The Logic of the Poverty Line

Abstract

Chapter 15 continues its engagement with the notion of the ‘poverty line’ introduced in Chap. 14. It is suggested in this chapter that a responsible use of language would dictate a view of the poverty line that has certain logical implications for the appropriate ‘space’ in which invariance of the poverty standard must be maintained. These logical entailments also have ethical consequences for how ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ we should be in specifying the poverty line, and what implications these decisions have for our diagnosis of the levels and trends of poverty in any concrete empirical setting.