Comment by busyant
2 years ago
> Between 1973 and 2013, the number of people in poverty in the US increased by ~60%.
You edited your comment. I believe it originally contained the text above.
I'm assuming the edit was due to the fact that the statistic was based on absolute numbers and was not corrected for US population growth.
I also think the US vs China comparison is basically apples to bowling balls. It's "easy" to lift a giant percentage of the population out of poverty when a large swath of your population is in poverty.
Not saying the US doesn't deserve some criticism here, but your comparison was not apt.
> It's "easy" to lift a giant percentage of the population out of poverty when a large swath of your population is in poverty
Not entirely true. When you look at the decrease of China's extreme poverty, it is almost linear up until the numbers got to essentially 0. Even if this were true, it should be easy for the US to lift people out of poverty, given that there is a huge number of poor people in America.
> Not saying the US doesn't deserve some criticism here, but your comparison was not apt.
My point more broadly is that China has spent 40 years going in the right direction and the west has spent 40 years stagnating and deteriorating. At any rate, my main qualm was with the text "and [our economic system] is still doing it [lifting people out of poverty] today". This is not true by any metric.