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A new poverty line shifted the World Bank's poverty data
- cbeach 1y agoThe poverty rate should be based on an absolute amount, adjusted for inflation in the staples, like food and shelter. Any other kind of adjustment (like, for example, this latest intervention by the World Bank) is political in nature. We should disregard any statistical data whose collection is politically biased.
- isbwkisbakadqv 1y agoHow do you think developing counties come up with their poverty lines? This new international number is just the median of those…
- automatic6131 1y agoUsually they choose a deliberately stupid measurement such as "household income below a percentage of the median wage". This is stupid for many reasons, including (but not limited to): non-monetary, in-kind benefits being excluded, perverse outcomes such as a decline in median wages "reducing poverty" and just about guaranteed continuation of this "poverty". So left wing politicians LOVE it. It's an everlasting cudgel that can never be fixed.
- DiogenesKynikos 1y agoIt's fairly easy to fix, as long as you are willing to do what it takes to address income inequality. Reduce the Gini coefficient and poverty decreases.
- automatic6131 1y agoThat's actually my point: if you take (e.g.) 65% of median income, in a world with a Gini coefficient of 1 - perfect inequality - the rate of poverty is 0%.
- DiogenesKynikos 1y agoBut that's an edge case that will never occur in reality.
- kingkawn 1y agoall your examples would not add up to someone who meets the standards for poverty not in real world terms being too poor to live well
- abdullahkhalids 1y ago> non-monetary, in-kind benefits being excluded This seems sane. The real question one should ask is, how many people can earn a living that allows them to meet basic needs, without state support? You can have a separate figure that out of the number of poor people (like defined in the last sentence), how many are no longer poor with state support?
- dudeinjapan 1y agoThere should be a universal human standard to define what extreme poverty is--i.e. the amount needed to secure food, shelter, and clothing--and then that amount should be assessed country-by-country (or region-by-region) by an independent body. The number of $3 per day is well above the "basic needs" threshold in some of the poorest countries, and well below it in the US, for example.
- duskwuff 1y agoThis is addressed in the article - see the section titled "Estimating comparable national distributions". (In short: income is being scaled relative to purchasing power parity.)
- ivape 1y agoMakes you wonder what the real purpose of that number was. Must have served some agenda, because saying some people live on less than $3 (when it's not a fair statement) definitely could serve a purpose.
- owebmaster 1y agoHow is that not a fair statement?
- ivape 1y ago$3 USD can buy you basic things per day like food, but it won’t buy you that in America, for example. It’s not a fair metric at all. $3 buys you various foods in various parts of the world, which would not put you in abject poverty.
- owebmaster 1y ago$3 a day makes you filthy poor in South America and probably everywhere besides India but there are still poorer people there.
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- Hilift 1y agoNever happen. Defining and measuring poverty is a sensitive topic with juked stats in every country. The UK for example, has a poverty rate of 46% for families with three or more children. The poverty rate for Pakistani households is 47%. Around 7% of the UK is considered destitute. This data is rarely discussed because it is too unpleasant, and no-one wants to connect the inability to fund the national budget with the lack of money. The US does the same with occasional outlandish claims of "lifting nn% people out of poverty" by spending on programs that usually don't last.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago"The poverty line has increased in real terms. And with it, so have the World Bank’s estimates of extreme poverty. 125 million people who would not have been counted as extremely poor before June are now included." I think this is a good change, but maybe would be better to leave the old standard alone in real terms and then make a new category? "the poor will always be with you" "the poor will always be with you"
- btilly 1y agoAnd yet, to an amazing extent, they aren't. If you look back in 200 years, poor people starving to death was simply an accepted fact of life. Today, poor people get fat. Do their lives suck? Absolutely! Just look at the craziness around housing. But in terms of resources per person available to the poor? Very few of us realize how good we've got it. The extreme poverty line has remained essentially the same (adjusted for inflation) for a few decades. Projecting backwards in time, most people in every country used to be in extreme poverty. We are on track to eliminating extreme poverty within our lifetimes. They've adjusted the poverty line upwards. But just watch, life keeps on improving.
