The Meaninglessness of Ending Extreme Poverty | Hacker News Reader

The Meaninglessness of Ending Extreme Poverty

bloomberg.com

45 pointsindoindo53 comments

The World Bank defines the state of extreme poverty as being:

Short of food for all or part of the year, often eating only one meal per day.

Unable to save money - for if a family member falls ill and money is needed to see a doctor, or if the crop fails and there is nothing to eat.

Unable to afford to send your children to school.

Living in an unstable house made with mud or thatch that requires regular rebuilding.

Having no close source of safe drinking water.

If relieving the estimated 1.2 billion people in extreme poverty from living this way is meaningless then I despair.

Your claim of the World's Bank definition of poverty is not what the article states. Can you provide a link?

This list is actually how people in poverty define poverty, according to a World Bank research project:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/books/chapters/chapter-lif...

The World Bank's own definition of "extreme poverty" is much simpler: $1.25/day or less, as can be seen all over their site: http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/measuringpoverty

It's important to note that the $1.25 denotes the relative purchasing power of their income and not something that would translate into some higher value in the country of the impoverished person.

Extreme poverty = absolute poverty http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty

The article seems to be talking about relative poverty with the title suggesting this is the definition of extreme poverty.

The article is talking about the stated politics fueled goal of eradicating extreme poverty as defined by the world bank. Not the definition from wikipedia.

It's not arguing against eradicating absolute poverty - it's saying that the current discussion is just politics and not helpful.

>There's no scenario that sees the world ending poverty if the poverty line is set relative to the average incomes of the world’s poorest countries.

No scenario? How about one where income inequality lowers in those countries? It's entirely possible to have all incomes be at least a certain percent of mean or median income.

That is badly formulated from the articles POV, but it is entirely possible for everybody to have the exact same income and still be poor: any sufficiently severe pandemic, war or natural disaster would do the trick.

I general I think most people who considered it closely would realize that you don't get rich by your neighbor becoming poorer.

>That is badly formulated from the articles POV, but it is entirely possible for everybody to have the exact same income and still be poor: any sufficiently severe pandemic, war or natural disaster would do the trick.

I don't think a disaster like that would actually flatten income.

>I general I think most people who considered it closely would realize that you don't get rich by your neighbor becoming poorer.

It's not about getting rich, it's about getting non-poor. Taxing a third of the money from the rich could greatly improve the lives of the entire bottom 80%. If you assume the economy won't suddenly implode for no reason at all, it becomes largely (not entirely) about relative wealth. If you don't assume that, you're making a strawman.

It's possible to have a situation with so much money that despite similar levels of income disparity to today everyone can get food easily and afford a doctor, and the rich become stupendously rich, but that seems least likely of all. We should be tackling the problem of inequality in addition to working to raise total GDP.

>> ... you don't get rich by your neighbor becoming poorer. > It's not about getting rich, it's about getting non-poor.

So far so good. Unfortunately, you immediately contradict yourself:

> Taxing a third of the money from the rich could greatly improve the lives of the entire bottom 80%.

Taxing the rich doesn't do anything for the poor. It's like in that joke with step 2 ??? - you jumped from taxing the rich to "helps the poor".

You're assuming that step 2 is: distributing the results of that taxation to the poor people. Hint: that never happens. What actually happens is 1) the rich find loopholes, 2) the rich move away, 3) the taxes are spent on the politicians' friends, 4) other things.

>Taxing the rich doesn't do anything for the poor.

Apart from provide them with affordable healthcare, education, and access to opportunities they wouldn't have had otherwise.

You realise this taxing the rich at a punitive rate - it used to be 90% - and investing it wisely was exactly what made the tech and education explosion of the 1940s and 1950s possible?

It's a practical issue. If you don't tax wealth the money stagnates in increasingly improbable and unrealistic paper "investments" which are only - temporarily - profitable while they're allowed to cannibalise the real economy.

