Let me be real clear: this message board does NOT need conservatives

Le sigh…

Of course there are child labor laws. However, laws don’t prevent activity. They just disincentivize it.

You really can’t compare income from country to country like that, unless you are trying to determine how many people can afford a laptop, or some other international good. Most goods and services, including food, housing, medical care, clothing, furniture, etc. vary a great deal in cost from country to country, and yes, they usually cost more in “richer” countries.

Years ago I had an Indian friend, and I ask him what the exchange rate was between the US dollar and the Indian Rupee. He said it was about 1-100, but you should think of it as 1-1, because most of the stuff you might want to buy (a meal, a wrist watch, a month of rent) would cost about the same number of rupees where he lived in India as dollars in Princeton, NJ, where we lived at the time.

You certainly can . . . when your goal is to minimize poverty that you really don’t to do anything about.
‘See, the international poverty line is currently $1.90 per day that means even $5 an hour makes you one of the richest people on the planet! So stop fucking complaining about how hard your life is.’

What would you use instead?

I’ve looked at the quality of life measures and cost of living.

Here’s the purchasing power index for 2020 by country.

The US is 3. India is 41. Your friend from India has less purchasing power based on this chart.

Quality of life charts have the US further down because of lack of universal health care, etc. but it’s still not on the level with India. US is 15, India is 59.

So, stop complaining?

Where Susanita (a very rich and conservative girl) told Mafalda that she always looked at news and reports about what the very bad people were doing to others in other places in the world. So she felt glad and good living in Argentina (While the dirty war was going on, but that is another history).

The point Mafalda made (actually what the great cartoonist Quino say) was:

“That is not good Susanita, you have to compare to others that are better than you, not with the ones that are worse so one can become a better person”

(I’m paraphrasing there), and then Susanita said to Mafalda:

“C’mon! who would do such a dirty move to oneself!”

And the moral of the strip was very clear, Susanita was the one with the dumb point, it is not good to look at the worst nations and come with your country’s shortcomings as mostly inconsequential by that comparison. We should be looking at what are the best efforts of other nations. To consider ideas like ending the war on drugs that would solve or minimize a lot of violence or incarcerations in the US; of course, many conservatives think that looking at better efforts or solutions in other countries is a nasty thing to do.

It depends on my purpose. Am i comparing how many people can buy laptops? Am i estimating how many people go to bed hungry? Am i questioning whether teenagers work after school?

I’d look at different metrics depending on the question at hand.

And i might look at Gini coefficients, or Lorenz curves not just means and medians, too.

Of course I know that! But I still think it’s pretty shocking.

So did you increase your score on the IQ tests by doing this practice? How much by?

I’ve been doing it most of the day. :frowning: Now that I’ve finally got the baby to sleep, should I look at the papers @IvoryTowerDenizen linked, or go and clean up the kitchen?

When school was in session, I worked 10 or so hours a week on the weekends, for my personal spending and gas money.

My pay was not needed to support the household. If it were, then I would have been working a whole lot more, with much less time to read and study.

The purpose is determining this statement. I will grant outright the massive inequality. The question is about the shitload of poor people. How is poor determined?

Yes, I’ve seen those other measures to determine inequality. But how does that measure how the poor are doing?

So how would you determine that?

Thank you. I wasn’t referring to your comments as anecdotes, but the ‘I did test prep and got a high score, so obviously test prep is the only thing that matters’ type of stories.

I don’t need to compare the US to other countries to do that. % families below the poverty line is a decent number, developed by people who study the issue and know better than you or i.

I was just pointing out why it’s dumb to dispute that number based on average dollars earned in other countries.

This is true.

And it has nothing to do with whether some children in the USA have to work to supplement the family’s income.

Not to mention that the only way you could stay alive in the USA on $1.90 a day would be to be successfully homesteading fertile land which you already owned and on which for some reason you paid no property tax (though I think in some states your 1.90 a day might cover that if you didn’t buy anything else); and in addition to be lucky enough that nobody in your family needed any healthcare.

– that’s $57 a month. You can’t get a one bedroom apartment around here these days for ten times that; and I’m in one of the cheaper real estate areas in the country. And that would be with nothing to eat, not even used clothes to wear, and not an aspirin for your headache.

Yes, I’m aware that there are people in the world with nothing to eat or wear that they couldn’t scavenge out of a dump, and even more reasons for their heads to ache. And that still has nothing to do with the question of whether some children in the USA have less time to read than others because they have to work.

I don’t remember whether they told us our scores; and, if they did, I wasn’t writing it down and making sure to store the information where I’d be able to get at it fifty or more years later.

Depends. Are you going to keep giving your opinion in @IvoryTowerDenizen’s field? (Which, I note, also takes some time. More time, of course, if one first researches whether one can back it before posting.)

OK, that number is projected to be 13.7% of Americans are projected to be under the poverty line in 2021 by people who know better than you or I Is that a “decent” number?

