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African poverty is falling…much faster than you think

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Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think

#11

Post by redwood »

plesn wrote: post #6

This gives some hope, especially the Gini graph. I'll wait for more information to have a more definitive opinion though as autonomy is not always well captured in those quantitative data. For example if more people live in big cities, is this growth enough ? (1$ can mean something different : in New York $400 certainly makes you poor…). Is this growth compensating former hidden markets, like self food producing and…

Right: how do they calculate the <$1/day rate. Its nearly inverse relationship with the GDP per capita graph implies that deep down in the data the basis for this $1/day rate could essentially be the GDP rate divided by population, or similar. I.e. without seeing where that data comes from this is a real possibility. However I would assume these folks are doing a rigorous analysis so this is probably unlikely.

Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think

#12

Post by [deleted] »

plesn wrote: post #6

This gives some hope, especially the Gini graph. I'll wait for more information to have a more definitive opinion though as autonomy is not always well captured in those quantitative data. For example if more people live in big cities, is this growth enough ? (1$ can mean something different : in New York $400 certainly makes you poor…). Is this growth compensating former hidden markets, like self food producing and…

[deleted]

Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think

#13

Post by [deleted] »

plesn wrote: post #6

This gives some hope, especially the Gini graph. I'll wait for more information to have a more definitive opinion though as autonomy is not always well captured in those quantitative data. For example if more people live in big cities, is this growth enough ? (1$ can mean something different : in New York $400 certainly makes you poor…). Is this growth compensating former hidden markets, like self food producing and…

[deleted]

Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think

#14

Post by wheels »

Uhm, they define poverty as living on less than one dollar per day. Then they show it dropping over the last 20 years ... but don't control for inflation. They show 10% improvement against a benchmark that (aside from being meaningless as a way of measuring abject poverty) lost more than 50% of its value and label it progress. This to me suggests basic innumeracy. It's entirely unclear from the data presented whether real poverty has been reduced at all.

Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think

#15

Post by ookblah »

burgerbrain wrote: post #4

So does this mean religious charities will finally stop trying to guilt trip me with starving children when I'm trying to have a few drinks while watching television? I didn't think so.

yeah, because laying out facts in a sterile and objective manner is going to compel you otherwise? don't confuse being presented truth with a guilt trip, sometimes we need a wake up call and it's not always comfortable.

Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think

#16

Post by jacobolus »

wheels wrote: post #14

Uhm, they define poverty as living on less than one dollar per day. Then they show it dropping over the last 20 years ... but don't control for inflation. They show 10% improvement against a benchmark that (aside from being meaningless as a way of measuring abject poverty) lost more than 50% of its value and label it progress. This to me suggests basic innumeracy. It's entirely unclear from the data presented whether…

These statistics are normalized across countries and over time by purchasing power parity. I don’t know what the precise calculation is, but it is relatively sophisticated. I’m sure if you search around you could find the details. They are just reported in simpler terms to make the comparison easily comprehensible to the non-technical. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold and also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geary-Khamis_dollar

(In other words, there are at least a few statisticians working for the UN and the World Bank, and they tend not to be “basically innumerate”.)

Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think

#17

Post by Eliezer »

burgerbrain wrote: post #4

So does this mean religious charities will finally stop trying to guilt trip me with starving children when I'm trying to have a few drinks while watching television? I didn't think so.

Don't forget, most aid is actively harmful.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/z2/another_call_to_end_aid_to_africa...

Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think

#18

Post by wheels »

jacobolus wrote: post #16
wheels wrote: post #14

Uhm, they define poverty as living on less than one dollar per day. Then they show it dropping over the last 20 years ... but don't control for inflation. They show 10% improvement against a benchmark that (aside from being meaningless as a way of measuring abject poverty) lost more than 50% of its value and label it progress. This to me suggests basic innumeracy. It's entirely unclear from the data presented whether…

These statistics are normalized across countries and over time by purchasing power parity. I don’t know what the precise calculation is, but it is relatively sophisticated. I’m sure if you search around you could find the details. They are just reported in simpler terms to make the comparison easily comprehensible to the non-technical. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold and also http://en.wikipedia.or…

Here's the actual paper, which does name its units (international poverty line):

http://www.salaimartin.com/media/pdf/Africa_Poverty_NBER.pdf

And criticism of their results from someone working on producing similar numbers for the World Bank:

http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/is-african-poverty-fall...

I must say that it irks me that they would use such a easy-to-understand-and-wrong ($1/day, when they mean "below the international poverty line") unit in writing without specifically qualifying it.

Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think

#19

Post by Kliment »

redwood wrote: post #11
plesn wrote: post #6

This gives some hope, especially the Gini graph. I'll wait for more information to have a more definitive opinion though as autonomy is not always well captured in those quantitative data. For example if more people live in big cities, is this growth enough ? (1$ can mean something different : in New York $400 certainly makes you poor…). Is this growth compensating former hidden markets, like self food producing and…

Right: how do they calculate the <$1/day rate. Its nearly inverse relationship with the GDP per capita graph implies that deep down in the data the basis for this $1/day rate could essentially be the GDP rate divided by population, or similar. I.e. without seeing where that data comes from this is a real possibility. However I would assume these folks are doing a rigorous analysis so this is probably unlikely.

Since they point out this inverse relationship as remarkable, I don't suppose there is an expected relationship of this sort between the two. Certainly there would be a negative correlation, but I don't believe they are coming from the same data.
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