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Yes, but it's pretty clear they're doing it to make some kind of political point. The point, of course, is pretty iffy, because the people out there who truly
by hughprime 17y ago
Yes, but it's pretty clear they're doing it to make some kind of political point.
The point, of course, is pretty iffy, because the people out there who truly are living on "less than a dollar a day" live in places where a dollar has very different buying power to what it does in a US supermarket -- thus their experiences are probably pretty incomparable.
- jonknee 17y agoWhen you hear those "dollar a day" stats for world hunger don't kid yourself into thinking that $1 converted into the third world is somehow generous. They use purchasing power parity power to calculate the numbers relative to what it would be in the USA. When they say $1 a day they mean a $1 a day in America. That means they actually have less than a buck to spend, depending on the country significantly less.
- hughprime 17y agoDo you have a source on that? I've always been curious about how those sorts of numbers are calculated. Do they, for instance, include subsistence farmers, who may have plenty to eat but no actual money?
- potatolicious 17y ago"When they say $1 a day they mean a $1 a day in America." Citation required. I've seen these numbers and I've never seen one quoted in terms of purchasing power parity. The $1 a day that's often trotted around is real dollars - i.e. $1 USD. The article authors would have had a far more accurate (and less biased towards their cause) result if they had accounted for this. By no means am I saying that $1 USD in a third world country is a lot of money, but it certainly does a lot more than $1 USD in the USA.
- jonknee 17y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold