Economists: “Oops, there aren’t 100 million below poverty in China; there’s 300 million.”

Keep in mind 300 million is about the population of the USA. I’m guessing that Li and Zhun, who made my flip flops, are among them.

From an Op-Ed piece by Eduardo Porter in Sunday’s NY Times:

Suddenly the number of Chinese who live below the World Bank’s poverty line of a dollar a day jumped from about 100 million to 300 million, roughly the size of the United States population. And if you thought China’s energy consumption was dismally inefficient, consider that it still uses the same amount of energy to produce 40 percent less stuff. The reassessment does not just involve China. India is also likely to be downsized. And, by the way, global growth has very likely been slower than we thought.