>[...] Both are true at the same time: The world is much better than in the past and it is still awful.
>To bring this to mind I need to know both statistics: When someone says we can sit back and relax because the world is in a much better place, I point out that 11 children are still dying every minute. We cannot accept the world as it is today. And when I feel hopeless in the face of this tragedy, I remember that we reduced annual child deaths from 20 million to 5.6 million in the last fifty years.
Keeping this in mind at all times is a very important thing.
>Trump administration claims only 250,000 Americans live in extreme poverty, despite UN estimates of 18m
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-extreme...
"The UN’s numbers come from the official Census definition which has been kept for decades by the US government, defining extreme poverty as having an income lower than half the official poverty rate."
"Citing a recent survey of American households, Heritage found only 0.08 per cent of American households (or about to 250,000) are in “deep poverty,” defined by Heritage as living on less than $4 (£3) a day. This statistic does account for government social spending programmes which help the poor – like Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance – while the figure cited by the UN does not."
I guess if you're going to memorize facts, you should also memorize definitions.
WRT: Extreme Poverty, a few years back, we had a political party who tackled the problem of poverty by redefining the measuring stick of what constitutes poverty. POOF much celebration and self-handshaking when they announced that during their term, their efforts dropped the number of people living in poverty by a very significant amount.
This has left a bad taste in my mouth ever since to never trust claims from politicians.
So I wonder, in the case of this article, how many of those people no longer living at the adjusted poverty line and now only marginally above it and no longer included. They're still their, but buy grace of a single digit, are now considered much better off.
"Facts" and figures quoted by governments, or even by various organisations not only can be twisted seven ways till Sunday to present a nice or gloomy picture with statistics, but even the raw numbers themselves can also be very different than the truth on the ground.]
>So I wonder, in the case of this article, how many of those people no longer living at the adjusted poverty line and now only marginally above it and no longer included.
There are lots of subtleties there as well. A family with very little to no income, but living in a traditional e.g. African or Amazon community where income is not really required (even European rural communities lived perfectly well with making most of their own food and minimal actual "jobs" and money well into the 1950s), could be much better off than a family that now makes $2 a day, but has been driven out of their land and forced to live in piss poor conditions and work their bones off in some slum.
As the parent says, not being in 'extreme poverty' doesn't tell us much about one individual. They could have $2.50 per day; they could be Bill Gates (of course, it tells us a lot if someone is living on less than $1.90/day; that's a much smaller range). But the aggregate measure is meaningful: The number is decreasing and has been for decades - a miracle relative to world history - bringing hundreds of millions of people of out hopeless poverty; just look at India, China, and Latin America. Yes, some are still very poor, but we can use other measures to examine that such as median income (which also has changed dramatically).
Also, 'poverty' in wealthy countries and 'extreme poverty' used in this measure are entirely different things. If you're reading this, $1.90/day probably won't pay for your electricity or water usage for the day, much less food, shelter, health care, education, transportation, etc.
In other words, Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
It has been a while since I read it but I found it quite compelling. If i remember correctly, the measures are based on consumption of goods per day to try to avoid complications related to differing economic systems. Also while it is true that measures can be manipulated to tell the story you want, it does not appear that that has been done in a significant way here. Even if it had i doubt that, such an extreme 90% -> 10% drop could be shown even with the most crooked measuring stick if things had not been genuinely improving a lot. Incidentally, my brother used to be a full on marxist until he read this data and completely abandoned that belief system.
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...
This relates to fact 2 in the article.
I learnt about the overpopulation myth during my undergrad, but I'm continuously surprised by how many people (including Thanos) didn't know this.
Edit: Here's a chart of expected population growths. It's expected to start slowing down[1]
[1]: Select WORLD from the menu: https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/
Historical evidence supports that a decrease in mortality rates is followed by a decrease in birth rate. Here, check out the data for yourself[1]
The theory of population growth leading to resource depletion is fairly old. Thomas Malthus published this in 1798[2], but guess what: we're all still alive, despite growing over 7 billion in size, and the empirical evidence debunked this theory. There are a fairly large number of theories why this didn't happen, but that's off topic.
My point is:
- The shortage of resource because of over-population is an old theory, but we've seen no evidence to it yet.
