Shouldn't we be looking at the percentage of people who suffer from food insecurity and lack of access to permanent housing to begin with? How far a dollar stretches, changes over space and time.
It seems to play into the global capitalist scheme of luring people into debt servitude with a false promise of high wages in a distant city / country.
> In all these statistics, the researchers are not only taking people’s monetary income into account, but also their non-monetary income and home production. One reason why this is important is because many poor people are small-scale farmers who produce their own food.
it has nothing to do with competence. we can and have defined per-country poverty lines, which these people obviously know. this is a malicious effort to present a twisted narrative of western superiority.
Sadly this is likely because these metrics are weaponized to show how superior and civilized the West is, which has largely abandoned subsistence farming. That's also why this article doesn't directly mention China, which is the runaway leader in large-scale poverty alleviation efforts over the last few decades.
From the linked article:
> Basics of global poverty measurement
> Throughout this article – and in global income and expenditure data generally – the statisticians who produce these figures are careful to make these numbers as comparable as possible.
> Non-monetary sources of income are taken into account
> Many poor people today and in the past rely on subsistence farming and do not have a monetary income. To take this into account and make a fair comparison of their living standards, the statisticians that produce these figures estimate the monetary value of their home production and add it to their income/expenditure.
> Differences in purchasing power and inflation are taken into account
The data is all there, in the linked studies. They could easily have used the actually correct data (i.e. per-country poverty lines).
But then e.g. China would go from 90-100% poverty bracket (dark red) to the 10-20% bracket (light brown), which is obviously not the conclusion that the blog post* wants readers to be impressed with.
* authored by the director of a global development program at Oxford