The one we're talking about today is "extreme poverty", which is the $2.15 purchasing-power-adjusted line. It's fantastic news that most Indians have surpassed this line, but it's also helpful to think of this line as just one rung in a ladder out of poverty. Life just above this line is still not great.
This chart, which shows how much of the population lives in different poverty lines for India, gives you a sense for the population as a whole. You can compare it to other countries to see their distribution, and China is probably a good comparison to make.
India: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
Despite progress on extreme poverty, you're right that there are still some 3 billion people in the world who cannot afford a nutritious diet, and likewise 3 billion people who live in energy poverty, meaning they have to cook indoors with solid fuels (wood, coal, dung) that damage their health and shorten their lives. It's important that we make progress on all these things in the coming decades. We absolutely have the power to.
The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better!
Interesting. There's seems to be some fuckery with Indian hunger data, i.e. malnourishment, stuntness have stalled at a relatively high level 10 years ago and even occasionally gets worse. Which kind of makes sense if one realizes India added 400 million mouths in last 20 years, and distribution is an issue. I remember also news a few years ago Indian average height decreasing, all proxy indicators that hunger/nutrition was not improving (granted this was during covid). But cultural drama over diet also explains a lot of it. Cultural drama seems to explain a lot in India... one other stark stat is Indian female work participation rate declined as country got wealthier... culture seems to be women stop working out of neccessity if men can sustain household. It's a... different development trajectory.
> It's a... different development trajectory.
My two cents: the rest of the world is highly westernized. If you consider Islam a western religion (which you should, since it's a derivative of Judaism, and is a cousin to Christianity), then basically all of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa was westernized with the Islamic conquests. Sub Saharan Africa has adopted western norms wholesale after colonization (no written language, so very hard to keep old customs). Later, China adopted communism (a western ideology), which made its way into parts of Korea and Southeast Asia, and Japan / Philippines were colonized by force. India actually stands out as never having undergone much of a western colonization. Obviously, the entirety of the Americas are the result of Spanish/British/etc colonization.
India stands out as the only country to have never been properly colonized, with a long written record. A lot of economic theories we have are really not universal truths, but things that only hold true in the global monoculture. That's why India's development trajectory is so different, and why states like Kerala basically defy all expectations (even if it's 'communist', it's 'communist' in a non-'communist' federal framework).
Again... my highly controversial opinion. I don't really pay a whole lot of attention, but this is my take.
But Judaism isn’t a western religion, it’s a Middle Eastern religion with strong ethnic ties. Hence it hasn’t evolved and branched like all the major religions have. Christianity isn’t western religion either, but modern Protestantism and Roman Catholicism arguably are. Eastern Orthodox is actually a great example of the diversity of all major religions— they have national churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).
Islam is multi ethnic of course and so there are branches that are western (Albania is an example) but calling Islam as a whole “western” is mostly incorrect.
China adopted communism which is ultimately a philosophy whose patrimony is European and all that entails.
> Eastern Orthodox is actually a great example of the diversity of all major religions— they have national churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).
I mean... Sure and they still have common beliefs descended from Judaism and Christianity?
The Jews didn’t invent their beliefs out of whole cloth—this is true whether it’s Judaism or communism (Karl Marx, Lenin, and most Russian communists were Jewish though I think you know that already). They borrowed monotheism and a bunch of their religion from local religions at the time. Jewish communists learned a great deal from the French Revolution. They put a Jewish stamp on these beliefs so to speak, then handed off some of those beliefs to other people who, like the Jews before them, discarded what didn’t make sense to them and kept what did. China is barely communist now, by Russian standards, it’s more fascist to be honest.
Another good example is how in modern Protestantism they talk a lot of about “the biblical definition of marriage,” when what they really mean is one man and one woman—more of a northwest European definition. The biblical definition of marriage is one man and one or more wives. But you can’t get a modern Protestant to accept what the Bible says because everyone reads their own beliefs into these religions.
There is no discernible ultimate source to any religion—it’s more like a chain of beliefs, where people take their existing beliefs and project them onto their religion.
Having said that, Hinduism is is a chain of beliefs that has stayed within the same ethnic group for a very long time, which maybe is what you’re saying? And that is indeed something rare and very precious.
I don't think I'm understanding the sense in which you're using 'colonized' here?
INMH the interesting questions is « what are the proteins options, considering the ressources of Indians/India? If your poultry is fed with soy you’ll have many times more proteins and other nutrients eating directly the beans instead of transforming them the eggs. However if your poultry find their food by themselves on a field, you have free eggs without input waste.
I think your theoretical argument is - "what if instead of eggs we could feed hungry people with all the soy used to feed those chicken to produce those eggs?" You and I both know that's not going to happen.
Just completely and utterly false, and reflects the poor understanding of diet and nutrition that is pervasive throughout India and in Indian culture. There's a reason why Indians have the highest rates of metabolic syndrome. I've basically shirked all of it, and my blood numbers, weight, etc are substantially better than my parents and my brother.
Firstly, chickens eat more than soy, and chickens (and animals in general) can turn undigestible, useless biomatter into actual food (such as ruminants digesting grass, and then humans drinking milk or eating the flesh). Using animals, you are able to use much less bio-matter to get an equivalent amount of calories and nutrition, simply because humans are terrible at digesting.
That being said, on to eggs. Eggs are an excellent source for protein and orders of magnitude better than soy when looking at both the amino acid profile as well as the protein / calories.
One hard-boiled egg contains about 70 calories and 6 g protein.
