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Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

What would [be] the reason for U.S. poverty?

Lets start with discussing the US legal definition of "poverty", which puts the line at some 20x world median income.

At least mention that purchasing power parity makes this less extreme than it sounds.

While purchasing power parity is certainly relevant, being poor in the US (by the official US definition) is still better than being poor almost anywhere else.

This paper goes so far as to argue that, in many ways, the average poor American lives at the same level or better (materially speaking) than an European middle class person:

http://www.timbro.se/bokhandel/pdf/9175665646.pdf

Also, note that the official definition's minimum yearly income doesn't include welfare benefits.

The paper you cite really only talks in terms of access to/possession of goods. So yes, in the US you may be more likely to possess a car than someone in Bhutan. But whether that is better is debatable.

By comparison it's interesting to look at 'happiness', obviously that has it's own problems in terms of quantifiability. However, at least it involves asking the poor how well off they are.

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic457678.files//Hap... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_national_happiness

You can talk about happiness, but even the poorest people in the US still have access to basic sanitation and clean drinking water, and (usually) a roof over their head which is not something you can say for many poor people of the world.

And as long as the poorest in the US are richer than someone in the world that is somehow satisfactory?

I'm fairly content to talk about happiness, it's fairly fundamental.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_liberty_and_the_pursuit_o...

So if given the choice between the two, you are picking a slightly happier life in a country where you will not live to age 30? Interesting.

"Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils." - General John Stark on July 31, 1809

No. "Purchasing power parity" fails to take into account a host of tangential & overhead costs. Sounds good to compare what a product costs in two countries in the same currency, and to note the difference in price, but there is so much more affecting those prices even though in "fairness" they should be the "same".

<rant> An overstated example... A dozen eggs here may be $2.00, and $0.10 somewhere else, but the former includes: sale in a store clean enough to host surgery in the other country, well-paid staff (staving off their potential poverty), robust packaging, long-term storage facilities, remarkable uniformity of products (each egg almost exactly the same size, shape, and color), proliferation of taxes imposed, long-distance transportation (keeping farming issues out of urban settings), compliance with regulations (starting with: no livestock in residential areas), wages reflecting a very high standard of living (imposed not just by society but by legislation), and quality feed & care of originating chickens; in the other country, the dozen eggs may be delivered in a random box by a guy who has chickens in his back yard and feeds them table scraps. Yeah the same product cost 20x more in the same currency in different countries: there's a radical difference in supply chains, regulations, taxation, and currency flow. </rant>

Excellent comment...thought the same thing!

Fact: The poor in US would actually be amazingly rich in a country like mine(India).

Add to this you also get something called social security.

Where exactly are the poor in the US?

It's more a poverty of spirit than anything else. They have material goods.

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