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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious about the math on that $66 billion number. According to the world bank there are about 750 million people living in extreme poverty. We only need to give them $88/year to get them out of it? And that's just the people in "extreme poverty." It'll be even less if we move up the income scale a bit.

The number seems low to me.

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The doc [1] below agrees that there are about 700m in extreme poverty now, which it defines as living below $2/day. If we gave each of those people $2/day, we'd need $550billion/year. So yes, $66b seems low for the $2/day threshold.

I wonder if this $66b is for those who are below $1/day. Looking at the plot in [1], we can guess that the number at $1/day is much lower; $66b would give 181 million people a dollar a day.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty/

You need to take into account that these people are not living on absolute nil - they have some level of income, be it $1 or $.50 - so you don't need to give each of them $2/day.

The OP article noted the amount needed in the village in the beginning was $22/month, so $.75 a day, give or take 10c.

And the system for means-testing at that level would be expensive enough to run, with opportunities for graft, false-positives, and false-natives, that means-testing would be a losing proposition. Just pick a level and make sure no one is double-dipping.

You still have the problem of regional thugs that will come round every "pay day" for their taste. Or beat you up. A pretty simple variation a protection racket, but I'm not sure how to protect against it.

there are about 700m in extreme poverty now, which it defines as living below $2/day. If we gave each of those people $2/day, we'd need $550billion/year

700m × $2 = $1.4b. What am I missing?

The multiplication by 365 to get the annual number.

I think that $2 is purchasing-power-parity adjusted (they talk about "international-$"), which is even less in real dollars.

For an anecote on PPP vs real dollars, I remember that in the eighties in soviet-ruled Poland, an average monthly salary amounted to about $20. At the same time, the average standard of living was not that bad: most families had flats with central heating (no air-con though), education up to university level and healthcare were free, most families didn't have cars but public transport was cheap.

You don't really need aircon in Europe. It's still extremely uncommon to have in private quarters.

I suppose the idea is that they'll spend the money in th local economy and prosper as a result. The starving man can't do much, but the guy who has more than he needs to survive can participate in the economy not just as a consumer.

Can't say that explains it all but presumably there are other things like that.

Let's say the number if 5 times higher that's still not out of reach, right? I doubt it's 100x higher.

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