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The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

nytimes.com

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Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#171

Post by squids »

dredmorbius wrote: post #30

Yes, a vast number of the world's poorest population have been raised out of nominal abject poverty, this is true. What Kristof doesn't state, however, are these facts: 1. Those people live almost entirely in China and India. 2. The rise in nominal wealth has come from a tremendous increase in energy consumption. 3. Both nations have extreme environmental problems, including the worst air pollution situations in the…

More than that 90% of the world still live on less than $10 a day. If you incorporate inflation into the 1981 $1 a day world bank poverty threshhold it would be about $2.50 a day now. At that $2.50 there are something like 300 million more people living below that absolute poverty line than there were when it was created.

Unfortunately those great Hans Rosling presentations really only deal with mortality at birth, which has consistently improved but probably only down to improvements in neonatal technology.

It's really about time people came to realise the World Bank/IMF neoliberal "free trade" globalisation experiment really only works to enrich western asset holders at the expense of the rest of the world through debt bondage.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#172

Post by erikb »

dredmorbius wrote: post #30

Yes, a vast number of the world's poorest population have been raised out of nominal abject poverty, this is true. What Kristof doesn't state, however, are these facts: 1. Those people live almost entirely in China and India. 2. The rise in nominal wealth has come from a tremendous increase in energy consumption. 3. Both nations have extreme environmental problems, including the worst air pollution situations in the…

It's a little ironic to say the poorest are not as poor, don't state countries, put a picture of African kids there and continue, when in the end it's these two countries we already know that they made progress.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#173

Post by ckozlowski »

coffeemug wrote: post #151

> We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off. This is why everyone should read The Economist instead of The New York Times. The Economist does a phenomenal job avoiding the selection bias and finding a way to cover mundane trends. It makes the mundane interesting, and gives a view of the world that's much closer to reality than any other publication I've ever seen. I'd strongly encourage everyone to give it…

I enjoy the fact that while they have a very clear opinion and bias (liberal economics and the free market), they avoid mudslinging, keep their criticisms factual, and are often quick to point out where their preferred system is failing.

That being said, I've few issues with The New York Times.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#174

Post by ZenoArrow »

WalterBright wrote: post #81
manachar wrote: post #4

It's really weird to me how commonplace the attitude of "It is what it is" and "Government can't do anything". The air and water quality in the US is vastly better since the passage of laws that created and empowered the EPA (Created by the Republican President Nixon). The endangered species act has had many similar successes. I live on Maui. The waters are now filled with Green Sea Turtles and Humpback whales that w…

It's the classic tragedy of the commons. Nobody owns the waterways and the air, and hence individuals have neither the power nor incentive to protect them.

>"It's the classic tragedy of the commons. Nobody owns the waterways and the air, and hence individuals have neither the power nor incentive to protect them."

Why does lack of direct ownership imply lack of protection?

It's possible to have a common resource that is owned by nobody/everybody, and have an organisation set up to protect misuse of this resource. Just because it's free to use, doesn't mean it's free for all potential uses.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#175

Post by hliyan »

marincounty wrote: post #20
quan wrote: post #9

Is there any inflationary effect to the $1.25/day figure that has been used since the 1980s? It's not clear from the article whether it's adjusted for inflation.

I couldn't find any correlation to inflation. I put in $2.00 in the calculator, and the millions of people in poverty came close to doubling. Maybe I'm missing something?

Who is down-voting all the inflation related questions? This shouldn't have to be explained to someone with downvote-level karma, but disagreeing with a comment's point of view is not a good reason to downvote it.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#176

Post by dannypgh »

JesperRavn wrote: post #51
whackedspinach wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well an easy answer is to take a lot of that money people are earning in technology (I'm talking personal income or gifts from companies) and put it towards programs that either work towards ending poverty in those cases (through economic development, direct cash grants, etc) or improving health conditions, which often helps. Some possibilities (although there are many others): http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-c…

Also whenever you earn more money, some the tax you pay goes towards programs like this whether you donate anything extra or not. So getting a high paying job alone helps.

Your taxes also fund the IMF, the legal system used to defend drug parents, and the promotion of "abstinence-only" sex-ed.

The reality is federal programs aren't started or canceled based on total, let alone an individual's, tax revenue, so I call bullshit here.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#177

Post by dannypgh »

JesperRavn wrote: post #49
Max_Horstmann wrote: post #6

Since this is HN, here's a question: what role could technology play in eliminating extreme poverty by 2030?

Technology is the main driver of growth in GDP per capita. Technology is what makes wealthy countries wealthy in the first place, and gives them enough surplus that they can afford to help poorer countries (whose problems may not be lack of access to technology per se, but other issues specific to their societies, such as unstable government, lack of education, etc.) By making the developed world richer, technology h…

GDP per capita can easily be increased without raising the median standard of living, or ending poverty. Increasing total wealth doesn't guarantee anything when the maldistribution of wealth is the underlying problem.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#178

Post by refurb »

nfoz wrote: post #103
clarkmoody wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context is dangerous to news & politics. Numbers are even more dangerous. So the likelihood of your wish coming true is almost nothing, at least in the mainstream news outlets. You'll get tons of context in long-format blogs and podcasts, where the purpose of the content is to educate. The primary purpose of media news is to make money, hence the bent toward entertainment more than anything. Data from the FBI[1] list…

> The primary purpose of media news is to make money My main news sources are: - CBC (Canadian crown corporation), - BBC (UK Royal Charter), - TVOntario (Ontario crown corporation), - Democracy Now! (independent non-profit), - PBS (independent non-profit), - crowd-sourced for-profit sites (HN, reddit) I live in NYC, and it's always really strange to see how prevalent for-profit media is here when there are so many be…

You think that the CBC isn't trying to make money? What are all the advertisements for then?

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#179

Post by mfringel »

Asbostos wrote: post #116
baddox wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which side has the actual ability to forcefully implement their desired policies over a large population?

The side with the real power - the voters. You can blame businesses or activists or interest groups or governments or whatever but America still has a democracy and American people actually do choose the outcomes they get. You personally might not want them, but most of your fellow Americans either do want them or succumb to some personal greed to make them happen.

No. The electorate chooses from a set of outcomes that are chosen long before they get a chance to vote on any of them. The political process starts a very long time before a typical citizen gets to vote.

Thinking that the political process begins and ends with voting is one of the key components of despair and cynicism in a democracy.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#180

Post by greggman »

interpol_p wrote: post #141
Houshalter wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely should ignore mass shootings. Paranoia about terrorism has created the NSA and TSA, and all sorts of other nonsense. People watching airplane crashes on the news think that airplanes are incredibly dangerous and drive instead. The raw numbers are important. People are actually surprised when you give them statistics like how rare murders actually are, or how rare shark attacks are, etc. That wouldn't b…

I absolutely agree that the raw numbers are important and they are quantifiable way to assess risk. But I very much dislike that they are directly compared to each other. The social impact of murders seems so different to death by smoking related disease that a comparison of the two numbers could be meaningless in determining which one is more "important" to reducing total death and suffering. They both seem incredib…

Aren't you falling prey to the exact problem being brought up?

You seem to be claiming murders have a bigger social impact than deaths by smoking. How can we know that's true? By what measure?

If we assume murdered people have on average the same number of social connections then 500000 smoking deaths have exactly 500k/16k more social impact than murders.

By focusing on the murders aren't we ignoring the much larger social impact?

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