To see what other people thought of various poverty-related issues, our team created a blog (in essence an online journal that allows users to comment on the entries) at http://adollaraday.blogspot.com. On this site, we have collected several of the best blog entries and comments, and placed them in various sections. In these blog sections, posts refers to original blog entries, while comments refer to user comments to these entries.

This blog section contains one post, on the definition of poverty.

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The Post (October 9, 2005):
Unfortunately for economists and humanitarians the world over, there is no concrete definition of poverty. This means that it is very hard to accurately measure and assess poverty as well, because no one really knows exactly what poverty is. Read More...

Today, two methods of defining/measuring poverty seem to be used more often than others: the Human Development Index (HDI), and the '$1-a-day'/'$2-a-day' indicator.

The dollar-a-day indicators are the simplest form of poverty measurement that can be easily used on a global level. Anyone with an income of less than $1 a day is deemed to be in 'extreme poverty.' People with an income of less that $2 a day are in 'poverty.' This definition of poverty was pioneered by the World Bank Group, and is widely used in their reports.

The HDI, on the other hand, was created through a collaboration by renowned economists Amartya Sen and Mahbub ul Haq and the United Nations. The HDI uses three sub-indexes to calculate the overall Index of a country: one for life expectancy, one for education (which itself consists of two weighted indexes, one for school enrollment, one for adult literacy), and one for GDP per capita. The theory behind the HDI is that income is not the ONLY reliable indicator of poverty. If someone makes $770/year but is illiterate and has a life expectancy of 45 years really better off than someone else who makes $670/year but IS literate and has a life expectancy of, say, 60 years?

While these two methods of poverty measurement seem to work well - after all, they are very quantitative and lend themselves to statistical use - isn't there more to poverty than just numbers? To really convey what poverty is, organizations should shift toward definitions more like the one that appears on the World Bank's 'Poverty Overview' page (though the '$1 a day' is used in all its publications):

This, to me, is a much deeper and meaningful way of looking at poverty. While I recognize the need to be able to 'measure' poverty, I feel that these kind of defintions can be used as well. Surely there is enough room for both quantitative AND qualitative poverty definitions. Collapse...

Comment #1: (Respondent #1)
Your comment brings to mind a widely used health measure that is both valid and reliable as well as subjective. Read More... To measure health status, researchers often ask individuals to simply rate their health: as excellent, good, fair, or poor. Though subjective, this rating also turns out to be a fairly accurate measure of a person's health status. I wonder if something comparable is available or would work to assess poverty? What would one ask? 'How ecomonically secure are you?' Collapse...

Comment #2: (Respondent #2)
Poverty is many things to many people. Read More... It may be a cop-out, but to paraphrase a more famous statement: "I may not know exactly how to define it - but I know it when I see it. And I am ashamed of what I see." Collapse...

Comment #3: (Respondent #3)
I've read many different definitions of poverty, many of them highly technical and far removed from the people experiencing it. Read More... These formal definitions are important; they allow us to track progress toward the alleviation of poverty. But in a way they offer a shield between those who are in poverty and those who are not. The BBC News website, reporting on the drought and subsequent food shortages in Niger, offered [a] definition [in its article], "How Many Dying Babies Make a Famine?" [by David Loyn]. Collapse...

Comment #4: (Respondent #4)
I don’t have a better definition of poverty to offer, but I can suggest a different perspective: Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist and development expert, has made much progress by focusing on what he’s called the “undocumented” or “invisible” assets of the poor... Read More... A champion of property rights reforms that can document those undocumented assets, and in the meantime, of the “gray” economy, de Soto has had successes in Latin America, the Carribean, and Africa and has won many admirers—among them, the World Bank. see, for instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto_(economist).

De Soto certainly also has his critics. But for the purposes of your question he may be interesting because his focus suggests a measure of poverty: the higher the presence of “undocumented” assets, the higher the level of poverty… or at least of relative poverty. Clearly, as your post suggests, there are other measures—more absolute measures—of poverty that go to the ability to meet basic human needs. But de Soto’s metric is interesting to me as an auxillary gauge, if only because it estimates the potential impact-the benefit-of eliminating the poverty that it measures. Collapse...

Comment #5: (Respondent #5)
It's even a broader issue than you raise. Thinking about poverty as an absolute measure (i.e., $1 or $2/day) does not provide sufficient context about the surroundings. Read More... There are several people within the US who live in what I'd describe as relative poverty who make minimum wages. While clearly not as immediately life threatening as those living in extreme poverty around the world, as Hurricane Katrina has shown us, living in even relative poverty can have dire consequences. Collapse...

Comment #6: (Respondent #6)
It is true that there is poverty within the US, and some of it is quite bad. Unfortunately, the situation in the undeveloped world is much worse than it is in the US. Read More...

If we can fix the poverty situation in the US, we can fix a decent amount of poverty. If we fix the poverty situation in Asia and Africa, to the amount in America, we can improve that to an amazing level.

While raising the average income in Asia to the US poverty line is nearly impossible, we must realize that any decrease in poverty is good.

The $1 a day/ $2 a day factors are necessary because of the huge difference that a dollar does between the US and India. Collapse...

Comment #7: (Respondent #7)
I agree that the scale of fixing poverty in Africa and Asia is, statistically, much bigger than in the US. But I would ask you to think of the problem as an 'and' issue, not an 'either/or' issue. Read More... Poverty is crippling to anyone who is unlucky enough to experience it. So 'fixing' it in one place can/ should provide options to fix it in other places--just by doing a bit of search and reapply. I am not trying to make the task of fixing it smaller, but to point out the choice in where you start. Closer to yourself may be easier to reach but harder in terms of dollars/effort needed, while farther from you may appear to give a bigger return....but with the same longer term barriers to overcome. Thus we must do both--the near AND the far. Collapse...

Comment #8: (Respondent #8)
Sometimes, different definitions of poverty are used for different purposes but for very good reasons. Read More... For instance, you might find out what the Grameen Bank's definition of poverty is. Or rather, find out how the Grameen Bank determines whether a prospective borrower is poor enough to be qualified for a Grameen Bank loan. In general, the definition relies on observation. Does the prospective borrower have more than one pot? Does she own more than one saree? Does she own the spot of land on which she lays her head at night? And so on. This method is a more accurate and rapid way of determining how poor a poor person is than would be any listing of annual income or assets with specific monetary values attached. This measure also translates the human stress of poverty into easily comparable, and easily understood, terms. It's an observation-based version of the PPP (purchasing power parity) system economists use to compare a consumer's ability to buy products on a given income, but in different economies, using different currencies. Collapse...

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