What if this is caused by inflation. Meaning that 1$ per day is not comparable between years.
African poverty is falling…much faster than you think
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Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think
#22It all depends on how low you set the poverty threshold. This morning I saw my old Economic History professor Stephen Broadberry get news coverage for a paper that suggests that on average people in several sub-Saharan African countries were not only poorer, but much poorer than the medieval English (less than half GDP per capita, using access to food as one of the main barometers).
Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think
#23When you're down, the only way is up.
I wish that was true, but it simply isn't. It's always possible to sink lower and it's the case way too often.
Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think
#24It all depends on how low you set the poverty threshold. This morning I saw my old Economic History professor Stephen Broadberry get news coverage for a paper that suggests that on average people in several sub-Saharan African countries were not only poorer, but much poorer than the medieval English (less than half GDP per capita, using access to food as one of the main barometers).
On the other hand, medieval England wasn't one of the worst places.
Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think
#25It all depends on how low you set the poverty threshold. This morning I saw my old Economic History professor Stephen Broadberry get news coverage for a paper that suggests that on average people in several sub-Saharan African countries were not only poorer, but much poorer than the medieval English (less than half GDP per capita, using access to food as one of the main barometers).
On the other hand, medieval England wasn't one of the worst places.
True, but it's an indication of how low a poverty threshold of a PPP-adjusted dollar a day is when its below the level of a mostly-peasant population that didn't have access to adequate sanitation, any form of energy other than wood-burned heat, or anything invented after the 1300s
Re: African poverty is falling…much faster than you think
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure that I agree here. I don't know about you, but my understanding of the variety of metrics they used in this article is quite minimal. Instead, it is instructive to just see the relative variation in the past five years or so compared to the 30 before that. For instance, I have no idea what the metrics in Figs 2 and 3 are exactly, but I can see that the inequality metric in Figure 2 has reduced itself to appr…
I agree with you, kermit_de_fro, but it could be better. If the intent is to show relative changes, then it should show percentages or have a hard baseline that indicates "zero change". I don't think "the bottom of the Y-axis isn't zero" is a guaranteed bad graph, especially considering some of the horrendous graphs out there. These ones are not that bad.
As a slight counterexample:
Suppose we want to show changes in temperature---unless you use the Kelvin scale, showing percentage changes is going to be bogus. Showing change relative to recent volatility seems useful.