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The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

nytimes.com

31–40 of 218 posts

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#31
post #9

Is there any inflationary effect to the $1.25/day figure that has been used since the 1980s? It's not clear from the article whether it's adjusted for inflation.

I'm a bit confused about that as well. What's worse is that the background papers that the world bank website references seem to all 404: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/...

Better luck here: https://wdronline.worldbank.com/handle/10986/6781

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#32
post #9

Is there any inflationary effect to the $1.25/day figure that has been used since the 1980s? It's not clear from the article whether it's adjusted for inflation.

The threshold is inflation-adjusted: http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/index.htm?0,6

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#34
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American progressives can be just as guilty, if less organized. They tend to view big business with suspicion and incorrectly think that the American government is hopelessly corrupt and in the pocket of "Big Business and/or Wall Street".

When money buys political speech, I don't think you can call the other side "just as guilty".

Which side has the actual ability to forcefully implement their desired policies over a large population?

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#35
"We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off."

It always fascinates me how much my world view and the world view of those around me is based on the exceptional and not the mundane. The news outlets report the news assuming that the audience knows what's normal. When the news is used to become informed about the world many people come away with a skewed impression of reality. I am of the opinion that people would be better served by news reports that provide context to explain why the news is in fact news.

Here's some context I find interesting:

According to the CDC:

Americans murdered per year: 16,121

Americans killed in car accidents per year: 33,804

Americans killed by smoking related diseases per year: 480,000

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_...

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#36

This journalistic impulse to sell the world as worse than it is will not end because a single journalist caught a quick (and likely fleeting) guilty conscience. It will continue until the profession recognizes that their addiction to narrative harms the entire population.

No, it will continue until it stops generating revenue. It is our appetite for this sort of journalism that feeds it; if all the journalists in the world suddenly stopped writing fear-baiting stories, then someone else would start writing those stories to fill the void.

The journalists aren't the ones with the addiction; it is their readers that have the addiction.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#37
post #29

Another big secret, is that the source of a lot of poverty being lifted is because of China. That's right, that terribly communist government suppressing its people and free speech, is actually responsible for lifting 500 million people out of poverty over the last 30 years. That is definitely a big secret of american media, and something that it neglects to report on, in favor of free speech violations, naval exerci…

Perhaps American sentiment is based on China's hundreds of years of bad policy relegating those same millions of people to extreme poverty? [edit: it might be more fair to say decades here, if you believe we can only attribute "policy" to the Communist Party]

I think you're right in your edit, the Community Party has only been in power for decades. Prior to that, China was in turmoil due to colonization and imperialism by the U.S., France, Britain, and other European states, as well as Japan.

I believe it's more accurate to say that the American sentiment is derived from China being a rising world power ideologically backed by Communism, and an actual threat to America's dominance (by some methods, China's GDP has exceeded the U.S. already). As a Chinese American (I've lived in the U.S. all my life), it concerns me that American media shows such an insanely biased and untruthful view of China. Growing anti-Chinese sentiment is not a good thing for me, or my future children.

I actually find it ironic that we Americans believe that the Chinese population believes in false state communist propaganda, but in reality, we suffer from it ourselves, just from free corporate backed media instead.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#38
post #9

Is there any inflationary effect to the $1.25/day figure that has been used since the 1980s? It's not clear from the article whether it's adjusted for inflation.

"PPP" refers to Purchasing Power Parity. The default option is the PPP rates for consumption in 2005 estimated by the World Bank’s Development Data Group.

So yes, it does account for inflation, assuming equal inflation across whatever basket of goods was chosen as the reference point for PPP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#39
post #8
post #4

It's really weird to me how commonplace the attitude of "It is what it is" and "Government can't do anything". The air and water quality in the US is vastly better since the passage of laws that created and empowered the EPA (Created by the Republican President Nixon). The endangered species act has had many similar successes. I live on Maui. The waters are now filled with Green Sea Turtles and Humpback whales that w…

What are you referencing in regards to poverty? I would have guessed that the recent reduction in poverty is largely attributable to wealthy nations reducing efforts to centrally plan the economies of poor nations.

> reducing efforts to centrally plan the economies

"Reducing" is technically correct, even in China. But China still has a command economy in housing, infrastructure, telecommunication, transportation, etc., and is still run by a big 'C' Communist Party. That's where the uplift happened, and it needs to be explained in terms of local conditions.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#40
post #9

Is there any inflationary effect to the $1.25/day figure that has been used since the 1980s? It's not clear from the article whether it's adjusted for inflation.

I came here to ask the same thing. Taking in consideration they use the US$1.25/day measurement since 1981 [1], today this value should be US$3.28/day [2] (based on US inflation between 1981 and 2015). Given that, I'd love to know the real value. Maybe it is still a positive perspective, but I think it'd be more realistic (or, at least, accurate). :-) [1] http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/index.htm?1 [2] http:…

It's already inflation-adjusted.
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