If you tax and invest you grow the real economy, with real people doing genuinely useful things, and not the paper "financial" economy, which is based on smoke, mirrors, faith, hope, wishful thinking, and outright lies.

I agree, but I would be more careful in throwing out that the highest marginal rate has historically been 90% or more. You're likely to scare people, unless you clarify that the income brackets were also much different. Today the highest rate kicks in at $225k for individuals, roughly double for couples.

But the fact is that, although highest rate used to be much higher, historically the brackets were also created so that the highest rates affected only a small number of people (i.e., the very, very rich). E.g., after adjusting for inflation the highest income bracket back in the 1930's was income above $75,000,000/year. For most of the last century the highest bracket started only for those making above $2M (in adjusted dollars), or roughly ten times above where highest bracket starts now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...

I said could. I was talking about the problems of inequality, not the problems of government. If the money moved somehow, it would improve things.

> distributing the results of that taxation to the poor people. Hint: that never happens.

Take a look at [0]. Clearly there are huge differences between countries - even between countries that are equally well developed. I could name at least five that fare better (on this particular scale) due to redistributing enourmous amounts of taxes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

This is what I came here to say. Poverty is a resource allocation problem that is judged relatively. As living standards increase, the subjective 'poverty' perception also moves. The inverse is also true: when living standards decrease (say due to a war or disaster) the conception of poverty will also adjust. Additionally, a country cannot be expected to solve it's 'poverty' problem in the entire country is pretty equally in poverty. The resources simply do not exist to be allocated.

So the proper way to judge subjective poverty is by income equality (a ratio of the richest X% to the poorest X%) within a country. If inequality is very high and there is still subjective poverty in the country, that country's government is not taking poverty seriously... do not believe them, they have the resources! Any external help that is not advisory is essentially subsidizing the rich of that country; instead if we want to support those in poverty we should sanction that government until they act appropriately.

If inequality is very low in the country and subjective poverty exists, you can make an excellent case for external aid. Countries in this situation may be victims of war (Afghanistan), failed states, or so small/remote that they may not have the resources to take care of themselves.

This is a difficult mirror to hold up, however, as there are many developed countries that have high inequality scores.

>Poverty is a resource allocation problem that is judged relatively.

I wouldn't go that far. It's a combination of relative inequality and of absolute living standards. We look at what it's possible to provide easily, and we look at what people truly need. Some costs are dragged up in proportion to the wealth of others. Some things drop to minimal cost as technology advances.

The definition of the poverty line should increase with wealth, but it should increase slower than wealth does.

> If inequality is very high and there is still subjective poverty in the country, that country's government is not taking poverty seriously... do not believe them, they have the resources! Any external help that is not advisory is essentially subsidizing the rich of that country; instead if we want to support those in poverty we should sanction that government until they act appropriately.

Interesting point. What would you recommend to a relatively well-off citizen of such a country, would donating personal time, money, and labor to alleviate poverty then constitute a subsidy of the rich/political class?

Note that my argument is based on an international perspective.

Within a country a voluntary wealth transfer is a great way to solve poverty IMHO. If one person can solve the whole county's subjective poverty problem, wonderful! The inequality in such a society may still be large, which is a shame, but if the country is democratic and 'functioning' (one criteria of mine is no poverty) then that sounds great. That person is sparing the rest of society from dealing with the issue, so in some way yes it's a subsidy to them.

I don't see this happening, though. In my opinion a rich person who cannot solve the problem unilaterally should be lobbying his government and society to solve the problem at that level. Maybe that's more efficient administration, reallocation of budget, or higher taxes, or a new means of distribution. Probably some combination.

The reason I ask is because I am a citizen of just such a country (high income inequality and high incidence of poverty). I'm not wealthy, but I'm better off than the vast majority and feel I can and should help somehow.

It's always interesting to hear other perspectives.

> How about one where income inequality lowers in those countries?

Unless you effectively drop the inequality to zero you always are going to have a lower band which would have the tag of "extreme poverty" even when their quality of live is better or worse than poverty in another countries.

