The Aff’s measurement of poverty is inherently problematic and kills solvency by adopting universal standards that unnecessarily complicate things and make the implementation of universal social programs impossible

This rather extensive chapter provided an overview of money metric approaches to measuring poverty, which are considered the most precise and restrictive, and serve as the cornerstone of various development goals by most international organisations. The aim was to demonstrate how even these approaches are inherently arbitrary, to the extent that they are unable to provide any reliable indication of whether basic needs are being met and how this might be changing over time. This is before consideration of all of the problems associated with international poverty comparisons, with reference to the ever-altering, one-dollar-or-whatever-a-day purchasing-power-parity poverty lines of the World Bank. Even if we accept the arbitrariness of a line but then adopt this as a means of evaluation, this merely kicks the problem forward into the classic quandary of whether poverty trends over time reflect actual changes or else errors of adjustment and even of conception. This intrinsic arbitrariness is ideological given the fundamentally normative and political character of the wide range of choices that are involved in producing data sets, and in setting lines and adjusting them over time. The fact that they are so arbitrary also renders them prone to political manipulations in application. The evaluative emphasis of these approaches essentially sidesteps the problem that, once applied to the social and political economy realities of policy-making and actual distributions of benefits and poverty relief, the problems of these poverty measures become compounded by social and power relations. Indeed, in this respect, official poverty lines need to be understood first and foremost as the outcome of complex processes of political contestation and the balance of power between various contending power factions that find an interest in weighing in on these measures. Money-metric poverty measures nonetheless remain attractive because they yield exact, seemingly objective and scientific statistics, in a technical manner that can be compared and analysed with an ever-expanding battery of increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques. Yet, we must ask what we are buying into when we adopt these approaches. At the very least, we must engage in them with awareness of their fundamentally ideological and political nature, as well as with transparency, honesty and humility as to their limitations. This is all the more important because these measures do remain as one valuable means to aggregate within one important dimension of poverty, among a range of other imperfect options, and aggregation is also a problem with other approaches. They do have biases and it is essential to understand these biases in order to compensate for them, but they reveal very important information, even though they do not reveal all of the information that is relevant to understand poverty, nor were they necessarily conceived to do so. The danger of diluting this information with attempts to add in different dimensions and elements intended to better reflect wellbeing or other objectives is that this original information then becomes obscured or even lost. Indeed, this obscurity might even advantage powerful economic interests and, despite the progressive intentions, dilute our ability to understand and contest certain core aspects of power and wealth in modern economies as they manifest for poor people. In the third section of this chapter, an elaboration was given on how the standard absolute money-metric poverty measures are arguably prone to a secular tendency to gradually underestimate absolute poverty over time in the context of structural and institutional changes associated with development and in particular during the recent neoliberal phase of change. One fundamental source of bias is based on declining terms of trade for food, which gives greater relative prominence to non-food essential needs over time. The second is in terms of the shift from self-provisioning to commoditised consumption, which in many respects overestimates the value of the latter relative to the functional value of previous subsistence modes of livelihood. The last is more proximate to the neoliberal era of commoditised social provisioning, in particular the substantial commoditisation and privatisation of health and education. A fundamental problem with money-metric measures of poverty is that they are biased by design against universalistic and decommoditised forms of social provisioning, such that a move towards greater commoditisation can actually be reflected as an improvement in poverty, all else held constant. Indeed, in the face of global productive capacity, if anything it is surprising that so much of the world’s population still subsists under or just above such minimally defined food-based poverty lines. Part of this is undoubtedly related to agrarian conditions in much of the Global South, where peasant farmers struggle to get by on the low food prices received for their output on shrinking per-person plots of land (if they produce a surplus), relative to rising prices in the range of other social needs (such as in health care and schooling, or else in inputs to production). However, much is not agrarian, particularly as poor people increasingly move out of such conditions, albeit bringing their poverty with them. Rather, as discussed in Chapter 6, much of it is related to the valuing of labour more generally, even as it is integrated into value chains that generate enormous value for those who control them. In this sense, workers integrated within such chains are still living under the predicament posited by classical economists such as Malthus, Ricardo and Marx, who assumed that workers’ wages would always be squeezed down to a level of subsistence, that is, subsistence minimally defined by the price of food. Because absolute poverty lines continue to be established by the price of food, such tendencies could ironically be reflected as declining poverty rates correspondent to declining real prices for food. This brings us back to the crucial question of social needs and how these are calculated by absolute lines. The mission is not impossible, but it is one that requires much more nuance and context specificity, as well as a much greater broadening of the scope of what we should include in the basket that is used to set the poverty line, all of which the World Bank has refused to do up to the present, despite some of the recommendations from its own high-level Commission (WB 2017a). As a result, we are left with poverty standards that are minimalist, whittled down to the necessities for mere food survival and that are arguably depreciating over time because of the logic of their construction, rather than anything that approaches a standard of decency or that can match the profound transformations that have been witnessed around the world over the past half-century. However, even with the inclusion of a broader range of social needs, the fundamental weakness of these lines remains with the question of social goods such as health and education. Such goods render the comparability of absolute lines very questionable across contexts with very different welfare and social provisioning systems, in particular between those with more universalistic provisioning, free at the point of use and funded progressively through direct taxation, versus the less-universalistic systems, with user fees at the point of use and high degrees of stratified privatised provisioning. Ultimately, such differences cannot and should not be resolved through comparative poverty measures but instead need to be subjected to social and political debate regarding the types of societies we wish to inhabit together. For these types of reasons, the international comparison line based on the PPP conversions used by the World Bank are to a large extent meaningless for the purpose of actually understanding local realities facing poor people in any particular context. At the very least, they muddy the water much more than they clarify, especially for the comprehension of ordinary people, and they render intangible and inaccessible a subject that should be a matter of national public debate and deliberation. In particular, making the arbitrariness of poverty lines more apparent would provide the basis for contestation by the poor or those representing the poor, whereas the opacity and obscurity of these measures has a tendency to disempower such contestation if only through the force of sheer incomprehension.