The current number of extremely poor people in China is less than 30 million, less than 2% of population.
From Google:
"According to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms."
In 2017 there are around 600 million people in rural area. Their average monthly income is 3300 yuan or around 500 USD, more than $15 a day. Cost of living there is cheap and this is middle income, not poor.
China has radically more extremely poor people than that. The number is closer to 500 million, so long as absurd numbers like $3 per day are not your line.
75% of China's middle class is in the $2 to $10 per day income bracket. And that's their middle class, the bottom 1/3 are even worse off.
“Poverty is still a salient problem in China,” Zheng Wenkai, a vice-minister at a government office responsible for poverty alleviation and development, said at a news briefing Tuesday, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper. About 200 million Chinese, or 15% of the country’s population, would be considered poor by international poverty measures, set at $1.25 a day, Mr. Zheng added.
I answered the comment which used "extremely poor" and "subsistence farmers" so I used the international poverty line ($1.90). At $3.2 (World Bank's lower middle income poverty line), it was 12.1% or 160 million people, but that was 2013. The number dropped rapidly every year. It should be lower now.
Purchasing parity is a good measure for living standards. You can buy a full meal for 10 yuan or $1.5 in rural China. It is not fair to measure their income with no adjustment. Cooking for a family may cost less than that. $1 in rural China is worth much more than $1 in the US.
Your quotes were from 2014. China is improving every year. You can Google for more recent statistics and quote them here if you disagree.
Wages aren't worth anything without purchasing power parity. You'll have trouble surviving on $10/day in the US (incl. housing) but will be fine in many other regions of the world, including most of India and China.
US pension funds together are worth $22 trillion. This is 61% of global pension funds and much much larger than the Saudi funds. They should invest a small part into Vision Funds and other VCs!
The drug was repatented with the delivery mechanism, as soon as the original patent expired.
It's the usual practice to keep novel delivery system/drug combinations off the market until the original drug patent expires, thereby extending the profitability of the patent, at the cost of users suffering medicine that is consequently decades out of date.
I think a similar issue applies with Epipen. There is an alternative, Adrenaclick (still expensive but not quite as bad), but because the delivery mechanism is different the prescription needs to be written differently.
Transdermal delivery unfortunately seems to be underexplored and very expensive in general. Transdermal estradiol is another one that is much more expensive than the pill form but is better in terms of safety. Generic patches available outside the US are less expensive (than patches in the US, still quite a lot more expensive than pill form). I'm not sure if generic patches are completely unavailable in the US or if they are just also quite expensive.
Melatonin is another case where transdermal delivery can be helpful, but it is difficult to find and fairly expensive (not quite as bad, though).
Beyond delivery mechanisms, drug companies also create modified forms of a drug (prodrug or metabolite or slightly different but similar substance) that have small advantages over the previous version. Again, these can't be substituted and doctors need to know to write the prescription for the form available as a generic. Best for the drug companies is when the origional form is pulled from the market by the FDA right after the patent expires, as happened with the antihistamine Seldane/terfenadine (replaced by Allegra/fexofenadine, a metabolite).
In other cases where out of patent drugs are not available as generics it is because the market is small and the current manufacturer can instantly drop their price to match if a generic appears, making it likely that anyone who attempts to make a generic will loose money.
As soon as it went out of patent, they patented the drug + transdermal patch. So, in order to keep their profits up, everyone went without the patch system until their original patent was about to expire. So now they can charge $2,200 for something they developed in the 1990s, but intentionally kept off the market to monopolize.
This happens as a matter of course, with every new drug.
Without the transdermal system, I can't take the drug. I have to take too much of the active ingredient, and it causes pain and permanent hearing damage.
Thanks for suggesting grey market alternatives - I hadn't given it a thought. However, they would definitely be grey/black market, since it's not off-patent, which means there will be higher risks, and it will harder to obtain.
The current statistics in 2017 is around 600 million in rural area. Their monthly income is 3300 yuan or around 500 USD, more than $15 a day. According to World Bank, a country with $6000 USD a year is upper-middle income.
If you count their rural areas as a nation, its GDP is $3.6 trillion around the same size as Germany, 4th largest in the world.
Economic growth is usually measured in percentage terms. There are good reasons for that. If they can keep the growth rate, the Chinese economy will be larger than the US in about 10 or 15 years.
China's is still a developing economy and they have a lot of ways to increase productivity compared to the US. They are also at a leading edge in many technologies of the future so they do not need to spend as much as other developing countries to purchase them from abroad.
China's growth rate may slow down but it will continue to be faster than the US rate for many years.
US Dollar is the world's reserve currency. If US dollar becomes less strong in the future, the size of US economy may not be as large in relative term anymore. The petrodollar system may not be as powerful when renewables are more important. Perhaps China also considers this when they push so hard for renewables.
Some populations practice having as many children as they can because their belief system calls for it. They believe they will get more brownie points from a supreme being for that.
