Economy depelopment problem

[Delphinoid_]

Not sure where you got those poverty numbers, I googled them and found that in 2021 Japan had a poverty rate of 15.4% and in 2022 the USA had 11.5%

I mentioned where the data came from in my other post.

You shouldn't necessarily trust the first text that Google returns: if you look at the website it's scraping the figures for Japan from for instance, it's a super sketchy paywalled website that doesn't cite any sources (except vaguely implying they're from the OECD, which none of the numbers they present actually appear to be from). I believe the poverty rate of 11.5% in the US also uses a different metric for measuring poverty rather than the "standard" one used by the OECD (an income below 50% of the median); in any case I couldn't find any source for it.

You should double-check in case I'm being stupid, but the OECD documents a figure of 15.7% for Japan and 18.1% for the US in 2018, and has no figures for Japan past this period. Naively speaking this seems to be the most fair way of comparing the poverty rates, since domestic studies might use incompatible definitions of poverty or might be from different time periods.

I actually did make a mistake in my other post, since I thought the figure of 15.4% for Japan was what the OECD listed for 2018, but actually it seems to be 15.7% (so closer to 16%, not 15%). My bad!!

In any case, I guess I've sort of introduced an arguably irrelevant tangent. When I mentioned that the main advantage of economic growth was in reducing poverty, this seems to primarily be true of developing countries, and in retrospect the link between economic growth and poverty isn't so clear for developed countries (since the US has higher economic growth and higher poverty rates than Japan, if the OECD data is to be trusted). In this case, if one only cares about economic growth for the sake of it, there may still be value in emulating stereotypical American attitudes to improve it (although this seems incredibly naive). I'm also not really sure why this kind of growth would necessarily be so important; I think a stable economy seems like a very fine thing to have.