Metrics, Politics and Definitions: How Poverty Lost Its Social Context and What This Means for Current Debates

Abstract

The notion of absolute subsistence poverty is uncontested. The idea of relative poverty as another genuine form of poverty, however, is less accepted. This paper will try to give some reasons for this phenomenon. I will show that a turning point was the moment when poverty was measured for the first time. With metrics and the search for hard facts on poverty, the idea of poverty being “relative” disappeared. Although poverty had been considered “relative” for centuries, the relativeness of poverty had to be deliberately re-discovered in the 1960s. Nonetheless, the idea of relative poverty is still side-lined by a monopolizing focus on absolute poverty in political debates—up to the degree that it is often questioned whether the label poverty is adequate at all when talking about relative poverty and its manifestations. Through focusing on three major texts on poverty and poverty measurement by Georg Simmel, Seebohm Rowntree and Peter Townsend, I will identify the historic and revolutionary change in the perception of poverty that resulted from the invention of poverty metrics and argue why it was and why it still is so difficult to (re-)embrace the idea of relative poverty.