"It is the research of hundreds of historians who have carefully assembled thousands of quantitative estimates that inform us about us about people’s living conditions that give us this global perspective on the history of poverty.
In public discussions of the history of poverty the extent of this careful work is often overlooked. Such a deceptively simple chart on the global decline of poverty may then be easily dismissed as being based on little evidence."
Similar to how the plots themselves contain and compress a multitude of information, and we've all learned some generally shared ways to process that information (what an upward sloping means, what diverging lines mean, and others), is there a way to add information such that we have a similar shared way to process the _source_ of the data? I know that listing of sources themselves are intended for this, but unless it's your actual job to process that type of information it seems unreasonable to ask a normal person trying to live their life to track down that final information.
Consider that summarizing it as a single quantity is already unwarranted and somewhat arbitrary. The question should be about the utility. What is the utility of having one major number that is supposedly quantitative and consistent rather than, say, five metrics related to material status? The latter will provide more opportunity to compare "like to like", after all, and there's no reason that the universe must conform to a single metric being in any way valid. This is made even worse by pinning it to a (controlled) dollar value rather than some aggregate quantity of material well-being.
For example, according to this metric, the vast majority of poverty reduction happened in China. What factors can we attribute to that development? Well even asking that question means we have to go back and look at other metrics and means by which to understand economic systems and the distribution of material goods. The moment we ask a pretty basic, but arguably more relevant and useful question, we have to throw this metric away and do something else.
And when I've encountered this information in this past, the utility seems to be more about propaganda and lazy inferences than anything else, and often among famous academics. While we all have our bubbles, it does make you question the point of trying to make poverty just one quantity.
For those interested in this topic, I found "Enlightenment Now"[1] to be a great read (the audio book is good too). We take so much of our progress for granted and often look at progress from too short a time horizon.
I didn't get much from it, except to the extent that I could imagine the lives of actual people in extreme poverty, which is not very much.
It did get me thinking though. Not about extreme poverty, but about just getting by.
If I was working multiple minimum wage jobs to feed my family and put a roof over their head, and had to put up with appalling behaviour from my bosses, and appalling conditions that did not consider my state of being, I might not be counted as being in extreme poverty.
And if I avoided any health crises that would terminate my employment for the rest of my life, I might die without having ever been counted as being in extreme poverty.
But what would be the difference between my life and the life of people who had more control over their circumstances, and experienced more respect in their workplace from their bosses and peers?
It’s a hard question, but in practice I’m not sure there’s a tradeoff. A hundred years ago, the least fortunate would have been working 12 hour shifts locked into in a sweatshop that doesn’t care if they burn to death, or putting in backbreaking labor to keep their farm barely above water before losing it all in the Dust Bowl.
Chronically overlooked point: “it is wrong to think of the last two centuries as being one where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The poor also got richer.”
Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. This sort of boilerplate just leads to predictable, boring, and nasty discussion. It's also sensational and gets lots of upvotes, which fans the flames. It's a failure mode for large internet forums, which simply can't do anything interesting with this material.
Poverty is relative. Compared to billionaires we all live in poverty. True poverty is not being able to attain food or shelter. Indeed many who are considered fabulously wealthy by neolithic standards are not able to find shelter or are barred from it by society (getting run off by police from public areas, national parks etc).
Define poverty as something than just income from wages. Can you "fix" poverty? Compared to my living standards I know people who I consider living in poverty but to them it is just life and they are used to government help. While a noble or laudable effort, giving them money holds them back.
In general, welfare benefits cement or create a lower class. I think our view of poverty is really just class guilt and fear.
Can you please not post unsubstantive comments or flamebait to HN? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and we're trying for something different here.
Through the history of the study of history there have been several ways of doing history (ie historiographies). One is Marxist historiography, trying to find the class struggle in everything. Another is whiggish historiography, named after the Whig history of Britain which viewed history as an inevitable progression towards constitutional monarchy, but which more generally refers to seeing history as intentionally leading to the present day.
For the sake of the argument. Consider a planet inhabited exactly by two humans. They would be in extreme poverty by our standards and there would be no rich class to contrast them against. Ah, it becomes obvious now, poverty is a product of nature. You are born poor by nature. Your children are born poor as well.
Those 2 humans give birth to 6 children. 2 of them die because of a disease. Are the children who grew up to adulthood the rich class? Repeat this until there are 100 people. They organize, they build and invent things. The rich are born, not by nature but by society. Wealth is a product of society.
> For the sake of the argument. Consider a planet inhabited exactly by two humans. They would be in extreme poverty by our standards (...)
Not true. Our standards define poverty either as the inability to afford lower-tier living expenses, or as the inability to ensure an income higher than a certain quantille of the population's income distribution (typically around 60% of the median income )
Both interpretations of poverty imply that none of your hypothetical examples represent poverty.