From these people

On that website, supposedly by people who know more than you or I, under the statistic of the projected poverty levels, it says this.

then this

So 13.7% of the US population lives below the poverty line. Is that a shitload? Not if you compare it to India, which they have done. It doesn’t make it acceptable. It just gives you the scope of the problem. It would be good if that number were zero. As an aside, that’s why I supported universal basic income which would decrease the level of the poor while redistributing from the rich.

Sam_Stone didn’t solely do that. He also pointed out the level of poverty for the US and compared it to the average level of poverty in the world.

If you’re going to point out what’s dumb, it would help to point out what you think is the smart or acceptable answer.

One reason I don’t like echo chambers, which is what this thread is advocating, is because the level of debate becomes very lazy. People use the argument that everyone agrees with me as a valid argument instead of using real sources and information.

I’ve done a lot of this research about poverty levels and economic statistics before, probably in a debate against Sam_Stone. Without people who question, “debate” becomes just reinforcing what everyone already believes.

More like you’d be living on the streets and begging from passersby. I heard there are tent cities in Los Angeles.

The latter is what I am proposing to do. At this point I am unable to take it on faith, and I think discussing one’s ideas with others provides a valuable reality check.

Perhaps you think I was rude, or too dismissive or something… if so, I don’t know how to fix that.

Yes, it is. And it’s hardly shocking to learn that there are other countries that have even more people in poverty.

Remember, this was a discussion about whether the SATs, as used in the US, tend to help those who are already ahead. And it was mentioned that many kids work in the afternoon while their more ament peers might be reading for pleasure. And someone from the UK said, “what, high school kids in the US have to work? Isn’t that a wealthy country?!”

The answer, of course, is that yes, lots of kids in the US have to work. Heck, we even have a shit ton of kids living in poverty". Obviously, more kids work than just those in poverty, but indeed, we have a shit ton of kids who are actually living in poverty.

How many kids in India are in poverty is really not relevant to a discussion of SATs in the US. And dragging it in to suggest that impoverished kids in the US are really doing fine, which is what Sam Stone did, is a dumb digression.

Okay, thanks to you I’ve learned the proper term for what I wanted to talk about: ‘differential prediction’ - whether the scores for a subgroup over-predict or under-predict college performance compared to the set as a whole.

AIU the posts from @Babale, @puzzlegal, and @thorny_locust, they believe that using the SAT in college admissions is bad because lower SES would lower a student’s SAT score more than their potential college performance, thus depriving capable students of an opportunity (they can correct me if I have misunderstood).

If this is true, then differential prediction analysis should show that the SAT under-predicts performance of lower SES students, ie on average they get higher GPAs in college than their SAT scores would predict. I can’t find this data for parental SES, but have found it for parental education level, and it shows the opposite:

There appears to be a clear delineation of overprediction versus underprediction of FYGPA depending on parental education level. The FYGPAs of students whose parents have no high school diploma, a high school diploma, or an associate degree are overpredicted by all measures and combinations of measures, with mean residuals tending to be closer to zero for those with parents with an associate degree. The overprediction of FYGPA was greatest when HSGPA was used alone. However, the FYGPAs of students whose parents have a bachelor’s degree or graduate degree are underpredicted by all measures and combinations of measures, with mean residuals tending to be smaller (more accurate) for those with parents with a bachelor’s degree. See Figure A 4 in the Appendix for a visualization of this relationship.

From this report here:

These are not large differences according to the report, but AIUI they do contradict the story of ‘having well off parents aids performance on standardised tests more than with general academic ability’. So, is there anything wrong with my reasoning? And is there any contrary data on differential prediction of the SAT?

If you were really managing to survive that way, and some people do, you’d be taking in probably an order of magnitude more money than $1.90 a day.

thorny_locust is right that the only realistic way to survive on your own in the US with a cash income that low is to get most of your sustenance from non-money resources. Such as farming and processing your own food (and probably fiber animals too) on your own land.

For the record, I wasn’t trying to diminish poverty. I lived in poverty (well, poverty by first world standards) for the first 25 years or so of my life. I’d rather have money.

The point, however, is that the U.S. capitalist system has provided such bounty that the ‘poor’ have roughly the standard of living as the world average. The poverty line in America is higher than the median income in many countries.

That doesn’t mean we should ignore it - it means we should avoid trying to ‘fix’ it by breaking the system that created all the wealth in the first place.

That’s not the argument you made to him. If that’s the argument you wanted to get across to him, you didn’t make it at the time. The argument you made to him was this

Nothing about a digression or being irrelevant.

Your response was about how to or not to compare poverty. His statement was refuting someone who was expressing surprise that someone from a different country didn’t realize that there was a “shitload” of poor people in the US. In response to that, it’s fair to say that, looking at other countries, it’s not so obvious that the US has a shitload of poor people. Because it’s relative. So yes, it was relevant.

He wasn’t quoting something about the SATs and posting about other countries’ level of poverty.

If that’s the case, not only did you not remark on the digression, you continued the digression with your comment.