ABSTRACT
In today’s globalizing, extensively networked, and, by extension, complexly interconnected world, our reading and analysis of poverty should be more complicated than the simple assumption that, because one is deprived of certain countable things that others have, such a person should be depicted as poor. Throughout history, different societies have had diverse qualitatively but more so quantitatively attached realities of poverty, and those understandings and/or measurements have been revised based on the unofficial continuum of the gap between the haves and have-nots. This is indeed the case of developed countries vis-à-vis the developing world, which itself is no longer as descriptively tenable as it used to be. While historically Western Europe, Mexico-less North America, and Japan used to be known as the developing world, now we are not only dealing with many potential candidates for this category (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and selectively China and Malaysia), but we certainly see the need to redo the meaning of developed, developing, and underdeveloped. In actual fact, what we are dealing with is a world in which all three categories could exist in one country (e.g., China). Even in the United States of America, the gap between the well to do and the poor is more complicated than ever, and especially with this last recession, complemented by the problematic notions of how much individuals and families need to live viable lives. So the simplistic assumption of quantifying poverty and from there defining effectively is more complicated than ever. Still, one distinction which seems to hold ground in defining the claim to be a developed country could be the size of a nation’s middle class in relation to the total population.
