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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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%.
"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"
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.
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.
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.
>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.”
> 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
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
If there aren't enough poor people, the NGOs can just start buying SFH like every other entity
> 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.
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.
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...
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
The x-axis isn't "income", it's "log income".
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.
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?
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
>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
> 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
>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?
> 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
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.