The problem is you will never have an income inequality of zero. Comunist regimes (the closer thing to that) actually have 2 classes (goverment vs. the rest) with a separation even worse than the rest of the regimes.

If the lowest band makes half as much as the second-richest band, and you tell me that counts as "extreme poverty" with the other band being "nowhere near poverty", I will laugh in your face.

You don't have to get things anywhere near even. In comparison to the current state of the US, a distribution where the bottom 10% had 1% of the wealth and the top 10% had 30% of the wealth looks nearly utopic.

> "and you tell me that counts as "extreme poverty" with the other band being "nowhere near poverty", I will laugh in your face."

That's precisely the point of the article, the definition is broken and the author is asking it to be fixed.

> "In comparison to the current state of the US, a distribution where the bottom 10% had 1% of the wealth and the top 10% had 30% of the wealth looks nearly utopic."

I don't think it even have to do with wealth distribution. For instance, Poor people living in the states have greater quality of life than lower middle class in Venezuela.

In my opinion wealth distribution is the wrong problem to solve. Wealth inequity is not an issue as long as the lowest class have a good quality of life (Good security, access to health care and education).

>That's precisely the point of the article

The article is talking about standards raising, but not to ridiculous things like like "nobody makes less than anyone else". The standards shunned by the article are possible.

>Poor people living in the states have greater quality of life than lower middle class in Venezuela.

Poor perhaps, but the really impoverished have trouble keeping a home or getting food every day, and that is worse than "middle class" anywhere.

This just redefines "poverty" to be a statement about inequality, instead of a statement about making sure the least-wealthy are above a certain living standard.

Fighting inequality is a good fight, but redefining poverty so that it means inequality does a dis-service to those genuinely below the poverty line.

So by defining poverty on a relative sliding scale, we'll constantly be working to improve the conditions of the least fortunate of us...

Good.

And will have no idea how much our efforts are actually achieving (or even whether we're being harmful). Not so good.

Absolute poverty is about actual living standards. How much food, housing, healthcare etc I have.

Subjective poverty is about social status. Where am I in a ranked list of wealth and resources?

Absolute poverty can change a lot, and that reflects real change in quality of life.

Subjective poverty is a zero sum game. Half the people will always be in the bottom half, because math.

I don't think your statements about subjective poverty are true. Subjective poverty is only a zero-sum game within a single social "game." If there are more games, there are more winners. Lots of little ponds means you are more likely to find the few where you can be the big fish.

It's true that these ponds can be loosely ordered and some of them are inarguably ranked higher than others (e.g., being a top-tier actor has more social status than being a top-tier chess player). But for the vast majority of people, we just don't care that we're at the bottom of the vast majority of these games.

For example, I'm pretty low on the totem pole in my local gym, but I'm pretty high on the totem pole at work (small company, long-ish tenure). Paul Graham is pretty high on the totem pole in Silicon Valley, but he's probably pretty low on the totem pole at a film festival.

Except for a few of these "big" games (film industry, politics, the extremely wealthy), most of us get to be pretty good at entirely avoiding situations where we are subjectively poor. For those we can't avoid, we're able "give more weight" to where we're more important, through our own, personal valuations. Hence my "sum" across the games I care about is greater than zero, which is true for most people.

For some reason I'll never be able to understand, a large percentage of the population considers relative wealth to be more important than absolute wealth.

What would a robust definition of poverty be? I think you'd have to get away from the concept of money, and define it as a lack of, or a lack of a way to get, any of the following:

* shelter

* transportation

* food

* medical care

* education

Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have worked to popularize something kind of like that, though your list is more oriented toward material things than theirs is. They call it the capabilities approach.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach

Edit: here is Nussbaum's list, pulled from the Wikipedia article:

    Life
    Bodily Health
    Bodily Integrity
    Senses, Imagination, and Thought
    Emotions
    Practical Reason
    Affiliation [social interaction]
    Other Species
    Play
    Control over one's environment (political and material)

Even that is very relative. What quality of housing? Of food? There are lifesaving medical procedures that even the richest struggle to afford, if the condition is rare enough (IIRC someone on HN posted about paying for genetic testing for him and his wife, $8k each, to figure out what their son's condition was - is that something you're "poor" if you can't afford?). It's even clearer with education - is basic schooling enough? Are you "poor" if you can't afford to do a PhD?

