A new poverty line shifted the World Bank's poverty data | Hacker News Reader

A new poverty line shifted the World Bank's poverty data

ourworldindata.org

I find the plots of distribution of global income here very illuminating - https://www.gapminder.org/income-mountains-dataset-v2/

Because the nicely shaped bell curves used in TFA are not at all what the distribution actually looks like. There is a significant right-skew. Don't miss the log-scale on x-axis in the first few graphs as well.

The distributions in TFA are accurate. Compare with the shape of the 2015 distribution here: https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-in...

When the benchmark changes, you should ask 'why.'

According TFA the number of people in extreme poverty dropped when using the old IPL value, and went up with the new value.

So politically, no NGO wants to say poverty decreased, because that might reduce urgency, and thus priority. So moving the goalposts means a 50% increase in poverty instead of a 20% decrease in poverty. Which one benefits your mission more?

That's not to say the revision of the IPL was wrong. But it does further the mission. Did the improved statistical methods trigger the IPL revision? It's hard to tell without internal world bank docs. I'll bet it did.

If you want something even more illuminating check the detailed annual report from the UN on the progress of the 2030 plan, the only measures that are consistently improving are those around governance and control not the well being of people.

What report are you referring to?

I stumbled upon it because I was wondering why every country seemed to be synchronized on a 2030 plan, and found them that they had all signed up to the plan in 2015. It being bureaucratic organisation means there will be documentation galore.

https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2025/

Poverty has decreased pretty much consistently. Infant mortality has gone down. Access to clean energy up. Etc, the trend seems to be positive, no?

You said "the only measures that are consistently improving are those around governance and control not the well being of people". Can you point out an example from the report of what you mean?

Re NGOs:

A friend of mine once said

"If the problem weren't so valuable, they would have solved it by now"

Like how Uber solved transport? Or Amazon solved online shopping?

We're not talking about corporations; we're talking about government bureaucracies.

That sounds good but makes little sense. Makes just as much sense as the people claiming there is a cure for cancer that works 100% with no side-effects but that "they" hide it because it is so profitable to treat sick people.

Or for a more HN-example. If IT-security wasnt so valueable as an industry we would have solved IT-security long ago.

Well, I think the general counter for a "cure-for-cancer" is the same as electric cars.

The Big4 never wanted EVs with there being a documentary [1] on how much they hated them. However, a company that isn't the big-4 has no issue with creating one.

Same with a cure-for-cancer. Sure, maybe Pfizer doesn't want to cannabalize their market but anybody that isn't Pfizer would love to.

I don't think IT-security fits into the same model though. There's a lot of money in theft so you need a lot of money into anti-theft to counter-act it.

Poverty imo fits the IT-security model more-so than cure-for-cancer. Each dollar you don't pay somebody in Madagascar to farm vanilla is a dollar you get to keep.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

I think the strongest counter-signal that there's a "secret cure for cancer" is that rich, powerful people still get it (in various forms), go through debilitating treatment, and often still die.

Unless, of course, they're faking their deaths and transplanting their consciounesses into younger, healthy bodies. Then I got nothing.

Your friend isn’t very smart and you’d likely be better off if you stopped quoting them. You’ve just lumped every single NGO in with a very small minority of bad ones - three seconds of research would have spared you from writing that.

The World Bank is not an NGO. It’s owned and run by 189 governments. It’s not a private organization.

> When the benchmark changes, you should ask 'why.'

The article goes into detail about why the poverty line changed. You must have skimmed past the secrion titled "How the World Bank sets the International Poverty Line".

The TLDR; is that it is at root based on the median poverty line set by the government of very poor countries (which is calculated in a complex way that is explained in footnotes and cited articles.)

At root, it isn't NGOs that caused the number to change, but it was inderectly caused by changes in how poor countries measure poverty themselves.

I’m not sure where to begin. The World Bank is not an NGO and is not funded like you think. And (to steal your phrase) TFA explains it in detail - purchasing power parity was updated so the number was updated. All in, this comment is nonsense.

