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December 14, 2008
Doppelganger couple living on a dollar a day of food
There is a couple nearby that is trying to live on a dollar of food per day. We were in synagogue yesterday and a man approached us, asking us if we were they. I went to their website ([url=http://onedollardietproject.wordpress.com/]One Dollar Diet Project[/url]) and looked for the photograph of them that looked the most like us. See any resemblance? I saw a little.
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Assuming they can succeed in this project, this strikes me as a serious problem with their goal. If people can really get by on a $1 a person a day, then food stamps and pantries are actually quite generous. It is only through serious weight loss and malnutrition that they can really attract the right sort of attention to the plight of the poor.
It also is a hairy middle finger to the idea of purchasing power parity (PPP). Under PPP, living in an area were non-tradable goods are inexpensive (like China) makes you richer than your income appears if you simply converted it to dollars at current exchange rates. For example, in nominal rates China was listed as having a per-capita income of $2,483 in 2007. Yet using the PPP methodology, China had a much higher $5,325 personal income. If in America, one of the more expensive countries in the world, two teachers can eat for a dollar a day, then maybe the price of non-tradable goods matters less than it seems. Maybe more of the difference in consumption between the poor and rich world is a product of unobserved taste and quality issue, not just a difference in the price of non-tradable good. It is hard to take issue with the general idea of PPP, but if this project succeeds, I'll assume that PPP exaggerates the difference it tries to elucidate.
Posted by OneEyedMan at December 14, 2008 9:37 AM
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