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Comment by briantakita | Hacker News Reader

Their definition of poverty is earning below a certain dollar amount ($1.90/day).

Their measure of poverty has nothing to do with the access to quality water, quality food, land, quality of life, freedom, personal autonomy, health, safety, etc.

Many indigenous people lived on $0.00/day yet had a higher quality of life; before outside influences (i.e. civilization, imperial, western) disrupted their ecosystems & way of life.

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Still, this is a relative improvement. There are many other indications (such as infant death ratio) supporting this.

As some of the quantitative metrics improve, many of the metrics (particularly of qualitative nature) degrade. Think ecosystems, our usage of resources, quality of life for the average person, etc.

> There are many other indications (such as infant death ratio) supporting this.

This is one of the many metrics that matter; much more than the percentage of people making > $1.90/day.

I would like to see some kind of metrics/information showing that quality of life of a person has been declining. Because I do believe quality of life has also been increased globally.

Edit: "quantitive" is replaced with "some kind of metrics"

I'm not so sure about infant deaths - this might be a "fail early" mechanism evolved in nature.

I don't think eugenics is really relevant with this discussion.

Not really, if you look at the statistics of people who have had difficult births they're not much more likely to grow up to be disabled. Especially if you exclude certain categories.

what's a "qualitative metric"?

Im thinking of a score on qualitative data.

Understand that information is lost in its translation to numbers. It's also interpreted to have meaning.

Also understand that values of those assigning the scores plays a large role. For example, an indigenous persob rating quality of life as a score is probably nonsensical to him/her.

all true -- scores are quantitative metrics though. And yes, rather imprecise and subjective, and a lot of information is lost at all stages. Is there a better way to compare things like a quality of life though? Hmm, perhaps something could be inferred from pairwise comparisons? There are many people out there who have experienced multiple lifestyles; alleviating biases would be really tricky though...

Income is a proxy. There are multidimensional definitions of poverty, but they are too hard to measure and compare across countries.

Right, but I think that's partially the point. When you try and boil things down to a simple number, you lose a ton of information. Perhaps it's not wise to do this extreme metric-izing as it will probably just lead to the metrics being gamed rather than actual improvements.

"Welcome to civilization. This land's not yours anymore. Want to eat? Work for us."

They were also living as hunter gathers in very sparsely populated areas. The earth can't support 8 billion people with berry gathering and deer hunting.

And to live that way we only have to let 99% of the population starve.

Also they probably had lots more women die giving birth.

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