Why on hacker news when it comes to tech salaries, if they stay for a year the same everyone calls it a reduction due to inflation.

However in cases of poor people and poverty there must be an ulterior motive.

It’s a VC backed forum, there’s a bias towards a population that looks down on the poor and fetishizes wealth.

It’s not everyone or even a majority but because of the VC backing it’s going to be more than the general population

Are you suggesting that hn is removing comment's/post's that don't look down on the poor or fetishize wealth? I'm not sure how hn being vc backed has any influence on how I or anyone else here comments

It sounds like parent comment is suggesting that hn attracts a demographic of people who look down on the poor and fetishize wealth, not that it's suppressing posts or trying to influence comments.

That was correct, I was commenting on the input demographics to the community, not on moderation activities

You don't need to remove content when you can let the users flag and downvote what "doesn't belong to" HN

I see your ad hominem and lack of actually explaining why the GP is wrong. Because they're not wrong. They definitely benefit from this redefinition.

Because the former is a reduction in real terms. The latter is an increase in real terms. The increase from $2.15 2017 dollars to $3.00 2021 dollars is well above the inflation in that time frame. The article points this out quite explicitly:

> However, the IPL has also increased substantially, even after inflation adjustments. The poverty line has increased in real terms.

Ah so the whole theory rests on “poverty numbers went up, therefore NGOs must be moving the goalposts to keep the cash flowing”, backed by nothing but your own suspicion, then wrapped in a half-baked sentence about “maybe it was legitimate” so you can claim neutrality. Got it.

He didn't actually make that claim. He's just making sure we know NGOs have a "preference" for which way the numbers go.

If there aren't enough poor people, the NGOs can just start buying SFH like every other entity

I am not a fan of their initial "Global Income Distribution" curve. if you take the actual data at the bottom of the article and plot it; it does not make anything the resembles a standard distribution as portrayed. It could be an infographic, it could be different axis, who knows, but portraying a standard distribution is wrong if you have an outlying skew in your distribution. Everything under $40 is a standard distribution, but above $40 represents the same volume of people as the average skewing any sort of plotting.

For 2025 only

Global People | Dollars

1,183,873,832 | above $40

389,144,677 | $30-$40

681,087,495 | $20-$30

1,647,364,177 | $10-$20

1,134,291,724 | $7-$10

1,170,170,455 | $5-$7

1,185,828,184 | $3-$5

700,440,541 | $1-$3

107,765,635 | <$1

I wish these numbers were percentile relative to the local economy and not in made-up "international dollars."

It means absolutely nothing that 1.1B people live on $3-5/day and a different 1.1B live on $5-7. Can you survive in the local economy on $2/day? Then $4/day is not that bad, and $7/day is doing pretty well.

That’s a fair criticism but given how the economy has globalized, people also exploit that discrepancy by hiring remote workers abroad so it’s not completely irrelevant

I'm no international poverty economist, but I imagine lower income relative to neighboring countries would still have some effect. For instance, if a poor country suffers a famine in its staple crop, can that government and its citizens afford to import food?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

Yes I'm familiar with PPP. "International dollars" is something completely different. What is your point?

The x-axis isn't "income", it's "log income".

It would be nice to see above 1000

The poverty rate should be based on an absolute amount, adjusted for inflation in the staples, like food and shelter.

Any other kind of adjustment (like, for example, this latest intervention by the World Bank) is political in nature.

We should disregard any statistical data whose collection is politically biased.

How do you think developing counties come up with their poverty lines? This new international number is just the median of those…

Usually they choose a deliberately stupid measurement such as "household income below a percentage of the median wage".

This is stupid for many reasons, including (but not limited to): non-monetary, in-kind benefits being excluded, perverse outcomes such as a decline in median wages "reducing poverty" and just about guaranteed continuation of this "poverty". So left wing politicians LOVE it. It's an everlasting cudgel that can never be fixed.

all your examples would not add up to someone who meets the standards for poverty not in real world terms being too poor to live well

It's fairly easy to fix, as long as you are willing to do what it takes to address income inequality. Reduce the Gini coefficient and poverty decreases.