- Population growth eventually slows down when the mortality rate decreases.
- The population growth rate is expected to begin slowing[3]
- Colorful animations help people understand a point, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/Demographic-Transition-Mi...
[2]:https://www.intelligenteconomist.com/malthusian-theory/
[3]:https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/
I disagree. Unless you can show me a first-principle calculation for why a specific number should be "too much", then I don't think it's reasonable to assume that we're either above or below such a number. Don't get me wrong: I agree that such a number must exist. But you seem certain that we're above it, which isn't based on anything as far as I can tell.
do you have earth scale measures for this? what is your threshold for drastic?
on most measures I can think of, earth is pretty much the same as it was 100k years ago. maybe you are suggesting humans have a drastic impact on other species on earth?
One of the facts is that 137,000 people/day have been escaping 'extreme poverty'. But what happens when the part of society that is living in economically stable and educated households is not even reproducing to the point of replacing itself, while those living in low education and low income households are massively reproducing?
The natural response here is that if we can just improve the situation of places such as Africa then this situation ought resolve itself with birth rates starting to become comparable thus preventing a condemnation of the next generation. There are two problems with this view. The first is that this relies exclusively on a correlation which to date has proved less than predictive of African fertility levels. More importantly this effect is not just international but also intranational. Those who earn the most in the US have the fewest children with households earning less than $10,000 having a 50% greater fertility rate than those earning $200,000+. [2] It seems we're creating a society where each new birth is more and more likely to come into this world in some of the least appropriate households.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_i...
[2a] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
[2b] - https://www.census.gov/topics/health/fertility.html (the link to statista presents this data in a cleaner format - also adding this as just a more reliable source)
It's also what Gates is kind of doing - redistributing his wealth to help the people who most need it.
Giving money to people is not really enough to solve problems. We can see this same problem in our education system for instance. US education has been slipping quite severely by most metrics, yet we spend much more per student than most of anywhere in the world excepting something like 3 nations (Luxembourg, Switzerland, Norway IIRC).
While obviously the wealth of wealthy households is undoubtedly useful for child rearing, I think more important is the education that these households instill in their children. I grew up very poor and in an urban area. And I know that, undoubtedly, what helped me more than anything else was the 'Big Brothers and Big Sisters' program. I think the lessons and learning from there set me up for success far more so than having some money splashed my parent's way would have.
[1] - https://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2016/01/why_do_...
His thesis, glibly summarized, was that population growth gives the rich a structural problem: given that reproduction is inherently exponential and the poor reproduce more than the rich, the only logical consequence is that poor people will overwhelm the rich.
- Make child rearing more financially feasible (big tax cuts for families)
- Foster reliance on family and local social networks, rather than reliance on the state
- Nudge younger generations to take responsibility for the future of their nation, rather that the nihilistic individualism that currently pervades our culture
- Etc
Migration is what happens. Followed by integration.
We can view this problem on any scale as it seems to be applicable everywhere. On a world scale the fundamental issue is that people who are of low education, low income, and high religiosity are increasingly the ones primarily repopulating our planet. This means that any given child is more and more likely to be born into this sort of circumstance. And many of these characteristics tend to pass from parent to child. It matters not what chunk of land they call home.
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/...
> Fact #1: Since 1960, child deaths have plummeted from 20 million a year to 6 million a year.
About half of this reduction (from 20 - 10 million) is because:
> Fact #2: Since 1960, the fertility rate has fallen by half.
Globally, the population of young people has decreased. Child mortality has decreased, too, but not by a factor of 3.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.0014.TO.ZS World Bank reports 0-14 years, rather than 0-5 used for infant mortality.
> Globally, the population of young people has decreased.
The proportion of the population which are young people has decreased but the total population of young people has increased significantly: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.0014.TO
Older people were also staying alive longer - the death rate no longer offset the birth rate to the same extent as before.
Thats why this is also front page HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17413622
Beyond such myopic reasoning I think there is a great deal of economic theory around the collective economic benefits of having a strong middle class. You could try to argue against this but I think its at least a popular mainstream theory.
Sounds good, right? I mean, you will absolutely see increased "competition and innovation" as you and your neighbors scramble to make sure you end up on the right side of that 70%!
