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.
The one we're talking about today is "extreme poverty", which is the $2.15 purchasing-power-adjusted line. It's fantastic news that most Indians have surpassed this line, but it's also helpful to think of this line as just one rung in a ladder out of poverty. Life just above this line is still not great.
This chart, which shows how much of the population lives in different poverty lines for India, gives you a sense for the population as a whole. You can compare it to other countries to see their distribution, and China is probably a good comparison to make.
Despite progress on extreme poverty, you're right that there are still some 3 billion people in the world who cannot afford a nutritious diet, and likewise 3 billion people who live in energy poverty, meaning they have to cook indoors with solid fuels (wood, coal, dung) that damage their health and shorten their lives. It's important that we make progress on all these things in the coming decades. We absolutely have the power to.
The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better!
Some of these graphs are highly inaccurate due to how the government skews employment data. For example, the government counts jobless people as "employed" if they return to their villages from cities due to lack of employment and occasionally help on family farms.
Agricultural employment has actually increased post covid [1][2]:
2018-2019: 42.5%
2022-2023: 45.8%
This isn't because the number of farms is growing, but because more people are working on the same farms due to lack of jobs elsewhere. This casts doubt on the overall poverty reduction narrative.
As someone of Indian descent, realistically speaking, Indian nutrition is going to be bad so long as the upper classes continue to moralize over it. Recently, there was a kerfuffle in Maharasthra because the state government wanted to remove eggs from the state lunch program and go lacto-vegan only. This is due to some people considering eggs unclean (like many other animal products). This sort of moralizing is extremely common in India, despite being a poor country. To put it bluntly, moralizing over diet is a past-time of the wealthy, not a way to run a country.
Interesting. There's seems to be some fuckery with Indian hunger data, i.e. malnourishment, stuntness have stalled at a relatively high level 10 years ago and even occasionally gets worse. Which kind of makes sense if one realizes India added 400 million mouths in last 20 years, and distribution is an issue. I remember also news a few years ago Indian average height decreasing, all proxy indicators that hunger/nutrition was not improving (granted this was during covid). But cultural drama over diet also explains a lot of it. Cultural drama seems to explain a lot in India... one other stark stat is Indian female work participation rate declined as country got wealthier... culture seems to be women stop working out of neccessity if men can sustain household. It's a... different development trajectory.
I honestly think most Indians eat too many calories, not too little. It's just trash nutritionally speaking, and deficient in protein, which is a large determinant of height. It's cultural
> It's a... different development trajectory.
My two cents: the rest of the world is highly westernized. If you consider Islam a western religion (which you should, since it's a derivative of Judaism, and is a cousin to Christianity), then basically all of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa was westernized with the Islamic conquests. Sub Saharan Africa has adopted western norms wholesale after colonization (no written language, so very hard to keep old customs). Later, China adopted communism (a western ideology), which made its way into parts of Korea and Southeast Asia, and Japan / Philippines were colonized by force. India actually stands out as never having undergone much of a western colonization. Obviously, the entirety of the Americas are the result of Spanish/British/etc colonization.
India stands out as the only country to have never been properly colonized, with a long written record. A lot of economic theories we have are really not universal truths, but things that only hold true in the global monoculture. That's why India's development trajectory is so different, and why states like Kerala basically defy all expectations (even if it's 'communist', it's 'communist' in a non-'communist' federal framework).
Again... my highly controversial opinion. I don't really pay a whole lot of attention, but this is my take.
Interesting! I agree that India’s colonial history is unique in that it wasn’t settled by Europeans like North America.
But Judaism isn’t a western religion, it’s a Middle Eastern religion with strong ethnic ties. Hence it hasn’t evolved and branched like all the major religions have. Christianity isn’t western religion either, but modern Protestantism and Roman Catholicism arguably are. Eastern Orthodox is actually a great example of the diversity of all major religions— they have national churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).
Islam is multi ethnic of course and so there are branches that are western (Albania is an example) but calling Islam as a whole “western” is mostly incorrect.
Then let's just break it down between Jewish descended (Abrahamic) and not
China adopted communism which is ultimately a philosophy whose patrimony is European and all that entails.
