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Comment by briantakita | Hacker News Reader

Is this really an improvement, or are more people plugged into our global economic system? Here's a hypothetical story. All names & circumstances are fiction.

Take Tan Bao, who lived in a pastoral barter system in his homeland in north-western China. Tan's family had the same trade over many generations. Their flock consisted of 63 sheep, 3 horses, 28 geese, 6 ducks.

Tan Bao made $0, yet was able to support his family. Everybody pitched in to subsist.

Now developers bought the land that Tan Bao's family has lived on. Tan Bao & his family are evicted. They move to Xi'an. Now, Tan Bao makes $2 a day working in a shoe factory.

Hooray! Tan Bao is no longer living in extreme poverty. Yet he & his family miss their ancestral homeland & old way of life.

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You raise another angle on wealth and income, and one that savvy researchers do look at. I don't know if development economists have a word for it, but I think of it as stability, or a non-monetary safety net.

I first was exposed to this idea in Kenya; a friend was losing his job, and I asked what his plan was, knowing that wages are low, and so on. He said worst case, he and his wife would move back to the family farm (un-mortgaged) and build out their cash crops.

Although his PPP-adjusted income was lower, lower middle class by American standards, he had something almost nobody under 50 in the 97th percentile has in America; a food and shelter safety net that was fairly resilient, and at the very least, not debt-ridden.

Situations like these are an inescapable consequence of population growth. As the number of humans increases, there will inevitably be less space allocated to inefficient activity, where efficiency is determined by an activity's contribution toward sustaining the larger population. Herding 63 sheep is not as efficient as housing 5000 people or stockyarding 500 pigs.

Growth is not 100% to blame, but growth is a sufficient cause for your story. It's worth tracking how well humanity copes with these inevitable changes.

That's an interesting point. I think that maybe what you're asking for is supplemental indicators such as number of people regularly getting the correct number of calories, have shelter, access to medical care and education. However, those supplemental indicators themselves don't tell you much about how much opportunity people have, of which economic indicators are a proxy for.

When I was young I remember most of my country was considered extreme poverty, but to be honest I was never really hungry, there was no people dying of hunger, people were happy and they appreciated little things. I would not like to see those times come back, but while it was difficult for everyone, it was easily survivable by just doing some jobs.

Yes, but how much has the price risen since then? Back then $2 could get you a lot more than today right?

I'm not sure where you're from, but my understanding is that "extreme poverty" literally means that people are dying of hunger. So, if you are able to consistently secure food, you're not living in extreme poverty, but of course, you may still be very, very poor.

In real life, Tan Bao wouldn't have been evicted, he would have preferred the opportunity to accumulate money instead of not accumulating money, despite the temporary lower quality of life working in the factory. I'd say he has less poverty now. He can still survive but can also save.

I think they try to take in to account the income from farming to avoid that sort of miscalculation. Obviously there's a lot of leeway as to how to account for that stuff but anecdotally I think things have improved a lot. Especially in China. I was there around 1982 and people were living on gruel and breaking rocks with hammers to make a living, a bit like you'd imagine a prison gang. Now it's quite like the west in terms of living conditions for most.

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