing? We have a growing population of homeless folks too "rich" for public assistance. A lot of them already have jobs: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/nyregion/in-new-york-having-a-job-or-2-doesnt-mean-having-a-home.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/nyregion/in-new-york-h... And it has only gotten worse since that was published. The Hoovervilles that showed up before the great depression are back: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/05/america-homeless-population-2017-official-count-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/05/america-home... Dude, you have to either be drowning in kids or make nothing to fall under the official poverty line. But what catches people's eyes is the rise of those officially falling below that line. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/15/america-extreme-poverty-un-special-rapporteur https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/15/america-extr...