In China, those people probably go stand in a line all day to come home with a bag of rice and a liter of milk...when it's their day to get rice. There are no choices, no convenience, nothing more than a meager subsistence.
Those same Chinese are probably living in huts and in 400 square-foot flats on top of each other, dimly lit with some small appliance bulb.
In the US, our people in "poverty" have debit cards to essentially buy healthy foods from whatever their local supermarket is. Whether or not they do, or whether or not they blow it on less healthy foods is up to them. They have apartments and housing--again, most don't appreciate it because they get most things from some government program or another.
Our US anti-poverty programs encourage generational living from the teat of government...these are Bernie people. They know nothing else.
[I could be completely wrong about this, but lifting 850 million Chinese out of poverty looks completely different than what we do here in the States.
In China, those people probably go stand in a line all day to come home with a bag of rice and a liter of milk...when it’s their day to get rice. There are no choices, no convenience, nothing more than a meager subsistence. ]
When someone among China’s working poor wants to buy food, he goes to the grocery store, where he pays with whatever meager cash he’s scrounged up from some low-level job like working security for a local commercial strip. Oddly enough, some of the best blue collar jobs involve working (indirectly) for foreign companies via their subcontractors. Companies that manufacture for household names like Apple, Hamilton Beach, Hewlett Packard, etc, are well-known for generous benefits and pay packages, relative to local Chinese employers. But regardless, Chinese wages already exceed all of Latin America except for Chile: