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Comment by fuzz4lyfe | Hacker News Reader

My bet is simply that you go where the money is[0].

[0]https://www.justfacts.com/news_poorest_americans_richer_than...

That's a big difference. It says the bottom 20% of Americans consume as much as the average person in my country.

Although this is in 2010, during the crisis, it would suggest a big difference in what I thought the outcome of such a study would be.

This doesn't include savings, it seems. Which are mandatory here.

This is wrong on so many levels it's not even funny. Original HN submission WRT that link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799705

Note I don't disagree, but that source was on hn a few days ago and is a pretty poor propaganda site. The article:

* redefines poverty multiple times and then comes to the surprising conclusion that the results differ from the NY Times article

* uses consumption in USD as a measure, which is highly problematic, because a) different countries have different purchasing power, which is is the reason almost noone in poverty research compares international poverty using gross consumption b) consumption heavily reflects economic inefficency (e.g. health care costs: If a say Danish poor gets her broken arm fixed for free, she would consume 0$ according to this figure, while achieving the same quality of life out of it)

The usual threshold for poverty (for good reasons) is 50 or 60% of the median income in a country. Which the NY Times article used.

>The usual threshold for poverty (for good reasons) is 50 or 60% of the median income in a country.

If you think half to 40% of people in the Congo are not in poverty you are delusional

That's cherry-picking. Of course everybody in the poorest country in the world, is in poverty.

But the usual measure of relative local wealth, works pretty good.

That measure won't work on the vast majority of the planet. The global per-capita median income is less that three thousand dollars a year. People making 4 grand a year aren't out of poverty.

60% of the median is the definition of relative poverty. This is what the NY Times article was about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty#Relative_poverty

You are free to find that delusional, but if you want to partake in the scientific discourse about poverty, it would be advantageous if you don't redefine the core concept.

Yes, and my point is it's an entirely useless definition. If 40% of the population were billionaires and the remaining 60% were millionaires. The millionaires aren't in poverty.

"delusion: an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder."

It is quite delusional to create new metrics on poverty because ones based on income or consumption don't get you to the result you like.

Are you aware of the difference between absolute and relative poverty?

I mean, really, take a step back and consider these two possibilities:

a) Thousands of researchers have researched the topic for decades, and no one ever considered it problematic to directly compare the poverty in Congo and the US using the same metric. But finally, after als these decades, during a few seconds of flying over a blog link, commenter fuzz4lyfe on hn finds the error and renders decades of research obsolete.

b) You err.

What is more probable?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com