Tuesday, January 21, 2014

More on extreme poverty

Here is an article from the Economist looking at the very real prospects for largely eliminating extreme poverty by 2030, which references many of the same new numbers and reports that I briefly discussed in a recent blog post.  It goes into some detail as to how this would/will play out demographically, namely that economic growth in countries like India will carry massive amounts of people over the $1.25/day extreme poverty threshold in the next few years, but after that the outliers that remain under $1.25/day in the world will become harder for the economy to bring out of poverty.  Another question I have that is not really addressed in the documents I've seen is how the new, extreme poverty-free world would look after 2030.  I mean, something like 10% of the US population is considered food insecure, which means that they go hungry some days during the year.  They may not manifest the same physical symptoms as someone who is chronically undernourished, but their life is still drastically affected by hunger.  This is also the case for countless people in places like Brazil or Colombia that earn well over $1.25 a day, but that are still very poor and deal with poverty's problems such as violence, unemployment, poor education, and hunger.  If that's the case for people well over the $1.25/day threshold in a generally prosperous country, how much nicer and better will the world really look even after eliminating the most egregious poverty?

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