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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

The number of people in extreme poverty globally have dropped roughly 650m since 1990. Some part of that is probably due to the internet though I'm not sure you could say how much exactly. (Our World in Data graph https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/04/Extreme-Poverty-p...)

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https://ourworldindata.org/internet

Almost none of the desperately poor had internet between 1990-2000, yet poverty fell steeply.

Yeah there are a number of factors in play. I doubt though that China say would be turning out tech in the way they are for example without being able to look stuff up and order stuff on the web. And I think it will kick in in Africa too.

The often-repeated trope, touted as an achievement of capitalism, relies on defining "not poor" as earning 2$ PPP per day, or 60 bucks a month, or 700$ = 0.7k per year.

Not to mention, ignoring any other measures of quality of life or progress besides raw dollars. It's judging capitalism via a metric internal to capitalism. Pure circular reasoning. E.g. subsistence farmers in rural areas made 0$ and were "poor" by that metric, now they work 14h a day at factories for 2$ a day and are "not in poverty" anymore. Congratulatory handshakes all around!

There's plenty of ignorance to go around on HN, but this is shockingly so. Global poverty statistics don't count subsistence farming as zero income, which would render the entire exercise meaningless. Two dollars a day isn't an objectively high number, but the point is that passing that bar is a threshold that means you're not _below_ $2/day. The kind of poor we're talking about deal with starvation, easily-preventable diseases, dying from indoor wood burning for lack of better heating systems,etc. Projecting your privileged, first-world notion that none of that matters because they aren't self-actualized and the resource level that helps you avoid that "isn't that much" is just sheer idiocy.

The international poverty line does take into account of subsidence farmers [1]. Dollars is just used as a standard, so that there can be a tangible value.

1. https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-home-production-and-consu...

That's not how subsistence farming is counted in GDP and poverty statistics. The value of home production is still counted. If you are eating only $2 worth of rice per day, you are counted as poor whether you buy it or grow it.

Even though the facts appear wrong, I think this comment does raise the interesting question of whether money is a metric that is internal to capitalism, or if capitalism is the natural consequence of using only money as a metric.

I guess money is a capitalist metric but there are others you can look at too like life expectancy or literacy that show similar improvements.

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