LIFESTYLE ARTICLE.How Do The Extremely Poor Live?

What is it like to be extremely poor?

Poor people life is very laboured.Poor people eating very simple food.Their food has not high protein.They are suffering many disease.
We know that the extremely poor are living on less than what $1.25 a day could buy in the United States. But this seems implausible. Wouldn’t someone with that little money just end up dying of starvation very quickly? Simulations like Living Below the Line can only go so far. It’s difficult to understand what it’s like to be that poor.

However, it’s now becoming a bit easier to understand. Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, authors of the popular book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty and co-founders of The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, have written a paper called “The Economic Lives of the Poor”. Using survey data from thirteen different countries, Banerjee and Duflo are able to tell the tale of life as a poor person.

Here’s an informative summary of their research.

An extremely poor village in Kenya.
Families Compared
The typical extremely poor households tends to be much larger than a US family. The extremely poor households have a median of 8 people living in them, compared to 2.5 in the US. However, it’s not typically a couple with many children like one might expect – there actually is a median of 3 adults in a household. This suggests a family structure where people live with their parents, siblings, uncles, cousins, etc., which makes sense given it is easier to pool resources when you are sharing a space.

However, poor households do have more children than US households, having about 3 children per woman of child-bearing age, as compared to 1.9 in the US or 1.6 in Europe. The population of extremely poor areas is also very young in general. While the US has about one young person (age below 18) for every old person (age above 51), extremely poor areas have a median of six young people for every old person.

This helps to explain why interventions targeted on children, such as school deworming, can have a large impact on the future of these countries - most of the population is young. It also helps to explain higher rates of violence or political instability in poor countries, as violence everywhere is overwhelmingly committed by young men according to Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature.

Children in an extremely poor family in Kenya.
What is Being Extremely Poor Like?
One of the most common traits of being extremely poor is weakness and disease. Because of low food consumption and poor nutrition, 65% of the poor in Udaipur, India (the area with the best data) are underweight.

43% of the adults report having difficulty with “activities of daily living”, and this includes 34% of adults under 50. Furthermore, 55% of the poor have an insufficient red blood cell count (anemia). In the last month, 72% of the poor in Udaipur report at least one symptom of a disease and 46% of the poor report seeing a doctor because of a disease.

Despite constant sickness, self-reported levels of health and happiness are not particularly low, but self-reported levels of stress (both financial and psychological) are very high.

Furthermore, infant mortality is still high. Surveys have asked women about the outcomes of their pregnancies, including whether the child is still alive. Infant mortality is the number of children who die before reaching their first birthday, as a percentage of the number of live births. Among the poor, this number is at a low of 3.4% in Indonesia and a high of 16.7% in Pakistan, compared to 0.5% in Europe. Notably, these numbers are likely to be underestimates because not all children are remembered, especially if they die very early.