[andrepd]

I think this is the most important thing to retain from reading this article:

>[...] Both are true at the same time: The world is much better than in the past and it is still awful.

>To bring this to mind I need to know both statistics: When someone says we can sit back and relax because the world is in a much better place, I point out that 11 children are still dying every minute. We cannot accept the world as it is today. And when I feel hopeless in the face of this tragedy, I remember that we reduced annual child deaths from 20 million to 5.6 million in the last fifty years.

Keeping this in mind at all times is a very important thing.

[grasshopperpurp]

I agree with you, and that's succinctly said. It reminded me of this article from a couple days ago.

>Trump administration claims only 250,000 Americans live in extreme poverty, despite UN estimates of 18m

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-extreme...

[skybrian]

These seem to be two different measurements of "extreme poverty," each of which is different from the world-wide definition used by economists in the original article:

"The UN’s numbers come from the official Census definition which has been kept for decades by the US government, defining extreme poverty as having an income lower than half the official poverty rate."

"Citing a recent survey of American households, Heritage found only 0.08 per cent of American households (or about to 250,000) are in “deep poverty,” defined by Heritage as living on less than $4 (£3) a day. This statistic does account for government social spending programmes which help the poor – like Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance – while the figure cited by the UN does not."

I guess if you're going to memorize facts, you should also memorize definitions.