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What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?

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Re: What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?

#71

Post by strken »

aspaceman wrote: post #44

There are so many folks in the comments who seem to be focused on a particular narrative. There's a lot of comments saying "It's so much better than it used to be!" While true, this feels to me like a deflection. It seems to come up any time inequality is mentioned here. It feels like an excuse. "yes things may be hard for someone making $2 a day, but they're better now so it's all ok." I find it to be a distraction.…

I can't speak for everyone in the comments, but when I say the world's improving, it's a reaction to either defeatism ("we can fix the problem so you shouldn't stop trying") or calls for revolution ("don't flip the table over when things are getting better").

It's not that things are improving so we don't need to do anything else, it's that current efforts are working and we should keep going.

Re: What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?

#72

Post by dalbasal »

aspaceman wrote: post #65
smallgovt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I don't care if things are better than ancient times. The world population living in poverty has decreased from >1.7 billion to 700 million over the past 25 years. So, it's not a comparison to ancient times. We've made considerable progress in just the past couple decades. There's still a lot of work to be done, and we should celebrate the progress made at the same time.

Why does a decrease in world poverty matter in a thread about living on $2 a day? I really don’t care about your stats, make your own post if you wanna talk about them. My point is that folks like you redirect the topic because you’re uncomfortable with reality. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to “celebrating”

...because it's a thread about people living on $2 per day. Would you say the trend is irrelevant if it was negative and things were getting worse? How is talking about poverty trends irrelevant deflection?

I totally disagree with the sentiment that being change oriented means avoiding positive news.

Re: What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?

#73

Post by AmericanChopper »

aspaceman wrote: post #65
smallgovt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I don't care if things are better than ancient times. The world population living in poverty has decreased from >1.7 billion to 700 million over the past 25 years. So, it's not a comparison to ancient times. We've made considerable progress in just the past couple decades. There's still a lot of work to be done, and we should celebrate the progress made at the same time.

Why does a decrease in world poverty matter in a thread about living on $2 a day? I really don’t care about your stats, make your own post if you wanna talk about them. My point is that folks like you redirect the topic because you’re uncomfortable with reality. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to “celebrating”

> Why does a decrease in world poverty matter in a thread about living on $2 a day

Because if the population living in poverty has decreased by 1 billion in 25 years, then were clearly doing the right things to reduce poverty. If you think reducing poverty is a bad thing because you’d only accept a solution that eliminates it instantaneously, then I’d question your priorities.

Re: What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?

#75

Post by dluan »

I did this in college for a week as part of a $2 dollar a day challenge for a student microfinance club. I knew well enough that it was near impossible to do it accurately in the U.S. where costs are inflated for basic things, and I also was discounting things like my tiny rent and what not, but I wanted to just go through it once as an exercise.

I had $14 and I used most of it to stock up on dry beans. I think I ended up with around one and half meals a day, basically of nothing but beans and rice. I didn't last the full week.

Re: What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?

#76

Post by mappu »

This surprised me -

> He supports his wife and three children with his income of about 1500 Rwandan francs per day (about USD $1.73)

My understanding is that raising a child in most developed western countries is just mind-bogglingly expensive. The purchasing power here has to be wildly skewed from the actual FRw/USD forex rate.

What does 1500 FRw look like in USD (or EUR or AUD or, ...), not going by the official forex rate, but normalized for the cost of raising three children? Like the Big Mac Index but a childcare index.

Re: What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?

#77

Post by onion2k »

ninguem2 wrote: post #74

How can a country that has people living in such abject poverty justifies sending a probe to the Moon?

In 2011 1.5 million families in the USA lived on less than $2 a day before benefits[1]. Is it time to defund NASA?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States

Re: What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?

#78

Post by jokoon »

> More than one billion people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty, driven by improvements in health, agriculture, and education.

I don't understand, is the increasing inequality and income concentration a mirage, a lie, or propaganda?

It would be nice to introduce the concept of relative and absolute wealth. If you increase the size of the cake, the poor will get more crumbs, and you did reduce poverty, but it's not really a fair improvement.

I wish Bill Gates would have to guts to do politics. He seems smart but to me it's never enough.

Re: What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?

#79

Post by AdrianB1 »

This is completely misleading, close to lying.

I lived with less than $2 a day. The average salary in the country was less than $100 and this was in Eastern Europe, not in Africa. What changes the story completely is that the exchange rate makes all the difference in my case: we all had a fairly regular life, but the exchange rate was showing a very dark picture. Yes, we were not able to buy American cars in dollars, but a local built Renault copy was a few thousands dollars new. All the prices were extremely low in dollars, but meaningful in local currency. We had not just the basics (food, electricity, house), but an almost normal life.

25 years later, the average salary is more than 10 times more, in US dollars only. An iPhone is now 10 times cheaper, but the price structure is more or less the same and nothing changed, just the exchange rate. The food is 10 times more expensive in dollars, rent is 10 times more, the few things that are more expensive today in local currency are the ones that are heavily taxed, like gas and tobacco.

Re: What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day?

#80

Post by phaus »

aspaceman wrote: post #65
smallgovt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I don't care if things are better than ancient times. The world population living in poverty has decreased from >1.7 billion to 700 million over the past 25 years. So, it's not a comparison to ancient times. We've made considerable progress in just the past couple decades. There's still a lot of work to be done, and we should celebrate the progress made at the same time.

Why does a decrease in world poverty matter in a thread about living on $2 a day? I really don’t care about your stats, make your own post if you wanna talk about them. My point is that folks like you redirect the topic because you’re uncomfortable with reality. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to “celebrating”

Aside from the fact that its obviously relevant, maybe it was mentioned because the thread is about an article that opens with some of those same statistics on the reduction of poverty.
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