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According to the Asia Development Bank 8.2% of the population lives below the poverty line, was your point that this is a low percentage? https://www.adb.org/c
by Godel_unicode 4y ago
According to the Asia Development Bank 8.2% of the population lives below the poverty line, was your point that this is a low percentage?
https://www.adb.org/countries/bhutan/poverty https://www.adb.org/countries/bhutan/poverty
- carapace 4y agoDid you read up on the place before looking for that stat?
- Godel_unicode 4y agoI did, did you? I’ll ask again, if that wasn’t your point then what point were you trying to make?
- carapace 4y agoThere are a few points that could be made. The primary point is that even though they might score low on some metric, the people of Bhutan are pretty much all well-off and happy. The king decreed democracy not long ago. It's a kind of "existence proof" that people can pretty much be alright. Consider a couple of other stats from that site: > the proportion of population with access to electricity in 2020 was 100%. and a 2.5% unemployment rate.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoSure, but that’s the answer to “can poor people more or less be alright “. Which while interesting is orthogonal to the question of “can a society exist with no poor people”.
- carapace 4y agoFair enough, but I feel that, at that point, we're getting into semantic weeds over the definition of "poor", eh? For concreteness, I'll say that I would define "poor" as not having the capability to satisfy the lower tiers of Maslow's hierarchy. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs ) By that standard Bhutan isn't poor despite being technically a Third World nation.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoI think it’s axiomatically true that if you change definitions at will then anything can mean anything. I don’t think that’s useful for enhancing understanding.