Agreed. But perhaps we can come up with a general framework for identifying extreme poverty (that's on par with the $1.25/day threshold currently being used).

We should definitely start with the necessities of life. Food and clean water, hygiene (it sounds dumb, but being able to bathe is a luxury in some places), dental care is probably more important than medical just from the standpoint that more need it...

Shelter would definitely be on the list. Energy probably.

Transportation probably not.

How to define the minimums... not entirely sure. Simplistic formula are liable to be downright unpleasant (daily calories) if distorted in situations like the "lowest bidder provides". Anything more than simplistic will soon turn into a designed-by-committee mess.

Clean water is the only easy one to define. Measured in gallons or liters, no contamination from toxins, no contamination that makes it unpalatable to a reasonable person.

Even energy can take many forms... electricity, cooking fuel, heating. If you live on the equator, no need for heating, but in northern climes it is a matter of survival. And the exchange rates between various forms of energy aren't constant, not even within a single locale.

The only useful way to look at poverty is to use an absolute scale.

If we assume that every human being is born with absolutely zero wealth (or, at least, that this used to be the case in the distant past), then we should go about determining some objective minimum standard that is acceptable.

And also there are some that live on less money and are quite happy with that. What do we want to do about them? Push some money onto them?

When the poverty line is established as the line whether they can buy a basket of food, making sure everyone can purchase that basket of food is tough to call a "bad thing".

We're advanced enough on a global scale that people perishing because they could not bring down a deer to feed them through the winter should not even be a thing. Hell, some countries let imported food rot in the warehouse due to politics, yet there exist people who starve because they can not afford food?

http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2015/05/france-superm...

"On Thursday, France's parliament unanimously approved a new law prohibiting large supermarkets from throwing out unsold food, instead mandating stores donate any surplus groceries to charities or for animal feed use.

The law, which aims to reduce waste in a country where people trash up to 30 kilos of food per person annually, is part of a more general energy and environmental bill."

Those who helped campaign for this are working globally next.

Stupid comments like this are usually made by people who have a lot of money and have never been able to actually test such a hypothesis for themselves. But it makes them feel better about inequality from which they benefit.

That's why I downvoted, in case you wonder.

Thanks for down voting because you have another opinion (or simply just haven't given it enough thought to understand it yet). But I'm already used to that, so no problem.

I think your comment was mostly downvoted due to the fact that it doesn't add to the conversation and lacks basic value as an argument.

What were you trying to say? That somehow people who enjoy poverty, however miniscule that population may be, would somehow be adversely affected by having spending power of any kind? As opposed to the damage that is done to all the innumerable people who are impoverished without almost any path out?

It's a juvenile, poorly thought out argument. It doesn't pass even the most basic logic test. Not to mention, it seems to lack any empathy towards others.

I was saying that some people decide to live without money (modern life nomads, they even exist in well known cities like Berlin) and some live in an environment were money is not part of life (thinking of the area around the Amazon river or maybe some steppe villages somewhere in Africa). According to that definition they are considered "poor" but actually they are not considering themselves that way.

Now if you go and throw money at them they might not even be able to do anything with that.

So, maybe that definition is not a good one. Poverty is not equal to having little money. It is more related to education, having one's basic needs fulfilled and opportunity (to travel, to build a house, etc).

Also Money does not come alone. It comes with the corresponding culture. And while at first people are happy about all the new things they can get, in the end they are quite frustrated because their own identity, culture and values are suddenly non existant in their environment. So yeah, increasing one's spending power can indirectly be harmful, even if you don't make anything off it.

