That it was wasted or mis-targeted is beyond dispute—that it was a negligible amount is laughable.

Off the top of my head – considerably less. The OECD DAC website might have the actual numbers.

At the margin, lower income will be engender increases in do-it-yourself activity, that is, a displacement of money-mediated division of labor. In terms of quality of life, how can one properly account for services provided by oneself, and (working out from there) services provided by family members, informally bartered with neighbors, more-formally bartered with more distant parties, etc.? Almost all profound poverty is the poverty of the rural poor. Regarding the central question of food, how can one properly account for one’s own (family’s, neighbors’…) garden production? There must be documents describing methodology, but the bare numbers have outrun the information needed to fully interpret them.

Considerations like the above suggest how $1.60 per day might be more tolerable than it seems to wealthy urbanites—while still being appallingly low.

So, $1.08 in 1992 is $1.60 today, according to some random inflation calculators that I Googled up. $1.60 a day doesn’t have quite the same ring as dollar-a-day, but it makes a lot more sense in terms of how the bottom billion survives.

Because of purchasing power parity conversions (and inflation adjustments) the WB’s $1 a day poverty line means the following:

To be under this line you will have to be consuming less per day than you could have consumed in the United States, in 1992, with US$1.08*.

In other words fricking poor**.

Also, because it is a consumption poverty line rather than an income poverty line, anything you consume from the subsistence economy is monetarised and included in your consumption bundle. This process is inexact of course – particularly at measuring the value of public goods. But the salient point remains – if you’re under this line you are very, very poor indeed.

If you go to the UNPD’s International Poverty Centre’s website there are some good briefing papers on this but, one of the many flaws of the WB poverty lines is that they were simply created by averaging the poverty lines of some low income countries. They were never tied to a fixed set of calorific needs. Attempts to construct genuine needs based poverty line come up with (please get the exact numbers from the aforementioned website) something like 90c / day for absolute basic calorific needs and $1.50 day for absolute basic basic needs. A line based on health outcomes (using the Preston Curve) produces a figure of about $2 a day (possibly significantly higher depending on calculations).

Former WB economist Lant Prichard has a (in my opinion) sensible approach to categorising poverty.

Under $1 / day – destitute
Under $2 / day – extreme poverty
Under $10 / day – poverty (the $10 figure is arrived at by averaging rich country poverty lines)

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*Might want to double check here in a hurry – presents to wrap and I could have the exact number wrong.

**So poor that poverty depth below this line would have to be minimal as you couldn’t fall much lower without being dead. And, for this reason, it won’t take a huge improvement to bring people over the $1 a day line.

You’re probably right that you could get enough calories to survive on per day, at $1, for the very cheapest foods. But literally nothing else. No clothing, or shelter, or anything.

The issue of making or scavenging for themselves is more or less what I’m getting at. If I’m a farmer, mostly subsisting, and I make enough food to eat, and then sell a small remainder for $1 per day, how is that counted? Am I in the $1 per day bottom billion, or not?

It seems on the face of it to me to be ridiculous. A dollar isn’t enough money to buy enough food to live on (much less buy clothing and shelter to keep the elements away, or many other bare necessities). Obviously, one billion people aren’t starving to death right now, or next month we’d have a population one billion lower than we do today. So I’m going wrong somewhere above, and the figure is repeated enough that I assume that there’s some validity behind it.