That's actually my point: if you take (e.g.) 65% of median income, in a world with a Gini coefficient of 1 - perfect inequality - the rate of poverty is 0%.

But that's an edge case that will never occur in reality.

> non-monetary, in-kind benefits being excluded

This seems sane. The real question one should ask is, how many people can earn a living that allows them to meet basic needs, without state support?

You can have a separate figure that out of the number of poor people (like defined in the last sentence), how many are no longer poor with state support?

There should be a universal human standard to define what extreme poverty is--i.e. the amount needed to secure food, shelter, and clothing--and then that amount should be assessed country-by-country (or region-by-region) by an independent body. The number of $3 per day is well above the "basic needs" threshold in some of the poorest countries, and well below it in the US, for example.

This is addressed in the article - see the section titled "Estimating comparable national distributions". (In short: income is being scaled relative to purchasing power parity.)

Makes you wonder what the real purpose of that number was. Must have served some agenda, because saying some people live on less than $3 (when it's not a fair statement) definitely could serve a purpose.

How is that not a fair statement?

$3 USD can buy you basic things per day like food, but it won’t buy you that in America, for example. It’s not a fair metric at all.

$3 buys you various foods in various parts of the world, which would not put you in abject poverty.

$3 a day makes you filthy poor in South America and probably everywhere besides India but there are still poorer people there.

Can’t look at it like that.

Does the person buy food and basics per day? Then don’t worry about what the dollar amount equates to. It’s a ridiculous metric when it comes to measuring abject poverty.

Never happen. Defining and measuring poverty is a sensitive topic with juked stats in every country. The UK for example, has a poverty rate of 46% for families with three or more children. The poverty rate for Pakistani households is 47%. Around 7% of the UK is considered destitute. This data is rarely discussed because it is too unpleasant, and no-one wants to connect the inability to fund the national budget with the lack of money. The US does the same with occasional outlandish claims of "lifting nn% people out of poverty" by spending on programs that usually don't last.

"The poverty line has increased in real terms. And with it, so have the World Bank’s estimates of extreme poverty. 125 million people who would not have been counted as extremely poor before June are now included."

I think this is a good change, but maybe would be better to leave the old standard alone in real terms and then make a new category? "the poor will always be with you"

"the poor will always be with you"

And yet, to an amazing extent, they aren't.

If you look back in 200 years, poor people starving to death was simply an accepted fact of life. Today, poor people get fat. Do their lives suck? Absolutely! Just look at the craziness around housing. But in terms of resources per person available to the poor? Very few of us realize how good we've got it.

The extreme poverty line has remained essentially the same (adjusted for inflation) for a few decades. Projecting backwards in time, most people in every country used to be in extreme poverty. We are on track to eliminating extreme poverty within our lifetimes. They've adjusted the poverty line upwards. But just watch, life keeps on improving.

Where are people living on $3/day getting fat?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor (note: distressing images)

Important distinction:

That is not "fat" in the same way that someone with cirrhosis isn't fat, that is diseased

>The name, introduced by Williams in 1935, was derived from the Ga language of coastal Ghana, translated as "the sickness the baby gets when the new baby comes"

Christ that's sad.

People in extreme poverty are not getting fat

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/obesity-vs-gdp

No, people in extreme poverty are not getting fat.

But poor people do in great numbers in many countries. For example there are many obese Americans on food stamps.

Thanks to social services, the number of Americans who are in extreme poverty is approximately zero. When I compare to history, I far prefer this state of affairs to what used to be the norm.

> Thanks to social services, the number of Americans who are in extreme poverty is approximately zero.

I wish I could make myself have such confidence in any government entity as much as you seem to have in US social services

You're commenting on an article about people consuming less than $3/day; Americans on food stamps (SNAP appears to be about $4-6/day alone, not counting any other benefits) are a distraction, simply not part of the population that the article is discussing.