I urge you not to use food insecurity in argument. Even outside food stamps, food is extremely affordable to eat perfectly healthy. If nothing else it's an education issue, not a food issue.
There are other issues other than money with regards to the cost of food. Time is one of them. The poorer I was the less time I had. No the recipes would not have worked. Healthy food also not readily available. It is not typically an education issue. It also can be a form of addiction in a manner. Many people get addicted when they are young to eating a certain type of way. It can become virtually impossible for someone to break that addiction as they get older. They often get addicted as a child. Lack of healthy foods in many places is a real issue. I live and grew up here tight in the US. If there is a solution for this please do share. I have seen this trap of thought before, I was in it for a while.
In Britain, where food is more expensive than in the US, ignorance about how to eat affordably and well is a shocking poverty trap. Anecdotally, a family getting pizza delivered will be spending almost an order of magnitude more than they would need to by cooking a nutritious meal from easily available basic ingredients; that's fine for a treat, but if you are relying on it regularly to put food in your kids' stomachs it quickly becomes ruinous.
I found this very painful to read, it's painfully slow to get to the point...actually, it doesn't even answer the question posed in the title.
> Just as we need to adjust for price inflation, accounting for non-market sources of income is an essential part of making meaningful welfare comparisons over time.
The article never says how they account for non-market sources of income, i.e. those things without a price. I'm sure there's a dozen links to various papers, but I expect the question posed in the article to be answered in the article, rather than be fobbed off with pat tautologies such as "historians know about history"!
They actually do. He describes in detail how agricultural production is estimated using historic data in farmland, yields and how it is painstakingly adjusted per region. In other words the tedious work needed to actually do this.
Readit News
Similar to how the plots themselves contain and compress a multitude of information, and we've all learned some generally shared ways to process that information (what an upward sloping means, what diverging lines mean, and others), is there a way to add information such that we have a similar shared way to process the _source_ of the data? I know that listing of sources themselves are intended for this, but unless it's your actual job to process that type of information it seems unreasonable to ask a normal person trying to live their life to track down that final information.
For example, according to this metric, the vast majority of poverty reduction happened in China. What factors can we attribute to that development? Well even asking that question means we have to go back and look at other metrics and means by which to understand economic systems and the distribution of material goods. The moment we ask a pretty basic, but arguably more relevant and useful question, we have to throw this metric away and do something else.
And when I've encountered this information in this past, the utility seems to be more about propaganda and lazy inferences than anything else, and often among famous academics. While we all have our bubbles, it does make you question the point of trying to make poverty just one quantity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now
I didn't get much from it, except to the extent that I could imagine the lives of actual people in extreme poverty, which is not very much.
It did get me thinking though. Not about extreme poverty, but about just getting by.
If I was working multiple minimum wage jobs to feed my family and put a roof over their head, and had to put up with appalling behaviour from my bosses, and appalling conditions that did not consider my state of being, I might not be counted as being in extreme poverty.
And if I avoided any health crises that would terminate my employment for the rest of my life, I might die without having ever been counted as being in extreme poverty.
But what would be the difference between my life and the life of people who had more control over their circumstances, and experienced more respect in their workplace from their bosses and peers?
How would I know?
How would anyone know?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Define poverty as something than just income from wages. Can you "fix" poverty? Compared to my living standards I know people who I consider living in poverty but to them it is just life and they are used to government help. While a noble or laudable effort, giving them money holds them back.
In general, welfare benefits cement or create a lower class. I think our view of poverty is really just class guilt and fear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don’t really buy either
Those 2 humans give birth to 6 children. 2 of them die because of a disease. Are the children who grew up to adulthood the rich class? Repeat this until there are 100 people. They organize, they build and invent things. The rich are born, not by nature but by society. Wealth is a product of society.
Not true. Our standards define poverty either as the inability to afford lower-tier living expenses, or as the inability to ensure an income higher than a certain quantille of the population's income distribution (typically around 60% of the median income )
Both interpretations of poverty imply that none of your hypothetical examples represent poverty.
Also job and food insecurity.
https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
https://www.epi.org/publication/top-charts-of-2018-twelve-ch...
One of the main quantitative definitions of poverty is the at-risk-of-poverty rate, which is defined as 60% of the median income.
Income inequality is expressed as an income distribution that's lopsided, thus leading the threshold to cover a greater share of the population.
https://efficiencyiseverything.com/eat-for-1-50-per-day-layo...
No comment on job security or wealth inequality.
Dead Comment
> Just as we need to adjust for price inflation, accounting for non-market sources of income is an essential part of making meaningful welfare comparisons over time.
The article never says how they account for non-market sources of income, i.e. those things without a price. I'm sure there's a dozen links to various papers, but I expect the question posed in the article to be answered in the article, rather than be fobbed off with pat tautologies such as "historians know about history"!
A long academic read nonetheless...