Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go?
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
Solutions must come from within the countries, and those solutions must involve cultural change: reduced tribal hatreds, fewer civil wars, less corruption, and so forth. Without such change, a lot of external aid just worsens the problems it is supposed to solve.
Unfortunately a prerequisite for foreign investment is political stability. Nobody is going to build a factory in a war zone, which is why Sudan Somalia and Ethiopia look the way they do.
It's a delicate situation and I don't think anyone really knows the best way to help.
does the answer not follow immediately from what youre saying?
economic aid, no strings attached. no efforts towards regime change, no political pressure or ideological motivations. that's all. of course this is not possible in a world with the US as hegemon, but the solution is hardly a secret.
TLDR; Haiti is a victim of the first world's evil.
TLDRBIWRS(but i will read some);
the second that Haiti won their independence and grew a black democracy (the first nation to ban slavery), the empires of the world turned them into a pariah and destroyed them systematically through means such as being literally held at gunpoint by Charles X to join a massive and incredibly predatory loan. One that took 130 years to pay off(1825-1947!!!). They were economically isolated by the Thomas Jefferson immediately. The US financial vice in 1910, in response to German investment, provoked a dictatorship in Haiti, then the US occupied. Eventually FDR pulled out, but the financial vice stayed in place until 1947, post revolution. That chaos churned for 20 years, and JFK pulled all aid in 1961. Haiti was forced into another ridiculous 100 year contract, this time by U.S. Dupont.
The CIA dug deep and control the haitain intelligence agency in the 1980s. drugs, guns, assassinations, normal CIA stuff for the 80s. The first true positive action from outside the country took place in 1994, when Clinton and Carter brought an exiled leader back and lead to a proper democracy. But, the second they asked for reasonable concessions from the US in 2000(which failed due to the US rotten congress and its self preservation), the EU and US cut aid significantly. Again.
Chaos leads to a 2004 coup, one where the US meddled and has still not provided counter evidence to circumstances that appear to show the US forcing out Aristide, the leader Carter and Clinton had brought back. Devastating earthquake and rebuild/restructure towards tourism through the 2010s. 2017, a new leader 'elected' with a heavy hand from the US who oversaw this election. This leader attempts a coup, and is assassinated in 2021. Another devastating earthquake. Gang violence in 2022.
So not only does this make it very hard to compare poverty statistics between very different economies, it makes it very difficult to compare it historically. Ive no problem tracking inequality, and it's a legitimate way to view fairness in a society, but it's highly misleading when applied blindly to people in fundamentally different societies and economies with totally different costs of living and internal wealth distributions.
Yes, I know the $30 was adjusted for purchasing power between rich and poor countries, but it's not adjusted for purchasing power over time, so it can't track actual changes in material circumstances. That's why the extreme poverty stats are more relevant for change over time.
It seems to play into the global capitalist scheme of luring people into debt servitude with a false promise of high wages in a distant city / country.
> In all these statistics, the researchers are not only taking people’s monetary income into account, but also their non-monetary income and home production. One reason why this is important is because many poor people are small-scale farmers who produce their own food.
it has nothing to do with competence. we can and have defined per-country poverty lines, which these people obviously know. this is a malicious effort to present a twisted narrative of western superiority.
Sadly this is likely because these metrics are weaponized to show how superior and civilized the West is, which has largely abandoned subsistence farming. That's also why this article doesn't directly mention China, which is the runaway leader in large-scale poverty alleviation efforts over the last few decades.
From the linked article:
> Basics of global poverty measurement
> Throughout this article – and in global income and expenditure data generally – the statisticians who produce these figures are careful to make these numbers as comparable as possible.
> Non-monetary sources of income are taken into account
> Many poor people today and in the past rely on subsistence farming and do not have a monetary income. To take this into account and make a fair comparison of their living standards, the statisticians that produce these figures estimate the monetary value of their home production and add it to their income/expenditure.
> Differences in purchasing power and inflation are taken into account
The data is all there, in the linked studies. They could easily have used the actually correct data (i.e. per-country poverty lines).
