Hacker News Reader

Comment by gembeMx | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Care to elaborate?

I look at the numbers in the article and my eyes glaze over; the only thing I got out of it was that they're urging India to bump its poverty level numbers. (I am decidedly _not_ and economist)

Can someone clarify please, I don't know much about India other than published economic data, and lately those seem to be showing impressive growth. Is there a reason I should be suspicious of this data?

It's not super suspicious. Like comment below, they're noting most Indian's now make more than $1.90 / day.

It's not nonsense, but it does depend on the specific definitions of "extreme poverty" as a technical term. What remains is an awful lot of mere "poverty" that anybody in Europe or the US would consider very, very extreme.

Part of the article is arguing for changing those definitions, though even revised definitions will still seem extreme to anybody in a wealthier country.

But the article also points out that improvements are being made. And it credits redistributive policies for those improvements.

This tends be my view on the article. If you read far enough, its pretty obvious there's still a lot of "high poverty".

Although the article title is extreme sounding, is seems like its mostly making the argument that India needs to shift focus on the "poverty scale."

And there's the "it's relative" issue, that mostly Americans and Europeans would look at India, and it would not even equate with "poverty."

The article is talking about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty "international extreme poverty" definition which is: "you survive on $1.90/day".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com