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Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

economist.com

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Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#81

Post by thatloststudent »

profsummergig wrote: post #55
navigate8310 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that's ingrained in the culture to live besides the filth and romanticize poverty.

There was a recent scandal involving someone spitting paan/chewing tobacco on the floor inside one of the state assemblies. A video I watched of a brand spanking new metro station in Mumbai. Marble floors and all. And a commenter pointed out a timestamp where you can see paan/chewing tobacco spit in a corner of the floor. Here's what baffles me. It is well established that Indians chew paan/chewing tobacco. It is wel…

"The Ugly Indian" [1] (a ragtag group of anonymous citizens) usually does that in India. In reality, though, these kinds of issues are only really seen as a minor inconvenience at most. Anecdotally, most middle-class people in here frown upon chewing tobacco, so I assume the government thinks that as long as they keep it relatively clean, nobody would think of dirtying it with their paan stains.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf1VA5jqmRo

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#82

Post by Y_Y »

triknomeister wrote: post #73
ta20240528 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes it harder (impossible even) to take precise measurements deep into the decimal places if you have massive contours in the very thing (wealth) you are trying to measure with just one scalar number. Diversity is not meant in the modern political interpretation. As an less triggering exercise: try record in a single number the temperature - and change - of a large geographically diverse place like Australia - w…

Really? That's pretty horrible understanding of stats you have there. By your logic, it makes no sense to say that the fertility rate is 1.81 and has changed by 0.8 to now be 1.73 because a woman can either give birth to 1 or 2 kids. We do measure Earth's average temperature for what it's worth and while different metrics might give different results, the absolute value is not really useful. What is useful is the cha…

The median is not the message!

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#83

Post by thatloststudent »

lupusreal wrote: post #63
clarionbell wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is much harder to report on problems in China than in India for one.

There's no shortage of industrial and traffic accident videos coming out of China, very often showcasing horrendous working conditions and absolutely depraved levels of apathy from onlookers, which is to say that China isn't very good at suppressing videos that make them look bad. But in all of these videos, China looks 1000x more clean than India. Am I to believe that the Chinese government cares more about suppress…

Is it that hard to find? This[1] took me one search on YouTube. I agree that India is filthy, but it's not hard to find such videos for China either.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hEJKOD1ux14

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#84

Post by Neonlicht »

jajko wrote: post #52
profsummergig wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent Delhi election, I was watching videos of some of the slums. There were literal hills of rotting organic garbage inside the slums. With children living next to them. I had visions of Paul Ehrlich freaking out at the sight of people defecating and bathing on the roadside in Delhi. I saw photos of some of the "mohalla clinics" (free basic healthcare clinics) that the previous Delhi government had (admittedly…

Watched videos, seeing photos... you should travel a bit more IMHO. Not everything is quickly solvable by 'billion dollar startup' mentality. Understand their culture and history a bit, where they are coming from and where they as society go, realistic limits and so on.

Culture can be changed. That's the power of Western countries- constant change. Nothing is ever set in stone.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#85

Post by [deleted] »

andsoitis wrote: post #10

Counter balance: “According to the 2023 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 111th out of 125 countries, with a score of 28.7, indicating a “serious” level of hunger. Although this is a slight improvement from its 2015 score of 29.2, the progress has been slow compared to countries with similar economic growth rates. India also has the highest child wasting rate in the world at 18.7%. And 35.5% of children under five are…

[deleted]

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#86

Post by bigbacaloa »

Neonlicht wrote: post #84
jajko wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watched videos, seeing photos... you should travel a bit more IMHO. Not everything is quickly solvable by 'billion dollar startup' mentality. Understand their culture and history a bit, where they are coming from and where they as society go, realistic limits and so on.

Culture can be changed. That's the power of Western countries- constant change. Nothing is ever set in stone.

[dead]

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#87

Post by kamaal »

profsummergig wrote: post #36

India really needs to work on consciousness-raising regarding sanitation/cleanliness. Modi made a start in 2014. I don't know why the momentum stopped. Some of the videos coming out of there (e.g. the recent video of the railway employee throwing a huge amount of used disposable plastic food trays off a moving train) are shocking.

>>I don't know why the momentum stopped.

There was no momentum. People never started, it was more of a marketing campaign.

Almost everyday I see people throw garbage around street corners, if you ask them not to, they gang up and go after you like its their birth right to be dirty and you are being evil by keeping clean.

You need to tear down the whole shebang and rebuild it from scratch, much of this also about income levels of the ordinary Indian, and being so poor, keeping clean isn't any where in the list of priorities.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#88

Post by kamaal »

ViktorRay wrote: post #53

China and India had similar levels of poverty 50 years ago. How come China today is so different from India today? In terms of cleanliness and poverty elimination specifically. I know China liberalized in the 80’s and India in the 90’s. So you could say that’s a 10 year difference. But China 10 years ago was still very different from India even today. Does anyone have any ideas?

>>I know China liberalized in the 80’s and India in the 90’s. So you could say that’s a 10 year difference.

India never really liberalized. It was more like one trick pony with affluence and progress centered around IT industry.

You can drive 30 kms from Bangalore in any direction and apart from mobile phones and two wheelers, nothing much has changed since 50+ years.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#89

Post by kentrado »

energy123 wrote: post #68
dartharva wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industrialization, obviously. China made more money, and faster. All such questions are easily answered once you take a look at the per-capita budget each country has for the required expenditures.

Why didn't India industrialize like China did?

China has central planning.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#90

Post by juujian »

numpad0 wrote: post #75
ksynwa wrote: post #5

I don't understand the significant of metrics like the international poverty line. Seems like the only point of its existence is to create a sense of progress or maybe exaggerate it. They never account for basic stuff like how many calories people get to eat, let alone the quality of nutrition. Last year I read an article saying like 30% of children in India are stunted.

This sounds like bit of column one and column two. On one hand, poverty by income in USD must assume that the world's economy had globalized enough, such that, there can be no such locations on Earth as where $0.01 pays Michelin star lunch for dozen healthy adults. That's going to completely break premises of this metric. On the other hand, it's probably useful enough for now. Maybe there are 100x differences between…

I always had to think of my grandparents when discussing GDP. Aside from being very much part of the regular economy, they were also quite self sufficient. When my grandmother died, we found rows and rows of bottled jam. Some decades old according to the labels. My aunt did the taste test, and according to that at least, they were still very much edible and yummy actually. To the GDP that whole side of life is invisible. But it makes a big different in terms of resiliency when disaster hits. I'm assuming it was a reaction to WW2 or maybe it just is what people always did. I'm guessing that a lot of people in India are quite self sufficient (although I wouldn't know) so the financialization of every day life and resulting gdp growth is indeed a flawed indicator.
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