The by-line of the article is at best misleading, and at worst, absolute bogus. Demonetization was not a consequence of a low poverty line.
While it is all good and fun to theoretically arrive at a number for where the poverty line should be in a vacuum, please remember that the real world works with finite resources. Yes, perhaps by a global standard of living, 95% of Indians are poor. But given the existence of a finite set of resources, one must aim to maximize welfare of the most downtrodden. I agree that designing policy around whether you come above or below a certain income line is slightly absurd, and there is scope to redefine the system or raise it to necessarily include a certain quartile of the population, I disagree that 19 out of 20 people in India should qualify to be ‘below poverty line’.
Author: The $1.90 line is surely not an adequate measure of global poverty – analysts have suggested that $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve decent nutrition and life expectancy.
Why stop at $7.40/day? Let us raise it to $75/ day per person. That would be a lot of fun. 95% of India’s population would be poor by those standards. With more than a billion poor persons in India itself, we can have a lot of fun. We can write millions of articles in papers and blogs on poverty. We can have a lot of research scholars studying poverty, etc… Let us have a party! As someone wrote a book or a paper titled: Everyone loves a good famine.
Good take on poverty lines. There should be work on a practical threshold for India.
The by-line of the article is at best misleading, and at worst, absolute bogus. Demonetization was not a consequence of a low poverty line.
While it is all good and fun to theoretically arrive at a number for where the poverty line should be in a vacuum, please remember that the real world works with finite resources. Yes, perhaps by a global standard of living, 95% of Indians are poor. But given the existence of a finite set of resources, one must aim to maximize welfare of the most downtrodden. I agree that designing policy around whether you come above or below a certain income line is slightly absurd, and there is scope to redefine the system or raise it to necessarily include a certain quartile of the population, I disagree that 19 out of 20 people in India should qualify to be ‘below poverty line’.
Fantastic article, well written
Author: The $1.90 line is surely not an adequate measure of global poverty – analysts have suggested that $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve decent nutrition and life expectancy.
Why stop at $7.40/day? Let us raise it to $75/ day per person. That would be a lot of fun. 95% of India’s population would be poor by those standards. With more than a billion poor persons in India itself, we can have a lot of fun. We can write millions of articles in papers and blogs on poverty. We can have a lot of research scholars studying poverty, etc… Let us have a party! As someone wrote a book or a paper titled: Everyone loves a good famine.