On Tue, 16 Mar 2004, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
> On Monday, March 15, 2004, at 11:38 PM, Luke Weiger wrote:
>
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Jeffrey Fisher" <jfisher at igc.org>
> >
> >> ok, stupid question, but when the world bank says that (as of 1999,
> >> iirc) 2.1 billion people lived on less than $1/day using the dollar as
> >> a marker of "purchasing power parity", does that mean the buying power
> >> of US$1 no matter where you are in the world, or does it mean the
> >> local
> >> equivalent of what US$1 would buy in the states?
> >
> > The latter may seem "impossibly small," but it's true.
>
> well, that was the way it looked and it seemed to make the most sense,
> but i was afraid of overstating my case.
>
These kinds of comparisons are misleading because of the more intense commodification of goods and services in industrialized societies. You need to buy stuff to survive in "advanced" industrial societies like the U. S.; that isn't true for a surprisingly large proportion of the world population (subsistence farming, herding, mutual aid, bartering are still common outside urban centers in many poor nations). This makes the $1/day statistic misleading, because many people in the world are not really capitalist "consumers" (yet).
Miles