Definition and measurement of poverty

Our conception of poverty applies to a society committed to the ideal of freedom. Freedom means that individuals are able to determine the sorts of lives they lead rather than having their lives determined for them. When individuals are free in this sense, it is not known in advance what sort of lives they will have or what those lives will require. Then, when we try to define poverty, we cannot mean a lack of a predetermined set of goods or income. Ways of thinking that define poverty as a lack of subsistence goods or of goods that will suffice to address basic needs falter where needs are not predetermined.

Thus, attempts to apply these notions to modern societies characterized by rapid transformation of needs, and by a breakdown of the hold of group norms on the shape of individual lives, are bound to fail. We see this failure in two broad areas. The first is the effort to define poverty by specifying a level of income separating the poor from the non-poor, as is done in the United States and has been tried elsewhere. The problem of freezing what is a fluid set of needs is seen in the crude method of coming up with a minimal food budget and multiplying by three. But even where the exact method differs, the need to revise repeatedly and fundamentally the method to calculate poverty lines shows the difficulties in the approach.