Hacker News Reader

Comment by educationdata | Hacker News Reader

The number is simply too good to be true. Reduce poverty rate by 20% in 3 years in Canada? So when will they totally eliminate poverty?

"there were 825,000 fewer Canadians living in poverty in 2017 than there were in 2015" from the official website. It's not the same as "Roughly 825,000 Canadians were lifted out of poverty in those years".

Also, it's ridiculous to claim this scale of change was caused by the program described in the article. It's almost certainly caused by some large scale economical or statistical reasons.

View on HN

You should read Factfulness, by Hans Rosling.

In the late 1990s, 29% of the world lived in extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as less than $1.80/day in today's dollars. Today, that number is less than 9%. We've slashed extreme poverty globally by two thirds in twenty years.

Too good to be true? No, facts on the ground.

We are talking about Canada, not the world. Also 3 years, not 30 years.

Also the poverty line here is totally different.

The data brought to light by Factfulness also contradicts this NYT article, which claims the US is not addressing poverty. In fact, the US and most western nations -- and indeed the world as a whole -- are getting richer with less poverty. Already extreme poverty is virtually nonexistent in Level 4 nations like the US.

Extreme poverty and regular poverty are different things. Extreme poverty is nearly nonexistent in the US, but the regular poverty rate has been more or less static for decades (yes, I looked it up). Canada is making rapid progress on the regular poverty rate, which is what's so remarkable.

If "living in poverty" is defined as some kind of statistical measure (which it usually is) which is defined as something like "percentage of average wage" or something like that, than lowering of average wage (due to any circumstances) could cause less people to end up under the bar and thus reduce "poverty rate". The people in question may not get a single cent better income or conditions. I have no idea if that's the case in Canada, but it's an example how this is can be statistic-driven. Usually when one uses a single number to describe complex conditions of people in a large diverse country, that's what you get.

> "there were 825,000 fewer Canadians living in poverty in 2017 than there were in 2015" from official website.

Yeah, that's meaningless. Those 825,000 could have been murdered and that statement would still be true.

Yes. However 825,000 Canadians weren't murdered.

Do you a plausible explanation for the stat that goes against the point being made that Canada is meaningfully decreasing poverty? Otherwise, that seems like a pretty useful stat.

Right, but my point is that statement on its own doesn't mean 825,000 people are now living above the poverty line. How many of them moved out of Canada? How many are deceased?

All this tells us is the numbers came up different. It doesn't give facts about why.

Also, just as a sanity check, Canada has a population of 37 million. So, ~2% of the population in two years.

it's 20% reduction in the rate.

as in, 2014 percentage of population in poverty was 11.3%, 2017 percentage of population in poverty was 9.5%

hence a 15.9% decrease in the percentage of population in poverty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com