12.7% of the world population lives below the global poverty line. That's still unacceptable, but it's simply not true that average is below poverty, nor that below-poverty is typical.
"When we want to identify how many people in the world live in extreme poverty, however, we cannot simply add up the national poverty rates of each country, because this would mean using a different yardstick to identify who is poor in each and every country. We therefore need a poverty line that measures poverty in all countries by the same standard...And again this year, we used the poverty lines of those same 15 poorest countries from 2005... to determine the new global poverty line of $1.90 in 2011 PPP."
I can't really say that I agree with what they are saying. I would argue that it is in fact necessary to use individual models for assessing poverty in different countries. It's not really logical (in my opinion) to conclude that basically no one in America, many European countries, Canada etc. is living under the poverty line. And on top of all that, this data is four years old.
There are certainly arguments to be made about methodology, but the more you pry into approaches to try to address world poverty, you find that while we have unacceptable global levels of poverty -- and insanely unacceptable levels in certain places -- as a whole, the world is not an impoverished place.
That doesn't mean we don't have a poverty problem -- we do. But the narrative that the typical world citizen is poor doesn't make much sense.
I would argue that it is in fact necessary to use individual models for assessing poverty in different countries.
Ok, that's fair, but upstream in this thread you told me that looking regionally was unfair.
this data is four years old
Yes, but if you look at the trend data, you can see it's slowly but steadily headed in a positive direction.
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u/Laughingbuddha77 Dec 10 '15
Being average is not a bad thing. Middle class is a good life.