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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?

#111

Post by zwayhowder »

luisdfp wrote: post #94

>"We asked ourselves why the world had to be like this and what we could do to help. Our search for answers altered the course of our lives and led us to start our foundation." It's a shame but it seems to me like Bill came up with the wrong answer due to a bad diagnosis of the problem. If you really want to help these people, your best bet would be to highlight how rampant corruption affects these countries and how…

My understanding is that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation only works on projects that are very transparent in their costs and minimise the risk of corruption siphoning away the money. No system is perfect but when I worked in international aid they were always the stick other orgs measured themselves against.

I think the general opinion of Bill Gates would be very different if he'd used his billions to hire mercenaries and overthrow governments, even un-elected ones. (Then again, Ross Perot did something close to this to rescue a few staff in Tehran and was hailed a hero).

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

#112

Post by bildung »

ninguem2 wrote: post #74

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

I think this is a legimite question! Personally I don't have a clear answer. Two arguments for a space program country with lots of poverty (like India or the USA):

* Establishing a high tech industry with programs like this potentially leads to increasing tax revenue for the country, thereby making funds available for fighting poverty.

* It could be used as a point of identification for the population in the country, helping to see oneself as a citizen in a nation, not just a member of a tribe, enlarging the "us" in "us vs. them". This can lead to more empathy towards the poor (as they are now part of "us"), which can pave the way for political changes leading to less poverty. To enable changes in a democratic country, you don't just need the funds, you have to have a political plan that resonates with a big part of the population.

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

#113

Post by rvn1045 »

peteretep wrote: post #15
H8crilA wrote: post #5

It's important to remember that the world has been unbelievably successful at getting people out of extreme poverty (inflation-adjusted $1.9 per day). We went from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 0.65 billion in 2018. Ways to go, but it is a truly amazing achievement of humanity. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the past 30 years. https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

I think this number is marginally misleading, because a huge amount of that is China: > According to the World Bank, more than 850 million people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015 China was not historically poor, and this is a reversion to the mean once minimal free trade was allowed.

Even if you look at the last 500 years fewer people live at near subsistence level today than they did in the past.

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

#114

Post by strken »

xyzzyz wrote: post #100
AdrianB1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. The article is not about living with the equivalent of $2 in USA, but a few African countries and values converted in dollars. A few years ago some colleagues of mine spent a month in rural, mainland China, trying to see how people live with a few dollars a day. While those people were poor, the numbers are very misleading when you convert in dollars.

No, you’re wrong. It’s not about converting what they earn to dollars using direct exchange rate, it’s about converting it to dollar’s purchasing power.

It's hard to convert PP directly because it's different for different goods - the measurements usually use a basket of multiple goods and services. It's possible that e.g. eggs in India are relatively expensive, while lentils are cheaper, but if we calculated PP using the two items then it would be somewhere in the middle: a PP-adjusted $2 portion of lentils would still be bigger in India than we would expect from looking at overall PP.

This may or may not be what the GP was trying to say.

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

#115

Post by barking »

arcturus17 wrote: post #105
luisdfp wrote: post #94

>"We asked ourselves why the world had to be like this and what we could do to help. Our search for answers altered the course of our lives and led us to start our foundation." It's a shame but it seems to me like Bill came up with the wrong answer due to a bad diagnosis of the problem. If you really want to help these people, your best bet would be to highlight how rampant corruption affects these countries and how…

So after reading this your first instinct was to comment how you know better than the world’s greatest philanthropist?

Is he greater than, say, the guy who founded DFS Group, who has now given away all his wealth in line with his plan to do so which he set in place decades ago?

Edit named wrong company initially

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

#116

Post by mettamage »

dluan wrote: post #75

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 end…

Could you guys share some strategies? The parent talks about beans. I wonder what Eyght did.

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

#117

Post by novalis78 »

PeterisP wrote: post #97
luisdfp wrote: post #94

>"We asked ourselves why the world had to be like this and what we could do to help. Our search for answers altered the course of our lives and led us to start our foundation." It's a shame but it seems to me like Bill came up with the wrong answer due to a bad diagnosis of the problem. If you really want to help these people, your best bet would be to highlight how rampant corruption affects these countries and how…

Realistically, the only thing that results in a "how their rulers should be held accountable for it" is a violent change of regime. There universally are large groups of local people who'd like their corrupt rulers to be accountable, so you theoretically could support that process by buying and delivering large quantities of weapons to the opposition of the regime so that they can (try to) overthrow it and bring just…

I noticed how most of them are trying to save money ‘to better their lives’ or are taking out loans in their local currency. The inflation rate of these currencies is devastating. Perhaps instead of overthrowing a corrupt upper percentage of their country they could find ways to evade their purchasing power and capital accumulation being drained away...

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

#118

Post by input_sh »

why-oh-why wrote: post #108
input_sh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is completely misleading, close to lying. Philanthropy in a nutshell. On a more serious note, I couldn't agree more. Any sort of international metric for poverty (like the $2 here) is downright useless because it ignores all the local context. > I hope you will be touched by their stories, their challenges, and their dreams for better lives. I also hope that you’ll ask yourself what you can do to help the mill…

That’s akin to giving a fish to someone. I think that what philanthropist can do to help is to effectively replace the government: build infrastructure, educate people, provide healthcare, employ the locals for these jobs. Any money you give to anyone for free will just get someone rich while the rest will continue suffering. — Also, to directly answer your point, you can give those $50 to a person OR spend those $50…

> employ the locals for these jobs.

That's where 95% of the problem lies. As someone whose origins are from a poor country, I can name you a lot of organizations that don't have this in mind. A huge chunk of your donation goes to some westerner going on a "spiritual journey" to teach locals, or whatever bullshit they tell to themselves that's needed. It very rarely "trickles down" to the poor people's pockets.

What they need is money. Like literally any single poor person in the world, that money will go first and foremost to securing basic life necessities (food, shelter, water, medical bills), and the rest is gonna get reinvested in their local town or village (either by starting a business or by paying for education).

> Any money you give to anyone for free will just get someone rich while the rest will continue suffering.

What's missing from your equation is taxes. Whatever they do with the money will get taxed, filling the local budgets. Thinking that westerners know more what's needed then people that actually live there is preposterous at best, superiority complex at worst.

> Also, to directly answer your point, you can give those $50 to a person OR spend those $50 to get 50 people to donate instead.

If you think this post without a direct call-to-action is gonna inspire people to donate more than it took to go there and film these documentaries, I honestly hope you're right. I personally don't buy that one bit.

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

#119

Post by neom »

joe_the_user wrote: post #37
neom wrote: post #16

I've mentioned this book here before, but I can't stress enough how good it is. $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America: https://www.amazon.com/2-00-Day-Living-Nothing-America/dp/05...

"..households surviving on virtually no cash income..." This is talking about people living on less than $2/day cash income . Which is still quite different from trying to get all needs with $2 cash each day, something that is more or less impossible in the US today. Those without cash live on hand-outs, soup kitchens and government assistance. Certainly, US poverty has gotten worse over the last twenty years and is…

It a collection of stories that help build empathy.......

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

#120

Post by Synaesthesia »

dluan wrote: post #75

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 end…

And that’s spending all your money on food, leaving nothing for anything else!
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