[extropy-chat] Seven cents an hour?

[Joseph Bloch]

I've always wondered about those statistics, which say that people in 
under-developed countries make $x an hour. Do those figures take into 
account the buying power of a dollar in that country?

As in, if a gallon of cooking oil costs $2 in the United States, and 
$0.02 in Mozambique, that dollar is suddenly looking a lot more valuable 
in Mozambique, and only making 80 of them in a year suddenly looks a lot 
more reasonable. (Because common sense tells me that no one could live 
on $80 a year in the US, let alone as an average for an entire country, 
I must needs infer that $80 has a different value in terms of what it 
can buy. Dollars don't have inherent value; things that dollars can buy, 
do.)

Is this a legitimate economic comparison of relative buying power, or an 
emotionally-touching sleight-of-hand based on exchange rates?

I'm not saying this as any sort of smarmy straw man; I honestly don't 
know. Do we have any economists in our midst that could explain it to 
someone like me whose knowledge of classic economics is confined to 
senior year in High School?

Joseph

John K Clark wrote:

> I came across an interesting statistic, the average resident of 
> Mozambique
> makes about 80$ A YEAR.  I'm sure they work one hell of a lot longer 
> than 40
> hours a week to survive but even at that figure my 7 cents an hour 
> would be
> enough to push a person into the upper middle class, if Mozambique had a
> middle class. They don't. I figure they must be making about 4 cents an
> hour now, so all you have to do to win the argument and make me 
> concede that
> I am a villain for paying 7 cents an hour is to prove mathematically
> that 4 is greater than 7.
>
> John K Clark
>
>
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