- appointment 1y agoWhere are people living on $3/day getting fat?
- wizzwizz4 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor (note: distressing images)
- mrguyorama 1y agoImportant distinction: That is not "fat" in the same way that someone with cirrhosis isn't fat, that is diseased >The name, introduced by Williams in 1935, was derived from the Ga language of coastal Ghana, translated as "the sickness the baby gets when the new baby comes" Christ that's sad.
- datax2 1y agoI am not a fan of their initial "Global Income Distribution" curve. if you take the actual data at the bottom of the article and plot it; it does not make anything the resembles a standard distribution as portrayed. It could be an infographic, it could be different axis, who knows, but portraying a standard distribution is wrong if you have an outlying skew in your distribution. Everything under $40 is a standard distribution, but above $40 represents the same volume of people as the average skewing any sort of plotting. For 2025 only Global People | Dollars 1,183,873,832 | above $40 389,144,677 | $30-$40 681,087,495 | $20-$30 1,647,364,177 | $10-$20 1,134,291,724 | $7-$10 1,170,170,455 | $5-$7 1,185,828,184 | $3-$5 700,440,541 | $1-$3 107,765,635 | <$1
- pc86 1y agoI wish these numbers were percentile relative to the local economy and not in made-up "international dollars." It means absolutely nothing that 1.1B people live on $3-5/day and a different 1.1B live on $5-7. Can you survive in the local economy on $2/day? Then $4/day is not that bad, and $7/day is doing pretty well.
- vlovich123 1y agoThat’s a fair criticism but given how the economy has globalized, people also exploit that discrepancy by hiring remote workers abroad so it’s not completely irrelevant
- vharuck 1y agoI'm no international poverty economist, but I imagine lower income relative to neighboring countries would still have some effect. For instance, if a poor country suffers a famine in its staple crop, can that government and its citizens afford to import food?
- pessimizer 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity
- CGMthrowaway 1y agoI find the plots of distribution of global income here very illuminating - https://www.gapminder.org/income-mountains-dataset-v2/ https://www.gapminder.org/income-mountains-dataset-v2/ Because the nicely shaped bell curves used in TFA are not at all what the distribution actually looks like. There is a significant right-skew. Don't miss the log-scale on x-axis in the first few graphs as well.
- nilstycho 1y agoThe distributions in TFA are accurate. Compare with the shape of the 2015 distribution here: https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-in...
- blessedcavapoo1 1y ago[dead]
- mannyv 1y agoWhen the benchmark changes, you should ask 'why.' According TFA the number of people in extreme poverty dropped when using the old IPL value, and went up with the new value. So politically, no NGO wants to say poverty decreased, because that might reduce urgency, and thus priority. So moving the goalposts means a 50% increase in poverty instead of a 20% decrease in poverty. Which one benefits your mission more? That's not to say the revision of the IPL was wrong. But it does further the mission. Did the improved statistical methods trigger the IPL revision? It's hard to tell without internal world bank docs. I'll bet it did.
- Guthur 1y agoIf you want something even more illuminating check the detailed annual report from the UN on the progress of the 2030 plan, the only measures that are consistently improving are those around governance and control not the well being of people.
- barbazoo 1y agoWhat report are you referring to?
- Guthur 1y agoI stumbled upon it because I was wondering why every country seemed to be synchronized on a 2030 plan, and found them that they had all signed up to the plan in 2015. It being bureaucratic organisation means there will be documentation galore. https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2025/ https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2025/
- barbazoo 1y agoPoverty has decreased pretty much consistently. Infant mortality has gone down. Access to clean energy up. Etc, the trend seems to be positive, no? You said "the only measures that are consistently improving are those around governance and control not the well being of people". Can you point out an example from the report of what you mean?
- therealdkz 1y ago[dead]