[Lazare]

I think Smith's argument is that:

1. We shouldn't use static, arbitrary lines. Going from $7.39 to $7.41 doesn't help much, whereas going from $1.50 to $7.00 helps immensely. An argument over where the single arbitrary static line should be drawn utterly misses the point.

2. The overall income distribution is shifting right, as people become richer.

These things both seem to be entirely correct, and they are devastating to Hickel.

> Noah Smith never seems to address Jason Hickle's point that the evidence based poverty line should be $7.40.

I found his debunking of the idea that we should be drawing a line at all utterly convincing.

[albatruss]

Smith does not address the point, made by Hickle and reiterated by the topmost comment, about taking into account subsistence farming and how that affects how we should be looking at the metric of income per day altogether. Hickle seems to believe that the lower bounds of this number are skewed by these broader concerns. Hence the topmost comment's sentiment, which I share, that they're talking past each other.

[hntrader]

What about this?

  "we want to emphasize is that those estimates of poverty do take into account non-market transactions such as subsistence farming."

https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-home-production-and-consu...