> Eastern Orthodox is actually a great example of the diversity of all major religions— they have national churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).
I mean... Sure and they still have common beliefs descended from Judaism and Christianity?
I think we agree but let me just as some nuance to what you’re saying.
The Jews didn’t invent their beliefs out of whole cloth—this is true whether it’s Judaism or communism (Karl Marx, Lenin, and most Russian communists were Jewish though I think you know that already). They borrowed monotheism and a bunch of their religion from local religions at the time. Jewish communists learned a great deal from the French Revolution. They put a Jewish stamp on these beliefs so to speak, then handed off some of those beliefs to other people who, like the Jews before them, discarded what didn’t make sense to them and kept what did. China is barely communist now, by Russian standards, it’s more fascist to be honest.
Another good example is how in modern Protestantism they talk a lot of about “the biblical definition of marriage,” when what they really mean is one man and one woman—more of a northwest European definition. The biblical definition of marriage is one man and one or more wives. But you can’t get a modern Protestant to accept what the Bible says because everyone reads their own beliefs into these religions.
There is no discernible ultimate source to any religion—it’s more like a chain of beliefs, where people take their existing beliefs and project them onto their religion.
Having said that, Hinduism is is a chain of beliefs that has stayed within the same ethnic group for a very long time, which maybe is what you’re saying? And that is indeed something rare and very precious.
While I agree morale is something for the riches (slavery ban, woman right… happens more where there’s many wealthy than when they are the exceptions), a diet-especially in a poor country- may also consider the efficiency (which some wealthy don’t give a sh*t because « they pay so they can »).
INMH the interesting questions is « what are the proteins options, considering the ressources of Indians/India? If your poultry is fed with soy you’ll have many times more proteins and other nutrients eating directly the beans instead of transforming them the eggs. However if your poultry find their food by themselves on a field, you have free eggs without input waste.
Eggs are an outstanding source of protein, culturally well-known, easy to transport, cook, etc.
I think your theoretical argument is - "what if instead of eggs we could feed hungry people with all the soy used to feed those chicken to produce those eggs?" You and I both know that's not going to happen.
Cheap meat sources are either banned by law (beef in some areas) or quite thoroughly socially banned due to the two major religions being Hinduism and Islam ie beef and pork. Hinduism technically does not forbid beef but the current strain of Ram-ization does vehemently so.
> INMH the interesting questions is « what are the proteins options, considering the ressources of Indians/India? If your poultry is fed with soy you’ll have many times more proteins and other nutrients eating directly the beans instead of transforming them the eggs. However if your poultry find their food by themselves on a field, you have free eggs without input waste.
Just completely and utterly false, and reflects the poor understanding of diet and nutrition that is pervasive throughout India and in Indian culture. There's a reason why Indians have the highest rates of metabolic syndrome. I've basically shirked all of it, and my blood numbers, weight, etc are substantially better than my parents and my brother.
Firstly, chickens eat more than soy, and chickens (and animals in general) can turn undigestible, useless biomatter into actual food (such as ruminants digesting grass, and then humans drinking milk or eating the flesh). Using animals, you are able to use much less bio-matter to get an equivalent amount of calories and nutrition, simply because humans are terrible at digesting.
That being said, on to eggs. Eggs are an excellent source for protein and orders of magnitude better than soy when looking at both the amino acid profile as well as the protein / calories.
One hard-boiled egg contains about 70 calories and 6 g protein.
Meanwhile, you'd need 50g boiled soybeans to get 6g protein. However, Soy is less bio-available (about 90%), so you'd actually need to eat about 6.6 g protein or 60 g soybean, containing about 70 calories. So far so good, right?
Wrong. Because soy beans are low in essential amino acids like methionine. For an average adult you need about 1.3g methionine / day. This is 3 eggs or 210 calories.
Meanwhile, you need about 480 g of soybean to meet your methionine requirement, which is 830 calories.
