[blagie]

The basic argument is a little bit different. There is a huge population in Kenya living, or in some places, failing to live for under $2/day. Most of these people are independent -- for example, street-side sellers in an urban slum, or living in a village far from Nairobi.

The key question is how we improve lives of these people.

It is difficult for me to overstate the impact a 5-fold improvement in income has on people's lives. I've seen initiatives which train people to do tasks like basic data entry, bricklaying, or otherwise, taking $2/day workers to be $10/day workers. Programs like these are typically a few months long. They don't train people to have the equivalent of even a middle school diploma, and they won't be competitive with even the least educated Western workers.

Still, breaking generational poverty is a long process, and that basic increased stability is a first step.

If we shut off employment paths following those programs by giving bad PR to anyone who employs people for $2/hour, we've doomed a key pathway for hundreds of millions of people to escape abject poverty.

Gapminder shows four income levels:

https://www.gapminder.org/fw/income-levels/

Westerners tend to group levels 1-3 together. However, the gap in quality-of-life from level 1 to level 2 is much greater than the rest of the stack. Level 1, life basically sucks. Hunger, lack of basic life-saving medicine, and early death.

Levels 2-4, I've lived at (for at least a few months), and it's okay once you get used to it.

It takes surprisingly little to bring people from 1 to 2, and these sorts of jobs are one way to do that.

As a footnote: People often confuse financial stress with simply being poor, since in the US, those correlate almost completely. Financial stress sucks. Most people worldwide living at levels 2-3 don't have high levels of financial stress. A much more typical situation is a village, where no one has a lot of stuff, but people own the land and their homes. Financial stress sucks. I'd rather own a home at Level 3, with savings, a stable family, income, etc. than live paycheck-to-paycheck at Level 4.

[nerdathlete]

Thanks for sharing, the Gapminder level stratification (and Dollar Street photos) was very eye-opening and a humbling reminder of how privileged I am as a software engineer.

[blagie]

A few years back, Bill Gates bought every university graduate who wanted one a digital copy of the book Factfulness. It's like the insight from that stratification, over and over, in book-length format. It's really quite excellent.

One of the interesting trends you'll see is we've gone from /the vast majority/ of the world at Level 1 really not all that long ago to around a billion people today (probably less when as I write this).

The world is getting a lot better very quickly for a lot of people. At the same time, solving the problem is no longer intractable.

I will also mention: "Privilege" is complex, and life isn't all about money. Starting around level 2 or 3, "stuff" usually isn't the biggest problem in life. You get used to the inconvenience of needing to boil running water or having to ride a bike instead of a car pretty quickly. You don't experience it as inconvenience at all if you've never had it (as most of humanity hasn't for most of time).

On the other hand, humans are social creatures. Many places where people live at level 2 or 3 have communities and families of a type you've never experienced if you grew up in the US. The US is a very lonely place, and there's a mental health crisis in the US that would be completely foreign in many places at level 2 or 3.

The US also experiences much greater financial stress. If you're in a poor village, but you grow your food and own your home, you stress out a lot less about money than if you're making a 6-figure income, but worried about college debt and making your mortgage if you have a short-term job loss, divorce, or medical crisis, as is common in the US.

Who's more privileged?