>>Other problems are more subjective; many have criticized the $2.15-a-day threshold (at 2017 purchasing-power-adjusted prices)—designed to reflect who would be poorest in the most impoverished countries, like Mali or Afghanistan, and not in even slightly richer countries like Angola or Pakistan—for being far too low to provide for sustenance or normal human health outcomes, and thus to measure anything meaningful about real graduation from poverty.
This is mental gymnastics done to dispel evidence that goes against the cynical anti-capitalist ideology that is so in-vogue.
The poverty line in question does, contrary to this claim, "measure [some]thing meaningful about real graduation from poverty".
If the author contends that living at the $2.15-a-day threshold is an abysmal quality of life, then what does he imagine living at below that threshold to be like?
Does he imagine that it's all indistinguishable anguish at those levels, and therefore that living on $2.50 a day is no improvement over living on $1.25 a day? Nothing could be further from the truth. At extreme levels of poverty, a 50% or 100% increase daily purchasing power is often the difference between life and death.
This is mental gymnastics done to dispel evidence that goes against the cynical anti-capitalist ideology that is so in-vogue.
The poverty line in question does, contrary to this claim, "measure [some]thing meaningful about real graduation from poverty".
If the author contends that living at the $2.15-a-day threshold is an abysmal quality of life, then what does he imagine living at below that threshold to be like?
Does he imagine that it's all indistinguishable anguish at those levels, and therefore that living on $2.50 a day is no improvement over living on $1.25 a day? Nothing could be further from the truth. At extreme levels of poverty, a 50% or 100% increase daily purchasing power is often the difference between life and death.