It’s hard to gauge the veracity of this during the ongoing information warfare, but one detail struck me as funny:
Around 20 million people in Russia — or 14% of the population — are on the brink of poverty or already in poverty, said Lipsits.
This is supposedly after two years of wars and sanctions.
Official US gov statistics puts the US peacetime number at 11,5 - 12,4 %
The official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5 percent, with 37.9 million people in poverty. … The Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2022 was 12.4 percent.
I wonder if this is meant as a disinformation piece?
Are the stated poverties in the US and Russia of the same poverty definition? If the instrument is for example relative poverty, a reduction of affluence for everyone (eg through reduction of GDP) is not trivially comparable.
I wonder if there’s an instrument that combines poverty and debt sustainability as a measure for the sustainability of a society’s access to resources.
I think the bigger indicator of how bad things are in Russia is that during the initial invasion, Russian troops were confused and delighted by such modern machines as running toilets and washing machines.
But that’s the point. Russia was doing terrible anyway. Is this new 14% poverty rate any worse than when the war started and they were stealing toilets to begin with.
I mean I have no idea, but this article doesn’t show evidence one way or the other.
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And that’s after throwing thousands of poor people into the meat grinder in Ukraine.
Hundreds of thousands*
Economist is about to get a lesson in freefall aerodynamics.
Russia has actually been doing a competent job with their financial situation, but they’re still trading a better short term situation with a lot of long term problems. I don’t know when exactly those will catch up, but they can’t push them off forever. Here’s more info from William Spaniel.
