
African poverty is falling…much faster than you think  - cwan
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5890
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plesn
This gives some hope, especially the Gini graph. I'll wait for more
information to have a more definitive opinion though as autonomy is not always
well captured in those quantitative data.

For example if more people live in big cities, is this growth enough ? (1$ can
mean something different : in New York $400 certainly makes you poor…). Is
this growth compensating former hidden markets, like self food producing and
local non monetary exchanges ? (you can sell cotton and have more money, while
still having it harder to buy food). Do their subsistance depend more or less
on external factors like speculation ? Are there less wars/civil wars ?

~~~
redwood
Right: how do they calculate the <$1/day rate. Its nearly inverse relationship
with the GDP per capita graph implies that deep down in the data the basis for
this $1/day rate could essentially be the GDP rate divided by population, or
similar. I.e. without seeing where that data comes from this is a real
possibility. However I would assume these folks are doing a rigorous analysis
so this is probably unlikely.

~~~
Kliment
Since they point out this inverse relationship as remarkable, I don't suppose
there is an expected relationship of this sort between the two. Certainly
there would be a negative correlation, but I don't believe they are coming
from the same data.

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wheels
Uhm, they define poverty as living on less than one dollar per day. Then they
show it dropping over the last 20 years ... but don't control for inflation.
They show 10% improvement against a benchmark that (aside from being
meaningless as a way of measuring abject poverty) lost more than 50% of its
value and label it progress. This to me suggests basic innumeracy. It's
entirely unclear from the data presented whether real poverty has been reduced
at all.

~~~
jacobolus
These statistics are normalized across countries and over time by purchasing
power parity. I don’t know what the precise calculation is, but it is
relatively sophisticated. I’m sure if you search around you could find the
details. They are just reported in simpler terms to make the comparison easily
comprehensible to the non-technical. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold> and also
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geary-Khamis_dollar>

(In other words, there are at least a few statisticians working for the UN and
the World Bank, and they tend not to be “basically innumerate”.)

~~~
wheels
Here's the actual paper, which does name its units (international poverty
line):

<http://www.salaimartin.com/media/pdf/Africa_Poverty_NBER.pdf>

And criticism of their results from someone working on producing similar
numbers for the World Bank:

[http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/is-african-poverty-
fall...](http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/is-african-poverty-falling)

I must say that it irks me that they would use such a easy-to-understand-and-
wrong ($1/day, when they mean "below the international poverty line") unit in
writing without specifically qualifying it.

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notahacker
It 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).

~~~
eru
On the other hand, medieval England wasn't one of the worst places.

~~~
notahacker
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

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burgerbrain
So does this mean religious charities will finally stop trying to guilt trip
me with starving children when I'm trying to have a few drinks while watching
television?

I didn't think so.

~~~
sliverstorm
Only because you can be sure of two things:

1) People who use guilt trips as a technique will always find new fodder with
which to guilt trip you. They will never say "Oh, ok, that's been resolved so
we're done now"

2) (Sadly,) There will always be a child starving somewhere

~~~
electromagnetic
I'm a strong supporter of help where you live. There are enough homeless and
starving people within 50km of you that your money is guaranteed to get to and
help, rather than send it half way around the world and hope your aid actually
goes to someone in need rather than fall into the hands of a corrupt regime.

I'd prefer to give money to something like Child's Play for Toronto Sick Kids
than give it to somewhere in Africa and I know many people will disagree with
me for it, but IMO it sucks greater being the 1 in 100 kid that is gravely ill
rather than the 1 in 2 kid that is starving. Throwing money at a norm isn't
going to resolve it, but throwing money at the abnormal can indeed resolve it.

However, if you're an orangutan I'll donate to help you wherever you are - I
like them much better than people.

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Bertrood
You have to love it when authors take scaling out of context in graphs. The
vertical axis should most likely always start at zero.

~~~
kermit_de_fro
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
approximately 1970 levels and that, since 1995, the welfare metric in Figure 3
has increased by (very roughly) twice the standard deviation of the past 30
years' measurements.

Of course scale is important, but it is folly to trot out the same argument
every time a graph does not include the origin. Without knowing something
about the y-axis variable we cannot make this type of claim.

~~~
thwarted
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.

~~~
eru
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.

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bartwe
What if this is caused by inflation. Meaning that 1$ per day is not comparable
between years.

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known
Hail Internet/Globalization.

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rorrr
When you're down, the only way is up.

~~~
DrJokepu
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.