So $10/day for 8.2B people is only $30 trillion a year. Tax the bots for UBI. AGI could make that in a weekend.

>For example there are many obese Americans on food stamps.

All of their own fault. I recently saw a youtube compilation of tiktok clips of Americans on food stamps making videos flaunting their overfull supermarket shopping carts and it was all name brand junk food made up of refined carbs, fats and sugars, and to no ones surprise, they were all obese. No vegetables, no fruits, no leafy greens, no legumes, but all junk food which costs more than the healthy stuff. Who's fault is that? At what point is personal accountability supposed to kick in?

If you can afford a roof over your head, a car, and entire shopping carts full of name brand junk food(which is more expensive than healthy food) to make yourself obese, you are anything but poor, you are just stupid and glutenous.

Edit: I see the downvotes, but notice nobody is saying that I am wrong? ;) So then we agree that I'm right.

You’re being deliberately incendiary and you’re saying like the simplest thing. Why might they be buying trash food? Why didn’t their parents teach them not to? Why is the shit food so addictive? Is it, perhaps, the cheapest way to get something tasty? Maybe there are underlying social problems, and that’s more interesting to discuss than “poor people are stupid and gluttonous.”

>You’re being deliberately incendiary

Which part was "incendiary"?

>you’re saying like the simplest thing

The truth is often simple, people are just too scared to confront it. So they call it "incendiary".

>Is it, perhaps, the cheapest way to get something tasty?

Healthy food is also tasty and cheaper than highly processed junk food. But it's easier to blame externalities than take accountability.

>Maybe there are underlying social problems, and that’s more interesting to discuss than “poor people are stupid and gluttonous.”

Why aren't poor people in poorer countries fat despite suffering even bigger social issue like war, slavery, rapes and famine?

Companies make tons of shit food that’s as cheap or cheaper than healthy things, while requiring no know-how or effort to prepare, and constantly bombard people with messaging telling them to buy it. Meanwhile people are overworked with less time and energy to prepare food. People aren’t raised to be considerate about the food they eat; many parents don’t teach their kids to cook and feed them tons of junk growing up. Of course under those circumstances a large portion of people eat shitty. Fix that stuff and they won’t eat shitty and get fat. It’s useless to blame them without suggesting actual fixes.

>Why aren't poor people in poorer countries fat despite suffering even bigger social issue like war, slavery, rapes and famine?

Famine

>with less time and energy to prepare food

People on food stamps have a lot of free time.

Prove it.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/most-working-age-snap-particip...

>Over half of individuals who were participating in SNAP in a typical month in mid-2012 were working in that month.

Let’s be generous and say that the other half have a lot of free time (they don’t, many are searching for a job while taking care of a family), and that the tiktok you saw only showed that other half. The parts of my comment you didn’t respond to may still be the explanation, rather than the sheer gluttony of the poor or something.

> name brand junk food(which is more expensive than healthy food)

Do you think a banana is 10 dollars too? Grains and bread are cheaper. Rotisserie chickens sold as loss leaders are a cheap source of meat. But fruits and vegetables?

Those are more expensive per calorie than junk food. Especially when you take into account spoilage

> Edit: I see the downvotes, but notice nobody is saying that I am wrong? ;) So then we agree that I'm right.

No we do not agree. You’re incorrect and vindictive about it

>Thanks to social services, the number of Americans who are in extreme poverty is approximately zero.

or 4.19 million, if you wanted to spend 2 minutes and look up [the source](https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=li...) actually listed in the main article

No, this is a good thing, assuming the overall global inflation rate (whatever that is) hasn't outpaced the increase. It's a measure of our increasing expectations for an acceptable human existence. Yes, "the poor will always be with you" unless you brutally cap individual rewards for results, but if the cutoff for "poor" 100 years ago was "literally starving to death" and the cutoff for "poor" today is "not literally starving to death" then I think that's a bar we should raise.

Sure, someday soon the global definition of extreme poverty will allow for clean water, adequate nutrition, clothing, and safe housing. Isn't this why we're doing... gestures around this?

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