ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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I haven't actually read the report all the way through, but I skimmed it and I have to say (and this is a failing, in my opinion, in the way this kind of study in general is reported), I'd really like to see these numbers given in international dollars. No one could live on $1 a day international dollars, and so to give a number based on currency exchange rates is almost disingenuous. It's probably taken into account in the actual study, but it isn't obvious from the data that I saw that differences in PPP exchange rate wouldn't account for the high degree of regional concentration of the ultra-poor. I'm sure that average salary of blue-collar/service workers in New York City is higher than in Peoria, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you will see fewer of the symptoms of poverty in New York than in Peoria.
Again, I haven't read the whole study and it's quite possible that these values were normalized to each other, but international dollars were invented for just such a purpose.
As someone who has done serious work on the data in poor countries trying to find a significant difference between countries where the daily income is $1.00 and $0.75 is a fools game. As far as I know I was the first person to ever estimate the GDP of Afghanistan.
Pick your Sub-Saharan country and compare it to Afghanistan and make a serious argument that you have any idea which one is poorer.
spencer, I'm curious about your work. How did you come to do it? Could you link to it?
What a ridiculous academic excercise. I'm sure the subadjacent poor sit around and scoff about how low class the ultra-poor are, and how sweet their lives are. Are you kidding me...all of these people live in primitive, awful conditions. Wy don't you go help them out doing something useful instead of doing 'research' showing that "Damn, there sure are a lot of really poor people." I could be shown pictures of any of their residences and say, "Yep, these people are really freaking poor, and live in crap countries," not needing some 148 page glossy print to understand that. Save the money on printing and give someone $5000 times their annual income.
Arnold: Speaking as a fellow "bleeding-heart libertarian," do you think we ought to implement some sort of global version of the Negative Income Tax, perhaps set to about $1000 per year? That is approximately $3 per day.