Hans Rosling illustrates the change in the percentage, but not the number, of people living in extreme poverty:
Found at GapMinder.
Comments
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Duran
This is fantastic! The poverty rate has dropped by 50% over the last 40 years.
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Dangger
This must be adjusted to inflationary rates among those years, because 1 dollar now is not the same as 1 dollar back then, right?
Also, geographically speaking, what countries are eradicating more poverty and what countries are actually producing more poverty.
From what I can see the redistribution of wealth isn’t that great because the vast majority will be living with 1 to 10 dollars a day.
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Annoyed
I am thinking because they adjusted for purchasing power, they probably also adjusted for inflation.
That is a really good point. Absolute poverty was used rather than relative poverty. So although the poverty rate dropped, the majority of the population were still hovering along that line. It’s not like one’s standard of living is going to change that much going from $.99 per day and $1.05 per day.
They also set that poverty line incredibly low. A person living on ten dollars a day couldn’t even pay for housing in most places in the developed world.
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dutchie
@Dangger: If you want the raw numbers check out http://www.gapminder.org/ “Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view.” You can interact with the statistical data in many different ways. If you’re unfamiliar with that site or with Hans Rosling you might want to check out his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
The dollar rate is of no importance if you when you define poverty as spending almost all of your resources on getting food, precisely what the line in his graph means. Also he points out at 00:35 that the dollars have “been adjusted for purchasing power, therefor we can compare incomes across all countries of the world”
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branigan.wddp
This video is pretty bad.
First, the x-axis is in logarithmic scale, so the improvement looks a lot bigger than it really is. Secondly, it measures income and not consumption. Most of the increase probably comes from China’s shift to a cash economy, even though people’s consumption didn’t increase much if at all.
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Sandra
I was also wondering about adjusting for inflation, because if you just look at the shape of the graph, it looks suspiciously similar to a normal curve (with an extra “bump” on the right tail) that just moves as inflation increases.
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