There's plenty of ignorance to go around on HN, but this is shockingly so. Global poverty statistics don't count subsistence farming as zero income, which would

There's plenty of ignorance to go around on HN, but this is shockingly so. Global poverty statistics don't count subsistence farming as zero income, which would render the entire exercise meaningless. Two dollars a day isn't an objectively high number, but the point is that passing that bar is a threshold that means you're not _below_ $2/day. The kind of poor we're talking about deal with starvation, easily-preventable diseases, dying from indoor wood burning for lack of better heating systems,etc. Projecting your privileged, first-world notion that none of that matters because they aren't self-actualized and the resource level that helps you avoid that "isn't that much" is just sheer idiocy.