I was trying to learn about this week's countries and saw "Nicaragua is the poorest country in Central America." Wow, I thought, that must be bad, and it was, with a GDP per capita of $2,800 a year. But what does that mean? So I looked up Haiti - poorest in the western hemisphere at $1,300 a year. Wow, that's really not much... I wonder what the worst of the Eatsern Hemisphere is? Turns out it's a toss-up - Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo both have a GDP per capita of $300. So that's less than a dollar a day. Less than $4 a day in Haiti. Just over $7.50 a day in Nicaragua.
The US is $46,400, or more than $127 a day. (Only #11, incidentally. All stats from the CIA fact book.)
Now, maybe GDP per capita isn't an accurate indicator. Maybe there are dimensions that it doesn't capture that reflects a less desparate life than these figures seem to say. But when I think about the fact that I spend more on diet coke alone than $4, I find it hard to really interalize what these numbers mean.
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