But then e.g. China would go from 90-100% poverty bracket (dark red) to the 10-20% bracket (light brown), which is obviously not the conclusion that the blog post* wants readers to be impressed with.
* authored by the director of a global development program at Oxford
It's easy to understand this sentiment, but it's incorrect. Growth won't save us. To understand why, I recommend reading this:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
The median household income in Lafayette is $41,000. With the wealth that has been created by all this infrastructure investment, a median family living in the median house would need to have their city taxes go from $1,500 per year to $9,200 per year. To just take care of what they now have, one out of every five dollars this family makes would need to go to fixing roads, ditches and pipes. That will never happen.
Thus, Lafayette has a predicament. Infrastructure was supposed to serve them. Now they serve it.
To use the US as an example, cities are overbuilt by a factor of perhaps 5:1. Yet they continue spending more and more tax revenue on new infrastructure to chase growth. I believe that this is where the political right wing's feeling that taxes are too high comes from. I also believe that it's where the political left wing's feeling that there isn't enough tax revenue comes from.
IMHO the solution to all of this is to stop chasing new revenue from growth. Wealthy people already have more money than they can spend. And poor people spend the entirety of their time working to make rent. This is mostly the fault of the wealthy, because they have the resources to address fundamental problems in our economy through innovation or by paying their taxes, but choose not too. They get rich and say "I got mine" and no longer see the plight of those struggling around them.
The biggest bang for the buck would come from raising tax brackets post-inflation and to stop charging income tax for about the bottom half of the country, which has no wealth to speak of. Which might look like raising the minimum income before taxes begin for single filing status from $12,950 to perhaps $50,000. Then raise taxes substantially on people earning more than about $250,000 per year. The additional funds should go to UBI and paying down the national debt to free up revenue that we used to have for education, defense, etc. Yes this negatively incentivizes high incomes, but it also incentivizes countless millions of underemployed people to work hard and finally enjoy the fruits of their labors, especially young people who have never known life beyond subsisting month to month. If we don't do this, we'll condemn another generation to lost decades, just like what happened to my generation - Gen X.
I believe that young people will use the investment in their generation to pay it forward and solve the multifaceted crises facing humanity and the planet. Loosely that looks like moving to a libertarian self-sufficiency to counter corporate price gouging, in the form of off-grid energy and local food production. And adopting a progressive culture at large that works counter to trickle-down economics, having the primary goal of alleviating suffering. This is the only way that I see to get more people self-actualized with their basic needs automated, so that the global average individual income of $10,000 per year can go to a higher quality of life instead of bills.
I'm sure there are holes in this plan and admittedly it closely aligns with the midlife feelings of anxiety/exhaustion/failure that I struggle with personally. But I'm not the only one.
This has already been the case for a long time. It was 47% of the US pays no actual federal income taxes in 2012. Pre pandemic 44%. 2021 was 57%.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/03/25/57percent-of-us-househol...
For example, if agricultural productivity in the worlds poorest countries increased a lot (for example, through improved availability of fertilizer or modern seeds), it could serve to reduce deforestation in those regions by reducing the demand for more farmland. That sort of economic growth would help lift people out of extreme poverty.
But there is another very well documented phenomenon (citing your answer to a sibling comment): people's consumption of natural resources, emission of pollutants and overall ecological footprint drastically increases with rising wealth.
This more than makes up for any leveling in population growth. And I want to make clear that I am not against more wealth for people who are starving.
Because another topic is that wealth is not evenly distributed, and mostly fuels excesses and further environmental destruction when inequality is high.
Many people cite statistics claiming that the per-capita emissions (just an exemplary quantity, there's more to the environment than CO2 emissions of course) would be falling in rich western countries over the last years or even decades.
AFAIK, even for "model countries" with low population density and comparatively good environmental legislation, such as Denmark, these numbers are based on basically lying with statistics.
Prime example being the outsourcing of all environmental damage while keeping the gains in the country.
Introductory reading (that's where I took the Denmark example from): https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/
Only if the food surplus gets used to improve the life of people, without increasing population size!
