The Threshold for Participation

A poor person in the U.S. is richer than half of the folks in the world.  True or not?

Because there's more to the question, perhaps not actually true.

The more complex the economy, the more it costs you to live in it.  That cost is the threshold for participation and the cutoff for survival.

The conservative view here is that the poor live rather well compared to the rest of the world, so we needn't worry much about them.  The reality, the top quintile household income rose significantly in recent decades while the lowest made no progress or lost ground. 

There's more, if you want to know.

More than half of the world lives at low income.  Few have regular jobs.  Most survive by fishing or small plot farms and flocks, perhaps a little trade and selling on the street.  They walk to the river for water.  There may not be public transportation or stores or health care nearby.

As an economy grows, it updates those rivers and footpaths and gardens with municipal water systems, city streets, and grocery stores, but living there means you pay your share of the cost.  

In any economy, if your contribution falls below that threshold, you're disenfranchised or perhaps homeless and on the street along with your family, begging.

The poverty line in the U.S. is indeed middle-income compared to the whole world.  That's because basic participation in the economy costs much more than in India or sub-Saharan Africa.  Here, if you don't have a cell-phone and a vehicle, you'll not likely be able to hold a job.  If you don't have a computer and internet, you're kids will have difficulty getting an education, and you'll have difficulty keeping up with your bills and finances.  A good diet, health care, shoes and clothes, soap and toothpaste ... making your way forward requires the ability to participate in the economy in which you live.

The GAP - The more useful measure for this issue is inequality.  When the privileged extract wealth from the economy at the expense of the rest, the result is a widening gap, or inequality.  The flow of wealth from bottom to top fosters persistent corruption in business and government, and deprivation below.  That's within a single country or economy.

Globally, countries can face the same difficulties.  There's a threshold for a country's participation in the global economy.  Poorer countries struggle and extractive trade policies are deadly.  Western countries have extracted wealth from African countries for centuries, for example, resulting in a deadly inequality and extraordinary difficulties for countries and their people.

Progress goes disproportionately to the top of the economic pyramid.  At the bottom, millions fall below the threshold for survival every year.  

Do your own inquiry - Human Development, extractive economics, and the GAP

Or look at fair trade vs. free trade, archenemies in international politics and competitive economics.  If international trade is just a competitive sport, then workers being abused and destitute isn't a problem.
Then there's the question of minimum wage vs. fair wage vs. living wage.

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(Smallholder farms depend on family labor for food and income. There are 460 to 500 million smallholder farms that grow 80 percent of food consumed in low income countries.)

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Change Makers and Help Bringers  -- The rich world's troubles fill our headlines, yet a more important reality is the yawning gap between the world's haves and have-nots. The average American income is 50 times that of a typical Afghan and 100 times that of a Zimbabwean. Despite two centuries of economic growth, over a billion people remain in dire poverty. We've yet a long way to go.