In real terms? I know when such a statement is made, it’s an attempt to make the poverty of a certain area understandable. But does the statement actually mean anything other than emotionally? It doesn’t seem to be a valid comparison. Trying to live on $1.00 per day in Atlanta vs. $1.00 per day in a village in Africa? My $1.00 will (I assume) buy a bit more at a village market in the Sudan than it will at the local Publix in downtown Atlanta.
This thread is not questioning the reality of brutal poverty in the world. It’s just that trying to convert a rural third world villagers situation into $USD doesn’t really tell you anything objective.
In a sense it does. Essentially it tells you that they don’t use nor have money.
What this means is that they’re essentially subsistence farming, trading labour for labour, building their own dwellings, and probably pooping under the summer sky.
So essentially they’re limited to what is available locally. They can’t purchase foreign products like medicine or books, nor hire teachers, buy fertilizer and high yield crops, etc.
Now really, you should include trading food for labour and so on as economic activity and that they’re simply bypassing the monetary stage, so probably they’re trading internally for something like the equivalent of $5 a day, but that’s not quite as pithy.
I believe one dollar is the poverty line set by the World Bank. Actually it’s $1.08 for deeply impoverished countries and more like $2.00 a days for emerging economies in East Asia. This is not really meant as a guilt-inducing comparisons for Americans. You are right that one dollar in an African village will buy much more than in an American supermarket.
But there is a bottom price for all consumer goods. A liter of cooking oil will always cost around two dollars these days, no matter where you are in the world. A sack of rice or corn will cost the same on a wholesale basis anywhere in the world. A course of antibiotics has a lowest possible price.
And this is what these statistics are talking about. It’s a rough estimate access to the most basic of consumer goods (basic antibiotics, cooking oil, grain, laundry soap and salt are the basics that I can think of.) Below this level, you are pretty much going to be living off the land and will have almost no chance of getting education, health care, etc. Of course this is just a rough measure, and leaves out a lot of complicating factors. The wikipedia article on the poverty threshold has some more complicated ways to measure absolute and relative poverty that factor in things like access to clean water, etc.