ABSTRACT
Of the many topics discussed in this book, poverty is one of the most difficult to define and explain, as well as being one of the most difficult to solve. The concept of poverty is similar to ethical goals like freedom or equality. These terms involve multiple dimensions, multiple definitions, and alternative measurements. As the first quote above indicates, poverty is not necessarily a lack of real income. The lack of access to publicly provided services such as education also provides evidence of poverty. Even if poverty is interpreted as inadequate income, its meaning remains controversial. According to some common measures, income poverty is virtually non-existent in the affluent countries of North America and Western Europe. According to other common measures, U.S. poverty ranges from 12 percent to as much as 20 percent of the population. There is also a conceptual dispute about the relationship between poverty and inequality that affects our interpretation of poverty. Finally, most poverty measures divide a nation’s population into two groups: the poor and the non-poor. For example, a single American under 65 earning $195 per week is officially poor but another single American earning $196 per week is not. Yet it is quite clear that poverty is not a yes or no problem, since some officially poor households are far better off than others. If we can’t agree on what the problem is, any debate over possible solutions to the problem becomes particularly difficult to resolve.
