[kortilla]

> But this is also true of, for example, everyone living on minimum wage in the US today, so I fail to see what's improved.

No it’s not and it takes a shocking amount of willful ignorance to suggest otherwise. If you become very ill in the US you just show up to an ER and they fix the problem. The ER cannot refuse you because you are poor. You deal with bankruptcy/hospital negotiations after. This brings me to my next point.

If you are on minimum wage in the US, there is Medicaid (and additional government health coverage in some states like California) for low income households. Not only do you get health coverage at minimum wage, it doesn’t even bankrupt you if you’re making use of the resources available.

If you’re living off the land, you eat some contaminated fruit and you die. You get a bad infection, you die. You get a bad gash, you might bleed out or get an infection and die. Bad water, giardia, maybe dead. These are all trivial for anyone to get fixed in the US and they are effectively non-issues (for people who actually seek treatment).

Additionally, entire classes of problems that plagued nomads (contaminated water, hookworm, etc) are gone because of drinkable tap water (a few fucked up communities not-withstanding) and sewage systems.

Your equivocation between those living off the land and a minimum wage US worker indicates to me you’ve never experienced low income life nor realize how many benefits of society you can still enjoy. Public education, libraries, OTA TV, parks, heating assistance (in the north at least), food stamps, Medicaid, discounted housing, etc.

If you can’t see how that’s better than living off of the land, I suspect your beef is with the lifestyle of modern civilizations and no amount of income will satisfy your comparison.

[tsimionescu]

First of all, all of your examples just show that someone living for minimum wage in the US is actually making way more than 42 USD/day ((7.25 USD * 40h work week) / 7 days) by the WB standards, as all those additional protections are counted in the adjusted income. How would the poverty stats look if you took extreme poverty to be 40 USD/day?

Secondly, you can live off the land and still live in a country with a functional health system. I'm not discussing nomad hunter-gatherers here, just people who don't live off a wage, like traditional farmers and rural tribes (who still have money from trading their goods for example, and can live pretty wealthy lives, but contribute disproportionately little to GDP).

Overall the point was that people can and have been living outside of any standard of poverty for a long time in areas that nominally have very little GDP per capita, and are often getting counted as extreme poverty in stats older than 1981.

Related to medical coverage, I was thinking more along the lines of cancer or serious chronic diseases, not acute poisoning or broken limbs. The kind of diseases that not only cost serious money to overcome in a privatized health system, but also destroy your ability to work and earn money when you're whole livelihood is dependent on a wage - even if Medicaid can cove the direct medical expenses.

[lopmotr]

> cancer or serious chronic diseases

Everybody must die from something so how could anybody possibly not be in poverty by this standard? Do you only count diseases which can be treated with enough money?

If a new cancer treatment was discovered but it was incredibly expensive, perhaps requiring a team of specialists to provide exclusive continuous care to the patient for the entire rest of their life, then almost nobody could afford it and suddenly the entire world would be plunged into extreme poverty through lack of access to it. So you obviously have to accept that not everybody can have access to all possible lifesaving medical care if the world doesn't have the resources to provide it. There are already some personalized cancer treatments that come close to that. These are a net improvement for healthcare but they look like a regression by making poverty relatively worse.

You're probably right that extreme poverty is increasing if you keep broadening the definition as people get wealthier.