Now we have more efficient processes with less waste, we have renewable sources of forestation, renewable energy sources, less coal, less chemical spills and dumping, but every body can afford and have the things that were once considered luxuries. Everyone has an HVAC now. Everyone purchases tons upon tons of little plastic pieces of shit and throws them in the trash. If you have a blueberry with a little bit of mold on it, now you throw away the pack. You have to fight for the right to repair your cheap plastic shit with silicon parts in it. You are expected to replace your plastic shit every 1-2 years with more plastic shit. We drink water and soda out of plastic bottles in absurd amounts. We use more electricity than ever before.
There has to be a balance somewhere. We have to have a culture shift at some point.
If it were down to wagging a finger, yeah, that's for the birds. The only thing that serves is feeding the clickbait money machine inflaming a culture war. We already know that if some alternatives are on the market (electric vehicles, plant-based boxed crap), people will buy them. A large percentage of consumers buys plant-based products despite not being vegan or caring to be.
In the food department, legumes and whole grains are not "luxury" items, but can serve as a substitute for meat. Even omnivores (I am one) who are health-conscious tend now to make a point to include more of these in their diet, and they're cheap.
Bearing in mind that these interventions are meant for short-run downward pressure on emissions (in the West), and short-run interventions are what we need. There is low-hanging fruit still, which can be exploited without dampening quality of life and without "mandates". In the long-run it's all a moot point, between nuclear/fusion and renewables. There is also a ton of public/private investment into carbon capture, renewables, the works - but that is not moving quickly, even though this would be the most valuable.
I feel like we 're nowhere close to getting our current resource extraction and pollution to anything resembling sustainable rate on many fronts and it's constantly growing.
Cutting let's say the average americans co2 output 8fold for example whilst maintaining harder to ditch outputs such as haber-bosh and having economic growth at the same time seems far off.
The main challenges are pollutants that can't easily be contained and have adverse effects even when diluted globally. Mercury is one example, DDT, and chlorofluorocarbons are others. We've mostly found ways to contain or replace those.
Of course, the big one is carbon dioxide. But it's not an impossible problem: the Haber Bosch process doesn't inherently emit carbon, it's the hydrogen production that emits carbon dioxide. This can be replaced with thermal water splitting from nuclear power or electrolysis. No doubt it'll take a lot of investment in new energy sources, but it's not impossible.
Highly toxic ones or in the case for the CFC's & co ones with a rather fast disproportionate effect and alternatives available. We make these choices relatively quickly and properly whenever they're proportionally easy. From leaded fuel to measures to prevent smog. I don't see the same push for lesser but more omnipresent ones like plastic. Whilst we contain the vast majority of it to landfills I find it rather disturbing how much of it has found it's way out there. Meanwhile recycling is used as a deceptive sham reason to retain it's use in current form and burning it is added to the green energy stats. It boggles the mind
> This can be replaced with thermal water splitting from nuclear power
How so?
>or electrolysis
If i remember well and correct me if i'm wrong the last study i saw on this projected this would need electricity prices that were ridiculously low. Under 0.03$/kwh i think. We'd much sooner use the hydrogen in power to gas plants as a form of energy storage but even that lacks wide scale commercial viability in the forseeable future. Given we're not in some post scarcity society when it comes to energy in the forseeable future i don't see many ditching our conventional methods quickly whilst also cutting down on....nearly all the rest. (Steel production also has a similar output, etc)
So I imagine if we cut down on that in an attempt to be sustainable fertilisers would become a lot lot more expensive putting pressure on our food supply. This in the context of a world poplation that will keep growing, in the meantime we have other issues that relate to food security. For example in Germany flying insect populations dropped about 75% since 1990. We're not exactly jumping to quit what's causing that too.
> How so?
If you hear water above ~800 Celsius it'll split into hydrogen and oxygen. A catalyst can make this happen at lower temperatures. Nuclear power can heat water, run it through this catalyst, to produce hydrogen.
Electrolysis is no doubt more expensive than steam reformation, but the point is that alternatives do exist and can be done if enough investments are made.