So these groups will get more share of the basic income in the next generation and more in the next and so on and so on...
The basic income should be on a sustenance level. So even without any controls, having more children is not a way to get wealthy. It's basically like now; if some of them succeed it may pay off, but it's anti-social and usually doesn't work.
What does Italy have that China cannot produce itself? Brand name products, basic machines and chemicals which Italy exports are not important to their development.
Russia has oil, minerals and iron which China needs to grow.
China's shifting to domestic consumption and strong Yuan is better than weak Yuan. Strong currency will also reduce capital flight from the country and increase its financial powers to buy world resources such as mining rights and companies abroad.
They understand how the dollar status as reserve currency helps strengthen American power. Many Chinese leaders understand the power of finance. They have used it to develop export-oriented economy and they are now using it to expand their power abroad.
China is now confident it is strong enough and has resources and relationships to counter US pressure.
Several major religions in poor developing countries preach having more kids. They don't care about environmental impact or sustainability. They believe their God will provide.
You don't. People should have more kids, period. What people don't get about the declining birthrate is that it leads to a graying of areas and a huge economic malaise as the elderly consume more and produce much less in terms of resources. This is part of the reason places like Japan or Italy are struggling so hard...they don't have enough native workers to support their aging population.
The demographic death spiral can be real. And if anything, there will be worse environmental impact simply because you have to use more invasive means to support an aging population. More factory farms since there are fewer, older workers, more resource intensive automation and robotics to take over things people did.
Religion is not to blame, for most include proper environmental stewardship. Unfortunately that theme is being ignored in the developed world. How about simply making the argument that it is morally wrong to destroy God's creation?
You cant. Its game theory- those religions preach only what people want to here. And they want to here, that one of there descendants make it- so if everybody puts more tickets into the lottery, one has to gear the gambling up to have the same chances.
Also to thwart any racists- no, this is not limited to poor country's or certain skin colors. Once the economy drops below a certain threshold, everyone goes full survival zombie with the Loop-Deformation. Proof: The Nazis turned europe into a white version of africa during WW2.
The Nazis had their economy ticking over in a very productive fashion, certainly better than before their rise. A successful economy doesn't make people behave well, although it certainly makes it easier to.
What do you mean by 'a white version of Africa'? There aren't many parallels I can draw.
Emergence of warlords/partisan leaders
(Yes, for freedom, liberty, king & country, fascism - im sure, in somalia and afghanistan they have great causes too )
Soldiers of the leash.
War feeding the war.
Refugees pouring back and forth.
Source is mostly anecdata:
My late grandfather was a Nazi truck-driver in France, Italy, eastern Europe (Hungary, Greece) and the stories he and his war companions told - are really very similar to those you get to hear from African refugees.
My grandfather and his officer made a nice little extra by smuggling people and got sentenced into a "Straf-battalion" for taking advantage of the general lawlessness of the situation.
I know, i know- the popular Nazi image in TV presents a wicked law & order extremist, but where the war went - it really was quite different. There was a mixture of total lawlessness (as in "We dont care/expend resources on subhumans") and extreme military overreactions.
And before you claim that was just fascism at work, as if politics where just a program loaded into humans, no,the unraveling usually set on before the occupation got started.
In a ironic way, the Nazis and their homecoming war proofed that all humanity, disregarding of race, pushed beyond a certain breaking point - is equally wretched and desperate.
A zombie like animal, forgetting about tomorrow, trying to see the end of today at all costs. Not a beautiful sight, but one that offers a lot to understand and learn.
The good news is, once the stress is reduced - and the war has not gone on to long, preventing the education of the next generation- there is a way to recover.
The Nazi economy was ticking over through the means of confiscating wealth from people, and later on, through just straight-up murdering them from it. It wasn't 'very productive', it was short-term gains with no long-term sustainability.
Compare the economy they had in the mid or early war to that in the early thirties or late twenties. Germany was in chaos. The output of their economy was still increasing throughout the allied bombing campaign. Duplication was removed, competition reduced, production lines simplified and available models decreased. Vulnerabilities were addressed and production went up, fast.
And yes, by every measure I can think of it wasn't sustainable, but it produced a lot in a short time with extremely difficult conditions.
I don't think the religions preach what people want to hear. They built procreation into their belief system to make sure they will have bigger and bigger adherents. It works and many of those religions are much larger today than others without procreation preaching.
Religions allow you to force a rule-set on your neighbors and limit your descendants behavior, long after they reached adolescence.
I would guess for a middle-aged person, in constant silent fear of loosing it all with one mighty divorce - or drug accident of son/daughter - this sounds attractive.
From Google:
"According to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms."
In 2017 there are around 600 million people in rural area. Their average monthly income is 3300 yuan or around 500 USD, more than $15 a day. Cost of living there is cheap and this is middle income, not poor.