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I don't understand the significant of metrics like the international poverty line. Seems like the only point of its existence is to create a sense of progress o
by ksynwa 2y ago
I don't understand the significant of metrics like the international poverty line. Seems like the only point of its existence is to create a sense of progress or maybe exaggerate it. They never account for basic stuff like how many calories people get to eat, let alone the quality of nutrition. Last year I read an article saying like 30% of children in India are stunted.
- jso33 2y agoIt is measured and there are targets - https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/hunger/ https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/hunger/
- ksynwa 2y agoThat's correct but my point is what kind of poverty is the poverty line measuring if it does not take into account how much people are getting to eat. This access to PPP adjusted dollar amount is clearly not a good heuristic for it because somehow extreme poverty has been alleviated while having a hunger index worse than North Korea.
- gruez 2y ago>while having a hunger index worse than North Korea. Relying on North Korean statistics to make your point is... questionable
- ksynwa 2y agoI don't know how World Hunger Index get their DPRK figures but that is not important. There are about 110 countries with better hunger indices than India. A country that tells its citizens that we are going to be a superpower by 20xx should not be doing that at meeting basic needs.
- slothtrop 2y agohttps://www.unicef.org/india/reports/indias-progress-malnutrition-and-non-communicable-diseases-insights-nfhs https://www.unicef.org/india/reports/indias-progress-malnutr... Malnourishment is also steadily diminishing. Effectively because food affordability improves as poverty diminishes. It's a good proxy.
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- milesrout 2y agoThe point is to get a sense of progress or not. It only creates a sense of progress if there actually is some. The alternative is the silly measures of "poverty" we use in the first world which are mathematically unachieveable by design so they can always be used to justify measures politicians want to pass: "won't you think of the child poverty you heartless monster" etc.
- aylmao 2y ago> The alternative is the silly measures of "poverty" we use in the first world which are mathematically unachievable by design so they can always be used to justify measures politicians want to pass: "won't you think of the child poverty you heartless monster" etc. No, I disagree. The alternative, as the original comment said, is to measure access to calories, nutrition, or other metrics like prevalence of starvation, access to shelter, access to sanitation, prevalence of certain health issues, etc. Measuring poverty via the international poverty line has often been criticized [1][2][3]. [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337335330_A_critique_of_the_Income_Poverty_Line_and_Global_Multidimensional_Poverty_Index https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337335330_A_critiqu... [2]: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-isnt-natural-it-is-created https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-i... [3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/8/21/exposing-the-great-poverty-reduction-lie/ https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/8/21/exposing-the-gr...
- Neonlicht 2y agohttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8rk5d7ekjmo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8rk5d7ekjmo I found this article interesting. Personally I think starvation is a very low bar to clear. What matters to the first world is whether or not India has a middle class that is able to buy stuff.
- thworp 2y agoThere has been tremendous progress in terms of available calories, malnutrition and deaths to starvation globally [0]. I'd say opaque indices and relative measures are now gaining adoption by certain parties to help conceal that fact. Of course anyone suffering hunger is tragic, but things have decidedly improved (although sadly it has plateaued in Africa since 2010). I can't really comment on the situation in India specifically, but just for some global context around stunted development, look at a chart of men's height [1]. Not having half your population stunted by malnutrition is a recent phenomenon. [0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-supply https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-... [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-of-men-by-year-of-birth https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-of-men-by-...
- ksynwa 2y agoYour first link says that it measures calories available and not calories consumed. It links to an undernourishment metric instead the world average for it has remained about the same for about a decade. I am not expert and I am probably cherry picking the page that matches my bias but I disagree that the progress has been tremendous.
- thworp 2y ago> but I disagree that the progress has been tremendous. There really is no argument that it hasn't. If we take a year between 1950 and 1970 as a baseline, there was a significant reduction in chronic malnutrition and the number and severity of famines -- both in absolute numbers as well as per capita. > it has remained about the same for about a decade If your time horizon is the last 10 years then the picture is more mixed, yea.
