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Forums - Politics Discussion - World Poverty Rate Over Last Two Hundred Years

Aeolus451 on 29 May 2016
sc94597 said:
Aeolus451 said:

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. 

You explained my point for me. Using money as the qualifier for determining who is poor or improvershed is fluffing the results to make it look more like modern times are living richer lives when that's probably not the case.  A country who lives off the land could very well be better off as people compared to a country that has lots of money. Of course, It's situational. That data is skewed because how they're measuring poverty. It's a too convenient "truth". 



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sc94597 on 29 May 2016
Aeolus451 said:
sc94597 said:

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. 

You explained my point for me. Using money as the qualifier for determining who is poor or improvershed is fluffing the results to make it look more like modern times are living richer lives when that's probably not the case.  A country who lives off the land could very well be better off as people compared to a country that has lots of money. Of course, It's situational. That data is skewed because how they're measuring poverty. It's a too convenient "truth". 

Can your provide an example of societies that rely on subsinence farming having empirically healthier and happier populations? What are the life expectancies, famine rates, and disease rates of modern agrarian societies? It is obvious that the lives of substinence farmers are harder by these measures. If you want to argue that they live more fullfilling lives in other ways, do so, but the majority of people likely would not agree. Myself having family who are (modern) farmers I know how hard the lifestyle is, and I could only imagine what life would've been like when  two thirds of your children died upon birth and your whole family could die because of a bad winter or a disease in your crops. When there was no alternative to how you occupied your days besides working laborious work from dawn to dusk. When there was no leisure time at all. Sorry, that is not a 'rich' lifestyle for me or most people in the modern world. Nor probably was it for people in the industrialized xountries which provided better options. The only people who probably loved farming were plantation owners who had slaves do the hard work for them.



Chris Hu on 29 May 2016

Poverty might not be as bad as it used to be but the wage gap between the rich and the poor is a problem and its only getting worse.