Meanwhile, you'd need 50g boiled soybeans to get 6g protein. However, Soy is less bio-available (about 90%), so you'd actually need to eat about 6.6 g protein or 60 g soybean, containing about 70 calories. So far so good, right?
Wrong. Because soy beans are low in essential amino acids like methionine. For an average adult you need about 1.3g methionine / day. This is 3 eggs or 210 calories.
Meanwhile, you need about 480 g of soybean to meet your methionine requirement, which is 830 calories.
If you analyze the Indian diet, you'll realize it's replete with these sorts of insane substitutions, where a perfectly good source of nutrition, whose protein profile matches exactly the human requirement, is substituted for a sub-par product. Obviously, since these are requirements, you'll see Indians compensate by simply eating more to make up for the deficiency. But eating these vegetarian sources of protein in the right amount to get to the required intake leads to insanely high calorie numbers, which is why diabetes, stomach fat, heart problems, etc are so prevalent in India. And it's also why Indians in India are shorter than the Indians in the diaspora despite Indians in India actually eating more calories (hence the weight).
And that's just calories and basic metabolism, we're not even talking body composition, which again suffers within India simply because the best sources of protein are eschewed due to moralizing. There's a reason why Indians, despite constituting 25% of the planet, do not constitute a large portion of world-class athletes and have low average rates of grip strength. It's an insanely self-inflicted pathology.
Agricultural employment has actually increased post covid [1][2]:
2018-2019: 42.5%
2022-2023: 45.8%
This isn't because the number of farms is growing, but because more people are working on the same farms due to lack of jobs elsewhere. This casts doubt on the overall poverty reduction narrative.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS?location...
https://dge.gov.in/dge/sites/default/files/2024-02/Employmen...
https://thewire.in/economy/share-of-agriculture-in-employmen...
I can't really comment on the situation in India specifically, but just for some global context around stunted development, look at a chart of men's height [1]. Not having half your population stunted by malnutrition is a recent phenomenon.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-of-men-by-...
There really is no argument that it hasn't. If we take a year between 1950 and 1970 as a baseline, there was a significant reduction in chronic malnutrition and the number and severity of famines -- both in absolute numbers as well as per capita.
> it has remained about the same for about a decade
If your time horizon is the last 10 years then the picture is more mixed, yea.
Relying on North Korean statistics to make your point is... questionable
Malnourishment is also steadily diminishing. Effectively because food affordability improves as poverty diminishes. It's a good proxy.
We were solidly middle class in india that never went hungry. All our kids in USA now are atleast 3-4 inches taller than us. They are often taller than their parents in their mid teens.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/11/children-height-gap-...
You never went hungry, but did you have a reliable supply of all the micronutrients, and an abundance of protein? At all periods from birth to the end of your teens when growth plates ossified?
Not being hungry is not the same as getting good nutrition. Middle class in India doesn't eat enough meat, fish, eggs, fruits, and vegetables.
Middle class meal in South India is mostly rice. With some fried potato side. In the North its Chapathi(Flat bread-Wheat), with friend potato sides and lentil(Dal).
Only thing that Middle class likely gets a good deal of is milk(through Chai).
Plus meat is taboo subject in India. A kind of sugar loaded vegetarianism is what most middle class in India gets to eat.
On the other hand, it's probably useful enough for now. Maybe there are 100x differences between prices for a sack of potatoes across different developing countries and therefore this index is at least that much inaccurate, but poverty problems and income gaps are a lot worse than that anyway, so there are ways this could make sense within reason.
Sugar is a preservative just like salt, and fruit jams were developed specifically as a way to preserve more of a fruit harvest.
Honey is an example of a sugary product that is extremely stable. There's honey that has been recovered from Egyptian tombs and is still considered edible.
I see paint jobs by people done by themselves. And compare it with paid professional servers. The pendulum always swings to professional. :)
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/business/worldbusiness/27... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/30/nicholaswatt.m...
> The revised GDP will include some money from illegal activities, such as money from cigarette and drinks smuggling, prostitution and money laundering.
(Greeks were highly motivate to have higher value by any means necessary as discussed in article, this is a quite extreme case)
I have dozens of jars of homemade preserves in my basement right now. I had no part in it, it was all my spouse’s doing. And we’re in a US urban area. But we’re affluent urban tech types with hippie tendencies.
Poverty levels are measured with PPP dollars, so that's already factored in.
India and China have similar regional differences.
People living in Alaska are a lot poorer than their income suggests because of shipping and heating costs.
By many reports, half of Indian homes do not have toilets.
Even if earning above some arbitrary dollar threshold, they sound uncomfortably "poor" to me.
The alternative is the silly measures of "poverty" we use in the first world which are mathematically unachieveable by design so they can always be used to justify measures politicians want to pass: "won't you think of the child poverty you heartless monster" etc.
No, I disagree. The alternative, as the original comment said, is to measure access to calories, nutrition, or other metrics like prevalence of starvation, access to shelter, access to sanitation, prevalence of certain health issues, etc.
Measuring poverty via the international poverty line has often been criticized [1][2][3].
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337335330_A_critiqu...
[2]: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-i...
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/8/21/exposing-the-gr...
I found this article interesting. Personally I think starvation is a very low bar to clear. What matters to the first world is whether or not India has a middle class that is able to buy stuff.
What-about-ism is an elitist way to pretend to care yet do nothing.
Imagine it was your country and your project which eliminated extreme poverty. No doubt you would be bending over backwards to listen to someone who “read an article” on the other side of the world
The WEF is a talk shop that has no power to impose any sort of restructuring. Are you talking about the IMF?
It's the "it's a big club, and you ain't in it" thing.