You are right, that I may have explained that in more detail up front. But I think it's possible to see that in the first comment. It's just that many people start reading a text with a strong opinion in mind before they even start, which leads them to complete wholes in argumentation with assumptions which are very far off. I did at no point say anything about actions that should be taken, like not giving people money who need it. I was simply adding another point of view.

> It's a juvenile, poorly thought out argument.

If someone doesn't say that and you consider it a poor argument, why do you assume that was someone's opinion. Is that logical? Is it funny looking back after reading this longer text, how I was actually adding a point of view with empathy for people not considered by this definition of empathy instead of not having some for people who really need more money?

I would like to understand how you think it is possible to lead a good life in Berlin (!) in extreme poverty (less than $1.25 per day). Note that this excludes begging or other external support, which would actually increase your income.

@quonn: It exlcudes begging for money, but wouldn't exclude begging for food and shelter.

There was a documentation about people living together in an apartment. They were maybe 10 people living together in one small apartment, eating not what they buy but what they can gather from super market garbage cans. They all had families and some had education and opportunity to work but they choose to live this way because of their political point of view. That's how they survived in Berlin on quite a small budget.

Is that a live I would choose? No. But it doesn't mean others don't choose that life.

What about the idea of poverty not being about money?

jklinger410 you idiot!

No evidence, not even anecdotal ("I have a friend, he and his family love being poor....")

Lack of ability to imagine another's experience.

Naivete regarding power relationships, especially ones you participate in without knowing it.

Basic fallacy of assuming people are different than you when convenient.

No attempt, however lame, to support your off-the-cuff remark with anything.

Lack of introspection and self evaluation.

Stupid post, downvoted.

> Lack of ability to imagine another's experience.

Actually assuming that it's impossible to enjoy life without money is a very western centric opinion. You don't necessarily need to buy food, you can grow food, you can hunt food, you can search for food in garbage bins or you can even steal it.

For what it worth, I do have a friend in that situation and she seem to enjoy it.

Now, I agree that GP's comment is pretty stupid: the fact that some people can enjoy living in that situation shouldn't be an excuse to let the other starve.

I assume you want to add value to the discussion. Otherwise you wouldn't have explained your down vote. But as other responses you felt you should make assumptions where trying to understand the statement better would have been the right call.

Let me show as example how your comment would look as a value addition to the discussion:

"I'm still not getting your point

What sources are you referring to? [instead of "no evidence"]

What does it look like for such a person who lives on ~$1.50 a day but being happy about their life? [instead of "Lack of ability..."]

Would an increase in income not help these people as well to maintain their individuality/culture against stronger outside forces? [instead of "... power relations..."]

How would your life change on that kind of money a day?"

Can't put anything for the last three lines.

Wouldn't that have offered you the chance to learn something you didn't know yet, namely about people who can live without ~$1.50 a day and still be happy? Wouldn't that have increased the chance to discuss how poverty should be defined differently, maybe on a more complex level?

Most people in poverty don't have a choice on how their lives might play out. As I understand it, they're often quite ignorant and helpless to improve their lot. Or they're bonded servants, or slaves. It's very sad, there's no way out, no possible route up and out. This world is so often a hell for its denizens.

I suppose that's why others are reacting so strongly to you. You're latching onto some odd hobo hipster ideal - but reality does not come close to your ideal.

I didn't say that you should avoid helping people in need.

And I didn't imply you said that.

Your "some people choose a life of poverty/beggary and have a good time with that" thing is just plain silly.

Who is quite happy with living on so little money that they can't afford enough food to eat?

Good point. If you have enough food, because, for instance, you make your own by farming and hunting, then you don't need more money to fight hunger, right?

Also if you compare someone who has everything they need and want to someone who simply has a lot of money, is the first person necessarily less happy?

What if we define poverty as "lack of food <add other points here like education>" instead of "lack of money"?

What if we define poverty differently but still consider giving people money who need money as a good way to help them?

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