Hmm, I must confess I didn't realise how far India tried to emulate the Soviet model, but taking the factors of the Indian society in mind, it's no wonder it all went very slow (looks like the USSR easily outpaced them). However their economy today is quite market oriented (it looks like they don't really know which way to go.

I can unfortunatly only point you to the website of our University press since the book isn't available online. It's also in Dutch :/

http://www.academiapress.be/sociologie-een-hedendaagse-inleiding-1458.html

This just in: A VGChartz user has posted a worthless graph on poverty following yesterday's breaking news story that Spurge won't be having sex until he's married. Stay tuned to find out what other dumbshit stories are coming up next on this season of VGChartz is Going Downhill Fast!

All the data is adjusted for inflation.

We're living in the best time in humanity, there are still problems, and a lot of them. But to say things were better before is a lie.

I feel mousy of those graphs don't also take into account that people in the US used to enjoy a higher  average pay (adjusted for inflation). That's kind of the whole problem with this minimum wage business. 

Wages have remained stagnant (only declined pre and post recession, otherwise over the long term 1950-2010 they've slightly increased) in the U.S because they've already reached the saturation point and there is more global competition (most of Europe was incapacitated post-war, and half of Europe was stuck with bad economic models (centrally planned Soviet economics.)) It is unreasonable to expect real wages to increase forever without the rest of the world catching up first. 

Nevertheless, global poverty has ever declined, and I don't know about you but I don't value American lives more or less than other people's lives. I am happy hundreds of millions in China are coming out of real poverty, and if that means Americans can't buy a third car because they don't have artificial market power in the manufacturing economy, so be it. 

Didn't people mainly farm, live off the land and trade goods with each other in the 1800s and not use currency? Would they be considered impoverished? I don't really trust that data.

Well, aren't you a bundle of joy.....

Seriously, if you don't like something, don't look or interact with it. 

Maybe in the early 1800's (note this starts at 1820), but at least in Britain and the U.S most people worked in industry midway into the century. I wouldn't really consider being a farmer luxury living either, even if food was on the table at the end of day (sometimes not if there was a drought or bad winter - you'd die.) It is also wrong to consider the economy at the time mostly a barter economy. There was still need for division of labor and the purchase of goods. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture_in_the_United_States#New_Nation:_1776.E2.80.931860

The U.S. economy was primarily agricultural in the early 19th century.Westward expansion plus the building of canals and the introduction of steamboats opened up new areas for agriculture. Most farming was designed to produce food for the family, and service small local market. In times of rapid economic growth, a farmer could still improve the land for far more than he paid for it, and then move further west to repeat the process.

In the South, the poor lands were held by poor white farmers, who generally owned no slaves. The best lands were held by rich plantation owners, were operated primarily with slave labor. They grew their own food, and concentrated on a few crops that could be exported to meet the growing demand in Europe, especially cotton, tobacco, and sugar. The main export crop was cotton. But after a few years, the fertility of the soil was depleted and the plantation was moved to the new land further west. Much land was cleared and put into growing cotton in the Mississippi valley and in Alabama, and new grain growing areas were brought into production in the Mid West. Eventually this put severe downward pressure on prices, particularly of cotton, first from 1820–23 and again from 1840-43. Sugar cane was being grown in Louisiana, where it was refined into granular sugar. Growing and refining sugar required a large amount of capital. Some of the nation's wealthiest men owned sugar plantations, which often had their own sugar mills.

In New England, subsistence agriculture gave way after 1810 to production to provide food supplies for the rapidly growing industrial towns and cities.

Those are the leading countries at the time that were industralizing. The source of that data/graph was trying to measure povertry levels for the world for the last 2 centuries based on currency. Depending on the time period and location, looking at currency would be wrong way to determine poverty levels. 

I really don't see it as an issue. Partial-subsidence farming is still poverty. Just because they didn't always starve if they lacked money because they were able to grow food and cultivate cattle does not mean they weren't poor. Living crop to crop, and dying when the weather conditions weren't just right is poverty, probably the worst kind besides hunter-gathering lifestyle. Since that is the only exception to the money rule, we really don't have to speculate about whether or not there were (relatively) middle class or wealthy people not using money. There are no/were never intricate and extensive economic systems that had large-scale production which didn't also have extensive economic activity which involved currencies. Hell, even centrally-planned socialist countries had currencies.