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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?

#141

Post by AdrianB1 »

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.

"income of about 1500 Rwandan francs per day (about USD $1.73)"

That is a direct conversion. Where is the purchasing power conversion?

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

#142

Post by AdrianB1 »

nabla9 wrote: post #95
AdrianB1 wrote: post #79

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,…

You made simple and understandable mistake. Gates talks explicitly about World Bank’s international poverty line measured in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) dollars. It accounts for differences in the cost of living across countries (the PPP exchange rates). example: PPP for India is 18.128. In India the international poverty line ($1.9 PPP) is $0.10 per day in USD. --- Gates writes: > Still, the number of people livin…

"income of about 1500 Rwandan francs per day (about USD $1.73)" That is a direct conversion there is no purchasing power conversion. Not my mistake.

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

#143

Post by tryptophan »

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.

This is not true. The same trend holds across the rest of the world.

https://ourworldindata.org/the-global-decline-of-extreme-pov...

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

#144

Post by segmondy »

davchana wrote: post #140
segmondy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can feed yourself for $2 a day in the US, not live on tho. But you can do that much easier if you have money upfront from the beginning instead of getting $2 every day. Let's say you have $60 in the beginning of the month. You can buy a 25lb of rice for $10-$15. You can then do the same for beans and you would have spent $20-$30. Some spices salt, pepper, thyme, onions and vegetable oil. Then if you're feeling re…

I work in an Indian Grocery Store & none of the tens of types of rice are $15 for 25LB. The cheapest is $15 for 20LB. Edit: Thanks for the price lists of Big Stores. I only have info about Indian Grocery Store.

It has been more than a decade when I did this, but as late as 3 years ago, you could buy a 25lb rice for $10. Of course inflation and good economy and tarrifs have probably pushed up prices.

https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/save-money/costco-sams-club-...

Rice

BJ’s 25-pound bag of rice is $9.89.

Costco’s 25-pound bag of rice is $9.49.

Sam’s Club offers a 20-pound bag for $7.23.

Winner: Pound for pound, Sam’s Club’s rice comes in cheapest at 36 cents per pound — even though it’s in a smaller bag!

Beans

BJ’s has 10 pounds of dry pintos for $6.42.

If you’re looking for canned, prepared beans, BJ’s has a pretty decent deal on an eight-pack of 16.5 ounce Bush’s — they’re $9.59 at my club.

Costco has a 10-pound package of black beans for $13.69 — it may have been out of pintos the day I went!

Its Bush’s eight-pack of 16.5-ounce cans is just $8.99, however.

Sam’s Club’s 10-pounder of pintos is $5.79. It carries the same package of Bush’s for $8.98.

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

#145

Post by ggggtez »

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…

To be fair, $2 probably goes a little farther in Africa than the US or Europe.

$2 a day in the US is impossibly little. I'm almost sure that food stamps would equate to more by itself.

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

#146

Post by mythrwy »

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…

It's a chicken and egg problem though.

When people are uneducated and barely feeding themselves tyranny and corruption flourish.

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

#147

Post by TheCoelacanth »

lunchbar123 wrote: post #87
AdrianB1 wrote: post #79

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,…

Since i live here, I can tell you people living on this salary in Africa are not living a 'regular' life. They live in shacks and they eat a malnourished diet, they sometimes tap electricity illegally (and dangerously), they do not have money for clothing or any sort of improvement. On top of that they have to deal with things like heightened crime in their areas or the fact that a bit of bad weather can destroy thei…

They also lack even the most basic healthcare and will die of easily preventable diseases if they get unlucky.

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

#148

Post by coldtea »

This is made to appear like an insight of the lives of those living on less than $2/day, but if you look closely, the videos have them talk about micro-loans they get and such, as a covert ad for [1].

Which is OK, I guess, but it's never explicitly mentioned, and the way 5 out of 6 people in the videos talk about those loans is entirely non-organic. Those are not some random people making [1] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/global-growth-and...

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

#149

Post by pbhjpbhj »

sireat wrote: post #125

I have a friend who lives on less than 20 pounds a week in London (while paying 1500 pounds a month on rent). How does he do it? * By using perishable sales at Tesco and other places. * By bartering for food I saw him pick up a bag of ripe but fine peaches for 10 pence and a 3-4pounds of chicken wings for 99 pence. Loaves of bread were 10-20 pence. This is not easy to do by any means because the competition is fierce…

We're out of the woods now it seems [no longer destitute] but the 8pm scrum at Tesco was always a bit fraught.

It seems like the supermarkets don't have as many deals as much now, I suspect they donate more to food banks (they can probably write it off at a higher value than they could sell it?).

Tesco in particular no longer have a "cheap" section, it remains on the shelves. I'd guess that's so that people will mistakenly buy expiring goods (netting them a higher sale price, and earlier repeat sale).

All elements of the squeeze on the poor and the widening poverty gap.

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

#150

Post by selimthegrim »

Symmetry wrote: post #124
legulere wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also much smaller. If you compare China to India it didn’t do that badly after all

I think that if I had to live through the second half of the 20th century in either place I'd take India's moderate socialism followed by a slight loosening over China's extremes. Even if China is in a better position right this moment, it lost a lot of people getting there.

You might want to tell the BJP voter base that
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