"Sustainable fertilizers" fundamentally needs some source of nitrogen. The amount we can get from manure is nowhere near sufficient, so carbon neutral replacements to steam reformation are needed. In short, electrolysis and thermal water splitting are the answer to the question, "how do we get sustainable fertilizers?"
If you interpreted my comment as saying 'the planet is fine, humanity is fine', I would re-read it a few times, think about it for 5 minutes, and then make a comment.
Capitalism itself cannot thrive when production/consumption slows down, even in terms of GDP, a -2% growth or worse is considered catastrophic to the economy. So no, I don't think we are going down a good path if the only way to stay afloat is to keep pumping out more crap.
The good news is that technological innovation is reeling back emissions and land encroachment, the bad is that growth in developing countries is outpacing innovation such that the demand for fossil fuels is still in an upward trajectory. Quality of life is improving, at a cost. East Asia won't grow this fast forever, but we're in a position of requiring some imminent intervention. I expect to see more policy moves in the near future as nuclear and viable carbon-capture won't come quickly enough, and rich people don't want shit weather and paying out billions in damages every year either.
Slowing down won't happen because we can't ask other countries not to improve their quality of life, and even if we did, they wouldn't listen. That's where the extra demand is coming from. Domestically you could put a small dent by disincentivizing purchases of SUVs or whatever.
Humanity though? Hoo boy, are we really in for it.
chitters maniacally
You might as well go and argue that some particular person from Africa can't be called “black” because his skin pigmentation is brown. That's equally productive.
Well i do think that's partly the point - the animals _will_ be fine. Viewing "the animals" as the set of biodiversity that we currently like and deem correct seems narrowly scoped. Diversity could be set back, but will definitely not go anywhere as long as evolution exists - right?
So what does our interpretation of animals really matter, especially if we're not around to judge it? Which isn't an argument to destroy everything to be clear. But i think "the planet doesn't care" includes life, not just a rock.
Ie, species have been invasively killing and replacing each other for all of time. Every time a closed ecosystem was breached (islands/etc) by some new foreigner it was chaos, expansion, evolution, etc. I don't think we change much in the long run.
But to stress, i am here, and i do enjoy the plants and animals of my habitat so i want to preserve the environment. However that's my selfish desire imo. The "planet and including life within this evolving biosphere" doesn't care.
Because of what...geology? The Earth itself? (No.)
You might have missed the “and/or animals” part. My comment already addresses those who are more concerned (as in preoccupied) with non-human life.
But I guess I should have mentioned plants as well. Mea fucking culpa.
What if the person from Africa has brown skin pigmentation and are descendants of people from India? I had a friend in college like that who fit those qualities, but I am pretty sure he would experience backlash if he referred to himself as a black person (in the US).
Unless we nuke ourselves into oblivion, humanity will preserve and thrive. Today is the greatest time in the history of our species to be alive.
Also, just because today is good, doesn't mean tomorrow will be. You could be singing your favorite song rolling through an intersection on a beautiful day, plenty can still go wrong. Some caution didn't hurt anyone.
Don't jinx it, please.
How do we put the genie back in the bottle and get people to accept a smaller, maybe generational home? And maybe only travel out of the country a handful of times in their life? And buy a good pair of clothes and shoes and make it last for a decade? Maybe forgo owning a car all their life? How do you get entitled people to live more humbly putting less pressure for economic growth at all costs?
For now, I feel we have so much work ahead of us.
This kind of zero sum thinking is rightfully rejected by most in the US. We don’t need to live with less, we just need to do a better job. More efficiency, lower footprint.
We need to do better, not do less.
There is no efficient way out of the problem. Any efficiency gains will be used to pursue even more growth, not simply sustain what we have now.
Accept less.
It's very obvious that you think everyone around you is an idiot, so can you please expand on your ideas for those of us too dim to understand?
And tbh what's the point of the poverty definitions, for the same reason?
It's outlined in the section[1] below the first graph, and the rationale for those methodologies is also outlined in that section.
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief#differen...