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Comment by mannyv | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

Re NGOs:

A friend of mine once said

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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