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Comment by cbeach | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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?

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

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