If you analyze the Indian diet, you'll realize it's replete with these sorts of insane substitutions, where a perfectly good source of nutrition, whose protein profile matches exactly the human requirement, is substituted for a sub-par product. Obviously, since these are requirements, you'll see Indians compensate by simply eating more to make up for the deficiency. But eating these vegetarian sources of protein in the right amount to get to the required intake leads to insanely high calorie numbers, which is why diabetes, stomach fat, heart problems, etc are so prevalent in India. And it's also why Indians in India are shorter than the Indians in the diaspora despite Indians in India actually eating more calories (hence the weight).
And that's just calories and basic metabolism, we're not even talking body composition, which again suffers within India simply because the best sources of protein are eschewed due to moralizing. There's a reason why Indians, despite constituting 25% of the planet, do not constitute a large portion of world-class athletes and have low average rates of grip strength. It's an insanely self-inflicted pathology.
These metrics are there to measure progress, and the progress is real and happening. My dad was born in 1951 in a village in neighboring Bangladesh. When he was a kid, over 30% of kids died before age 5: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1072376/child-mortality-.... This was an improvement compared to 50 years before that, when the under-5 mortality rate was about half (which was about the same as in pre-industrial Europe). Today, the under 5 mortality rate is only 3%. Still higher than the sub-1% of the U.S., but similar to what it was in the U.S. in 1951 at the same time my dad was born.
There has been tremendous progress in terms of available calories, malnutrition and deaths to starvation globally [0]. I'd say opaque indices and relative measures are now gaining adoption by certain parties to help conceal that fact. Of course anyone suffering hunger is tragic, but things have decidedly improved (although sadly it has plateaued in Africa since 2010).
I can't really comment on the situation in India specifically, but just for some global context around stunted development, look at a chart of men's height [1]. Not having half your population stunted by malnutrition is a recent phenomenon.
Your first link says that it measures calories available and not calories consumed. It links to an undernourishment metric instead the world average for it has remained about the same for about a decade. I am not expert and I am probably cherry picking the page that matches my bias but I disagree that the progress has been tremendous.
> but I disagree that the progress has been tremendous.
There really is no argument that it hasn't. If we take a year between 1950 and 1970 as a baseline, there was a significant reduction in chronic malnutrition and the number and severity of famines -- both in absolute numbers as well as per capita.
> it has remained about the same for about a decade
If your time horizon is the last 10 years then the picture is more mixed, yea.
That's correct but my point is what kind of poverty is the poverty line measuring if it does not take into account how much people are getting to eat. This access to PPP adjusted dollar amount is clearly not a good heuristic for it because somehow extreme poverty has been alleviated while having a hunger index worse than North Korea.
I don't know how World Hunger Index get their DPRK figures but that is not important. There are about 110 countries with better hunger indices than India. A country that tells its citizens that we are going to be a superpower by 20xx should not be doing that at meeting basic needs.
> Last year I read an article saying like 30% of children in India are stunted.
We were solidly middle class in india that never went hungry. All our kids in USA now are atleast 3-4 inches taller than us. They are often taller than their parents in their mid teens.
The Lancet suggests that the difference between very poor nutrition and great nutrition adds up to roughly 8 inches (20cm) of adult height. Height remains very genetically heritable, aside from that.
You never went hungry, but did you have a reliable supply of all the micronutrients, and an abundance of protein? At all periods from birth to the end of your teens when growth plates ossified?
>>We were solidly middle class in india that never went hungry.
Not being hungry is not the same as getting good nutrition. Middle class in India doesn't eat enough meat, fish, eggs, fruits, and vegetables.
Middle class meal in South India is mostly rice. With some fried potato side. In the North its Chapathi(Flat bread-Wheat), with friend potato sides and lentil(Dal).
Only thing that Middle class likely gets a good deal of is milk(through Chai).
Plus meat is taboo subject in India. A kind of sugar loaded vegetarianism is what most middle class in India gets to eat.
My parents were both upper class in Bangladesh (so a rich diet in fish, meat, etc.) and I'm 3" taller than my dad (moved to US at 5) and my brother is 5" taller (born in US).
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 prices for a sack of potatoes across different developing countries and therefore this index is at least that much inaccurate, but poverty problems and income gaps are a lot worse than that anyway, so there are ways this could make sense within reason.
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.
