The poverty rate of $2 a day isn't about living off $2 converted to the local currency, if is about living off the local currency with a value of what $2 is worth in USA. You can compare it to live off what half a cup of coffee costs at Starbucks.
Not true. The article is not about living with the equivalent of $2 in USA, but a few African countries and values converted in dollars.
A few years ago some colleagues of mine spent a month in rural, mainland China, trying to see how people live with a few dollars a day. While those people were poor, the numbers are very misleading when you convert in dollars.
No, you’re wrong. It’s not about converting what they earn to dollars using direct exchange rate, it’s about converting it to dollar’s purchasing power.
It's hard to convert PP directly because it's different for different goods - the measurements usually use a basket of multiple goods and services. It's possible that e.g. eggs in India are relatively expensive, while lentils are cheaper, but if we calculated PP using the two items then it would be somewhere in the middle: a PP-adjusted $2 portion of lentils would still be bigger in India than we would expect from looking at overall PP.
This may or may not be what the GP was trying to say.