- sorushn 2y agoIt is used to justify and excuse WEF-imposed restructuring which in reality comes at tremendous human cost.
- gruez 2y ago>WEF-imposed restructuring The WEF is a talk shop that has no power to impose any sort of restructuring. Are you talking about the IMF?
- tbrownaw 2y agoThe usual claim is that the people who are involved do have power to effect policies (mostly by deciding what to throw money at I think), and that that's where they meet to bounce ideas off eachother and generally get all on the same page. It's the "it's a big club, and you ain't in it" thing.
- numpad0 2y agoThis sounds like bit of column one and column two. On one hand, poverty by income in USD must assume that the world's economy had globalized enough, such that, there can be no such locations on Earth as where $0.01 pays Michelin star lunch for dozen healthy adults. That's going to completely break premises of this metric. On the other hand, it's probably useful enough for now. Maybe there are 100x differences between prices for a sack of potatoes across different developing countries and therefore this index is at least that much inaccurate, but poverty problems and income gaps are a lot worse than that anyway, so there are ways this could make sense within reason.
- juujian 2y agoI always had to think of my grandparents when discussing GDP. Aside from being very much part of the regular economy, they were also quite self sufficient. When my grandmother died, we found rows and rows of bottled jam. Some decades old according to the labels. My aunt did the taste test, and according to that at least, they were still very much edible and yummy actually. To the GDP that whole side of life is invisible. But it makes a big different in terms of resiliency when disaster hits. I'm assuming it was a reaction to WW2 or maybe it just is what people always did. I'm guessing that a lot of people in India are quite self sufficient (although I wouldn't know) so the financialization of every day life and resulting gdp growth is indeed a flawed indicator.
- jorvi 2y ago> My aunt did the taste test, and according to that at least, they were still very much edible and yummy actually. Sugar is a preservative just like salt, and fruit jams were developed specifically as a way to preserve more of a fruit harvest. Honey is an example of a sugary product that is extremely stable. There's honey that has been recovered from Egyptian tombs and is still considered edible.
- HPsquared 2y agoAlso: anything relating to home cooking, exercise, self-care, relationships and caring for children and other relatives. Only "paid professional" services are counted which are often much worse quality than the organic untaxed real thing.
- lars512 2y agoYou can check out a range of important development statistics on India here: https://lars.yencken.org/projects/country-explorer/india https://lars.yencken.org/projects/country-explorer/india The one we're talking about today is "extreme poverty", which is the $2.15 purchasing-power-adjusted line. It's fantastic news that most Indians have surpassed this line, but it's also helpful to think of this line as just one rung in a ladder out of poverty. Life just above this line is still not great. This chart, which shows how much of the population lives in different poverty lines for India, gives you a sense for the population as a whole. You can compare it to other countries to see their distribution, and China is probably a good comparison to make. India: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-up-to-30-dollars?time=2000..latest&country=~IND&focus=~IND https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio... China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-up-to-30-dollars?time=2000..latest&country=~CHN&focus=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio... Despite progress on extreme poverty, you're right that there are still some 3 billion people in the world who cannot afford a nutritious diet, and likewise 3 billion people who live in energy poverty, meaning they have to cook indoors with solid fuels (wood, coal, dung) that damage their health and shorten their lives. It's important that we make progress on all these things in the coming decades. We absolutely have the power to. The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better!
- anon291 2y agoAs someone of Indian descent, realistically speaking, Indian nutrition is going to be bad so long as the upper classes continue to moralize over it. Recently, there was a kerfuffle in Maharasthra because the state government wanted to remove eggs from the state lunch program and go lacto-vegan only. This is due to some people considering eggs unclean (like many other animal products). This sort of moralizing is extremely common in India, despite being a poor country. To put it bluntly, moralizing over diet is a past-time of the wealthy, not a way to run a country.
