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Comment by Godel_unicode | Hacker News Reader

According to the Asia Development Bank 8.2% of the population lives below the poverty line, was your point that this is a low percentage?

https://www.adb.org/countries/bhutan/poverty

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Did you read up on the place before looking for that stat?

I did, did you? I’ll ask again, if that wasn’t your point then what point were you trying to make?

There are a few points that could be made. The primary point is that even though they might score low on some metric, the people of Bhutan are pretty much all well-off and happy. The king decreed democracy not long ago. It's a kind of "existence proof" that people can pretty much be alright.

Consider a couple of other stats from that site:

> the proportion of population with access to electricity in 2020 was 100%.

and a 2.5% unemployment rate.

Sure, but that’s the answer to “can poor people more or less be alright “. Which while interesting is orthogonal to the question of “can a society exist with no poor people”.

Fair enough, but I feel that, at that point, we're getting into semantic weeds over the definition of "poor", eh?

For concreteness, I'll say that I would define "poor" as not having the capability to satisfy the lower tiers of Maslow's hierarchy. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs ) By that standard Bhutan isn't poor despite being technically a Third World nation.

I think it’s axiomatically true that if you change definitions at will then anything can mean anything. I don’t think that’s useful for enhancing understanding.

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