Nah it's not a WW2 thing. Not sure about Western Europe but in Central/Eastern Europe, especially in rural areas, people still have chambers and basements full of jam, compote and basically anything else which can be preserved. Not one or two jars but enough to last several years, that kind of stuff.
Valuing self-sufficiency over dollar efficiency or even time efficiency is not dead.
I have dozens of jars of homemade preserves in my basement right now. I had no part in it, it was all my spouse’s doing. And we’re in a US urban area. But we’re affluent urban tech types with hippie tendencies.
Also: anything relating to home cooking, exercise, self-care, relationships and caring for children and other relatives. Only "paid professional" services are counted which are often much worse quality than the organic untaxed real thing.
> The revised GDP will include some money from illegal activities, such as money from cigarette and drinks smuggling, prostitution and money laundering.
(Greeks were highly motivate to have higher value by any means necessary as discussed in article, this is a quite extreme case)
Interesting. So you would say, if someone has a talent for cooking, specializes himself, becomes a professional, paid by people who enjoy the food, you would be at least sceptical, when it comes to quality?
I see paint jobs by people done by themselves. And compare it with paid professional servers. The pendulum always swings to professional. :)
If that person makes a home-cooked meal for their family, no doubt adding value to the world, the value added is not counted towards GDP. Only the "money (or something else taxable) changing hands" transactions are counted.
"So you would say, if someone has a talent for cooking, specializes himself, becomes a professional," - do you typically know all that about the people who staff the restaurants you visit? And do you think it is the case?
I can say that I would rather visit my friends and have a homecooked meal over a restaurant visit any day of the week. There is an intangible value to the combination of food and personal relationships.
For babysitting it's obviously better for the children to be with their family instead of "cared for" by the first stranger that accepts the lowest wage.
> My aunt did the taste test, and according to that at least, they were still very much edible and yummy actually.
Sugar is a preservative just like salt, and fruit jams were developed specifically as a way to preserve more of a fruit harvest.
Honey is an example of a sugary product that is extremely stable. There's honey that has been recovered from Egyptian tombs and is still considered edible.
>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.
Poverty levels are measured with PPP dollars, so that's already factored in.
That's only an issue if you use nationwide metrics to make local comparisons (eg. are new yorkers richer than people in Kolkata?), but if you're comparing the entire country it's fine.
If you want to reduce poverty it's handy to have some metrics. Obviously it's a simplification of reality but you can't really track all 8bn people individually to see how they are doing.
The point is to get a sense of progress or not. It only creates a sense of progress if there actually is some.
The alternative is the silly measures of "poverty" we use in the first world which are mathematically unachieveable by design so they can always be used to justify measures politicians want to pass: "won't you think of the child poverty you heartless monster" etc.
I found this article interesting. Personally I think starvation is a very low bar to clear.
What matters to the first world is whether or not India has a middle class that is able to buy stuff.
> The alternative is the silly measures of "poverty" we use in the first world which are mathematically unachievable by design so they can always be used to justify measures politicians want to pass: "won't you think of the child poverty you heartless monster" etc.
No, I disagree. The alternative, as the original comment said, is to measure access to calories, nutrition, or other metrics like prevalence of starvation, access to shelter, access to sanitation, prevalence of certain health issues, etc.
Measuring poverty via the international poverty line has often been criticized [1][2][3].
This shows you don’t know what extreme poverty is and how horrible it is.
What-about-ism is an elitist way to pretend to care yet do nothing.
Imagine it was your country and your project which eliminated extreme poverty. No doubt you would be bending over backwards to listen to someone who “read an article” on the other side of the world
The criticisms against charity and progress seem to be politically motivated. Human suffering can be used as a commodity to influence elections or promote specific ideologies. If you start measuring the suffering and show progress, you take away their commodity and thus become a threat. I.e. "how dare you say you're improving? There's still plenty of suffering going on". This position is a shift from continuous scale to simple binary thinking. At which point, anyone without new clothes and an air conditioned SUV is "poor".
The usual claim is that the people who are involved do have power to effect policies (mostly by deciding what to throw money at I think), and that that's where they meet to bounce ideas off eachother and generally get all on the same page.
It's the "it's a big club, and you ain't in it" thing.
