Arnold Kling of EconLog alerts me to a new and rather grim term: the ultrapoor. These are people on less than 50 cents a day. Fortunately, there seem to be fewer of them than there used to be.
The original report is here. I do not know what it is like to live on 50 cents a day – or even a dollar a day – but there’s some interesting research into the lives of the poor around.
Here’s an extract from a previous column:
Guntur, in south-east India, is a city short of money but not of entrepreneurs. Stroll through the main thoroughfare of the largest slum at nine in the morning and outside every sixth house you will pass a woman sitting behind a kerosene stove, ready to prepare dosa for passers-by with a rupee to spare. An hour later, each woman will be on to her next job. One earns cash by sewing fancy beads on to cheap, plain saris. Others are labourers, rubbish collectors or pickle-makers.
The scene is described by two MIT economics professors, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, in a recent article, ”The Economic Lives of the Poor”. They set themselves the task of explaining how very poor people make money, and how they spend it…
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