[bungie4]

First off, I stand up and applaud the Gates Foundation, and everybody, who work to improve the lives of everybody on the planet.

WRT: Extreme Poverty, a few years back, we had a political party who tackled the problem of poverty by redefining the measuring stick of what constitutes poverty. POOF much celebration and self-handshaking when they announced that during their term, their efforts dropped the number of people living in poverty by a very significant amount.

This has left a bad taste in my mouth ever since to never trust claims from politicians.

So I wonder, in the case of this article, how many of those people no longer living at the adjusted poverty line and now only marginally above it and no longer included. They're still their, but buy grace of a single digit, are now considered much better off.

[coldtea]

That's a very important thing to keep in mind.

"Facts" and figures quoted by governments, or even by various organisations not only can be twisted seven ways till Sunday to present a nice or gloomy picture with statistics, but even the raw numbers themselves can also be very different than the truth on the ground.]

>So I wonder, in the case of this article, how many of those people no longer living at the adjusted poverty line and now only marginally above it and no longer included.

There are lots of subtleties there as well. A family with very little to no income, but living in a traditional e.g. African or Amazon community where income is not really required (even European rural communities lived perfectly well with making most of their own food and minimal actual "jobs" and money well into the 1950s), could be much better off than a family that now makes $2 a day, but has been driven out of their land and forced to live in piss poor conditions and work their bones off in some slum.

[forapurpose]

Extreme poverty, in this case, is a measure developed by economists and not by politicians, and AFAIK the definition hasn't changed significantly in many years.

As the parent says, not being in 'extreme poverty' doesn't tell us much about one individual. They could have $2.50 per day; they could be Bill Gates (of course, it tells us a lot if someone is living on less than $1.90/day; that's a much smaller range). But the aggregate measure is meaningful: The number is decreasing and has been for decades - a miracle relative to world history - bringing hundreds of millions of people of out hopeless poverty; just look at India, China, and Latin America. Yes, some are still very poor, but we can use other measures to examine that such as median income (which also has changed dramatically).

Also, 'poverty' in wealthy countries and 'extreme poverty' used in this measure are entirely different things. If you're reading this, $1.90/day probably won't pay for your electricity or water usage for the day, much less food, shelter, health care, education, transportation, etc.

[denzil_correa]

> WRT: Extreme Poverty, a few years back, we had a political party who tackled the problem of poverty by redefining the measuring stick of what constitutes poverty. POOF much celebration and self-handshaking when they announced that during their term, their efforts dropped the number of people living in poverty by a very significant amount.

In other words, Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[babbadook]

If you are curious here is the larger exploration of global poverty from Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

It has been a while since I read it but I found it quite compelling. If i remember correctly, the measures are based on consumption of goods per day to try to avoid complications related to differing economic systems. Also while it is true that measures can be manipulated to tell the story you want, it does not appear that that has been done in a significant way here. Even if it had i doubt that, such an extreme 90% -> 10% drop could be shown even with the most crooked measuring stick if things had not been genuinely improving a lot. Incidentally, my brother used to be a full on marxist until he read this data and completely abandoned that belief system.