It’s incredible how wording can be confusing to different readers.
The HN title of this post is currently “the end of poverty has just begun” which made me think “just” = “recently”. So I thought the article would be about something that has indicated that the rate of poverty reduction has increased.
The URL says “history-of-poverty-has-just-begun” which made me think this is an article about historiography of poverty and how it’s not been cataloged well.
The article title says “The history of the end of poverty has just begun” which just completely confuses me.
The article subheading says “ The decline of global poverty is one of the most important achievements in history, but the end of poverty is still very far away.” which to me is a much more accurate summary of the article. Mainly that most of the world still lives on less than $30 a day. But some parts of the world have been uplifted from poverty recently.
My point I think is that, to me, a better post title would be something like “Poverty is only now starting to decline”
It's odd to say that an end has a beginning instead of it happening. It's more accurate to say - without the hyperbole - that the incidence of poverty is being reduced.
"extreme poverty" is a very arbitrary threshold and some charts are using a fixed threshold that does not updated based of real cost of life, making the whole analysis profoundly misleading.
PPP is designed precisely to allow fair comparisons. The article refers to it as "international dollars". It is important to note it did not refer to USD anywhere: it is talking about $30PPP per day, which in real currency is a wildly variable amount but which buys approximately the same things.
Without understanding the distinction between PPP and USD, it is not possible to fully comprehend the article.
Folks 30 usd a day isn't basic poverty at all, it's what i used to earn as a software developer for some time. It's a pretty decent amount in a third world country
The HN title of this post is currently “the end of poverty has just begun” which made me think “just” = “recently”. So I thought the article would be about something that has indicated that the rate of poverty reduction has increased.
The URL says “history-of-poverty-has-just-begun” which made me think this is an article about historiography of poverty and how it’s not been cataloged well.
The article title says “The history of the end of poverty has just begun” which just completely confuses me.
The article subheading says “ The decline of global poverty is one of the most important achievements in history, but the end of poverty is still very far away.” which to me is a much more accurate summary of the article. Mainly that most of the world still lives on less than $30 a day. But some parts of the world have been uplifted from poverty recently.
My point I think is that, to me, a better post title would be something like “Poverty is only now starting to decline”
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