MEASURING “ESCAPES FROM POVERTY.” I don’t think that the new poverty line is of much use in telling us who is poor. When I posted here on studies of how people (twenty to forty per cent of people in the world!) live on one dollar a day, Dick Weisfelder commented: “I wonder whether pundits who measure the percentage living on a dollar a day have controlled for inflation and the buying power of the dollar.” I agreed with Dick then and do now. The Economist article bears out Dick’s point. When the World Bank looked at prices and foreign exchange rates in 2005, “At a stroke, the Chinese economy shrank, in real terms, by 40%.”
Categories
Archives
Recent Comments
- “A COMFORT BLANKET FOR THE SMUG”? (1)
- Nick: Further informing my perspective was that in the writings of classical Romans the middle-aged authors opined...
- ARE PEOPLE LESS VIOLENT? (COMMENT). (2)
- Dick Weisfelder: My prior comment was just in the context of sports. Whether or not from Pinker, I have seen the...
- erik: It seems doubtful that human nature has changed. The most likely explanation would be that modern culture gives...
- HOW BANKS PREPARED FOR A U.S. DEFAULT. (2)
- GREECE’S ADVANTAGE IN THE CHICKEN GAME. (2)
- Nick: That makes sense. It reminds me of the stories Pater Familias would tell me about how in Boston the person with...
- Dick Weisfelder: Greece seems to me to be playing a game that Karl Deutsch called “underdog.” While one...
- FOOTBALL PLAYERS DELIBERATELY CAUSING CONCUSSIONS? (3)
- Nick: It was my understanding that boxing gloves were to protect the puncher’s hands and not the...
- Dick Weisfelder: Remember the Roman arenas? Bare knuckled boxing? Such injuries were taken as natural and accepted in...
- Mary Jane Schaefer: This isn’t about football. Or even sportsmanship. Well, it is about sportsmanship. But what...
- A 25 % CHANCE OF A EURO DEFAULT? (1)
- Nick: The fact that this has gone on for so long is pretty perplexing. The Economist is referring back to articles it...
- DECIDING WHAT KIND OF PATIENT YOU ARE. (1)
- Dick Weisfelder: One can be very open to new technology, but also risk averse. The recent debates about how to...
- “A COMFORT BLANKET FOR THE SMUG”? (1)
Meta
Well, I just can’t find the relevant post I wanted to comment on; so I’ll stop right here and use this gateway. (i was going to use the Harry Potter term, but, alas, I can’t think of the word.)
The books we’ve been reading about “Stumbling on Happiness” and Proust as a neuroscientist are, to me, disquieting. If Phil always believed that Enlightenment Philosophy was just pure common sense and universally held, I guess I always thought that one could rely on memory and principles learned from experience to guide one in the DIRECTION of happiness and fulfillment, if not to happiness itself. But these books seem to question our ability to remember, to project possible outcomes into the future, etc. so that life seems so much more random and chancy than I’d like to admit. The bottom line is that we seem to make choices anticipating some good outcome, and then we adhere to the choices simply because they are OUR choices. I suspect, however, there is something else going on. People need to feel that their lives have a texture, and a texture that is the result of continuous weaving. That is why community is so valuable, long marriages, commitments of all kinds. Horror comes when we’re floating free in the ocean of existence.