- maxglute 2y ago>moralizing over diet Interesting. There's seems to be some fuckery with Indian hunger data, i.e. malnourishment, stuntness have stalled at a relatively high level 10 years ago and even occasionally gets worse. Which kind of makes sense if one realizes India added 400 million mouths in last 20 years, and distribution is an issue. I remember also news a few years ago Indian average height decreasing, all proxy indicators that hunger/nutrition was not improving (granted this was during covid). But cultural drama over diet also explains a lot of it. Cultural drama seems to explain a lot in India... one other stark stat is Indian female work participation rate declined as country got wealthier... culture seems to be women stop working out of neccessity if men can sustain household. It's a... different development trajectory.
- apwell23 2y ago> Last year I read an article saying like 30% of children in India are stunted. We were solidly middle class in india that never went hungry. All our kids in USA now are atleast 3-4 inches taller than us. They are often taller than their parents in their mid teens.
- lurk2 2y agoIs air quality a problem in the city where you grew up?
- apwell23 2y agoNo. Not at all.
- christkv 2y agoThey probably eat a lot more protein than their parents.
- mapt 2y agoThe Lancet suggests that the difference between very poor nutrition and great nutrition adds up to roughly 8 inches (20cm) of adult height. Height remains very genetically heritable, aside from that. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/11/children-height-gap-nutrition-study/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/11/children-height-gap-... You never went hungry, but did you have a reliable supply of all the micronutrients, and an abundance of protein? At all periods from birth to the end of your teens when growth plates ossified?
- kamaal 2y ago>>We were solidly middle class in india that never went hungry. Not being hungry is not the same as getting good nutrition. Middle class in India doesn't eat enough meat, fish, eggs, fruits, and vegetables. Middle class meal in South India is mostly rice. With some fried potato side. In the North its Chapathi(Flat bread-Wheat), with friend potato sides and lentil(Dal). Only thing that Middle class likely gets a good deal of is milk(through Chai). Plus meat is taboo subject in India. A kind of sugar loaded vegetarianism is what most middle class in India gets to eat.
- trashtester 2y agoTry to live below that poverty line for a few months, and I'm pretty sure you will understand it.
- david38 2y agoThis shows you don’t know what extreme poverty is and how horrible it is. What-about-ism is an elitist way to pretend to care yet do nothing. Imagine it was your country and your project which eliminated extreme poverty. No doubt you would be bending over backwards to listen to someone who “read an article” on the other side of the world
- gosub100 2y agoThe criticisms against charity and progress seem to be politically motivated. Human suffering can be used as a commodity to influence elections or promote specific ideologies. If you start measuring the suffering and show progress, you take away their commodity and thus become a threat. I.e. "how dare you say you're improving? There's still plenty of suffering going on". This position is a shift from continuous scale to simple binary thinking. At which point, anyone without new clothes and an air conditioned SUV is "poor".
- Sleepful 2y agoAccusing "what-about-ism" is itself a "what-about-ism".... You are using it to short-circuit valid thought-provoking criticism.
- tim333 2y agoIf you want to reduce poverty it's handy to have some metrics. Obviously it's a simplification of reality but you can't really track all 8bn people individually to see how they are doing.
- noja 2y agoSure you can. But it costs more.
- rayiner 2y agoThese metrics are there to measure progress, and the progress is real and happening. My dad was born in 1951 in a village in neighboring Bangladesh. When he was a kid, over 30% of kids died before age 5: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1072376/child-mortality-rate-bangladesh-historical https://www.statista.com/statistics/1072376/child-mortality-.... This was an improvement compared to 50 years before that, when the under-5 mortality rate was about half (which was about the same as in pre-industrial Europe). Today, the under 5 mortality rate is only 3%. Still higher than the sub-1% of the U.S., but similar to what it was in the U.S. in 1951 at the same time my dad was born.
- hilux 2y agoI agree. By many reports, half of Indian homes do not have toilets. Even if earning above some arbitrary dollar threshold, they sound uncomfortably "poor" to me.