A World Bank statistic (1999) claimed that 1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day. Moreover my friend claims that there are parts of the world where it is possible for a person to maintain a sustenance on less than two pennies a day (say in a place so poor that almost nothing is thrown away, there are no unused natural resources etc.). Is this correct?
Thanks,
Jebidiah
There are tribes living in Amazon that, AFAIK, are nearly 100% removed from the ordinary Brazilian economy. So they might not use money at all. The same for certain people in Africa, I would guess.
But being hooked into the money flow is certainly a continuum. Like the Unabomber, you could go live in a house somewhere in the vast wilderness of the US, maybe trapping and hunting a bit and selling your skins/meat/etc. for a little extra money.
Or you could work 100% for wages and produce nothing yourself directly.
Wages aren’t the only source of sustenance, in other words.
Well, a lot of places your living on $0 a day because there is no formal economy. If you attach an economic value to a barter system, then you can still grow your own food and eat it and use only what you make to live at $0 a day.
Yes. That is very clear since money is a recent thing in the span of human history. What I meant when I said “no unused natural resources” was that there an no edible roots to dig up or berries to pick etc. such as in the middle of a slum.
Jeb.
Related question: does GDP measure subsistence economic activity? For example, if a villager in Laos catches fish for his family to eat, but those fish are never sold, is such activity reflected in GDP calculations?
is it?
money has been almost essential for most of civilisations growth and spread… no cite, just what i think 
I don’t know if we can say that money is “recent” in human history. Examples of currency date back almost 3000 years, and few of the written records that constitute history date much older than that. “True coins” (metal disks of a defined weight and metal composition, stamped with official insignia of the government) date at least as far back as 630 BC in Lydia. True, today’s near-exclusive reliance on currency, rather than production of the essentials is relatively new for most of the population (recall that even in the US, most of the populaion was rural until roughly WWII - well within the recollection of many people now alive), but it has been a patchy state of affairs in many times and places for millenia. If nothing else, taxes paid in currency are in many ways easier (but in some situations, less useful) than payment in grain, etc.
I’ve always said that money is probably the most sophisticated abstraction that most of us use in our daily life. It’s almost imposssible for us to appreciate exactly how much of an abstraction it is. On every level, from the coins in your pocket, to trade between nations, a close examination will ‘see through’ its conveninet fiction.
Exchange rates are a good example: I was in Hungary in 1987 (during the Communist era, but after the Privatization Act) and the average worker’s income was 150 Forint (a physician’s state salary was 450). The official exchange rate was 47 Forint/$ and the unofficial rate was even more lopsided. Tens of millions of families lived in nearly “West Europe comfort”, not an eked-out subsistence lifestyle, on just over $3/month or $0.10/day. Though there were many places that would happily charge western tourists western prices (e.g. the restaurants in the international hotels), you could enjoy a refined evening of wine, haute cuisine and chamber music in chandaliered ballroom (e.g. Szondi’s on Leninikorut in downtown Budapest) for less than a supersized Value Meal at McDonalds.
I don’t recall the exact numbers, but North Korea has a similar state of affairs today. I know people who’ve been there, and while unguarded conversations with the locals were rare, the universal consensus of those conversations seemed to be that local families lived quite comfortably on salaries that translated to under $2/month. I think they fit the OP’s criteria.
One might quibble that this was an artifact of Communism - but frankly, our Western “free market” economies are equally artificial.
It’s hard to answer this question due to exchange rates. The Hungary example of living on 3$ US a month shows that… are you asking if a person can live on less than 1 actual $US per day, or their own equivilent of 1$us per day (be it % of monetary income or time spent on labour)?
If you assign a poor(er) person’s wage to 5$US per hour, (40$ per day) and apply that value to everyone’s time regardless of the country, I doubt you could survive many places for long on 1/40th of a day’s work. Even in a tropical jungle with no cost of anything other than food, you couldn’t feed yourself for 12 minutes worth of hunting/gathering per day… at least not every day. There are people and cultures more efficient than us, but not that much more!