Poverty is complicated.  It’s a phenomenon as old as humanity itself which has probably touched the vast majority of human lives, each in a subtly different way.  Its character has not been constant through history, but has changed as our lives and social structures have changed.  It varies in intensity and quality between countries and continents and has prompted varied responses from different religious, social, and political groups.  

And yet, we in the English-speaking world ask one remarkably simple term to capture all of that complexity.  The word “Poverty” is governed by pau-, a root from the Proto-Indo-European language believed to have been spoken widely in the late Neolithic age.  Pau- makes other things little.  Pau-ltry are the littlest animals that farmers deal with.  A pau-diatrician practices medicine on little people.  And pau-verty is the condition of having little. 

Simple, right?  To be poor is to have little.  But little of what?  I could be poor if I were lacking in access to food, clean water, economic opportunities, healthcare, or any number of other things.  Which of these is actually relevant to defining capital-p Poverty?  If it’s more than one of them, how should we decide how to weigh them against each other? 

One way to help this overburdened word express more nuance is to join it to another word with a preposition like of: poverty of resources, poverty of time, poverty of access.  Jesus even famously blessed the “poor in spirit.”  But the phenomenon that underlies all these terms still remains too rich to be captured by semantics.  It deserves empirical study, and has received it from many disciplines, from anthropology to philosophy to religion to mathematics. 

In this series of posts, we’ll look at some of the ways that researchers studying poverty have tried to define and measure it, and how those definitions have shaped our understanding of it.  But before we do that, I want to make the case that this kind of study is a worthwhile use of our resources.  Studying and measuring poverty are the key processes that help us to understand the nature of the problem and communicate it to others, and both of these are important ingredients in the efforts to eradicate it.  

UNDERSTANDING

Why should we measure poverty at all, instead of just working to eliminate it?  Why spend resources trying to understand something that we want to get rid of?  Firefighters don’t waste any time measuring the temperature of the flames they're trying to put out.  Police officers don’t wait to arrest their suspects in order to understand criminal behavior in the real world.  And a doctor wouldn’t spend a few hours studying a person with a violent allergic reaction before administering epinephrine. 

If these analogies seem overblown, let me assure you that they’re not.  The poverty that exists in the world today causes children to die of easily preventable diseases.  It creates economic conditions that incite families to make dangerous journeys of thousands of miles.  It is responsible for crime and terrorism as much as, if not more than, wicked ideologies.  It is not something which you or I would wait a few years to solve in order to study it, if a solution were available. 

But that is the complicating factor: “if a solution were available.” Experts disagree about the most effective ways to solve global poverty, and even about its extent.  And it’s difficult to implement solutions without having a broad understanding of the nature of the problem. Doctors don’t wait to treat their patients with proven cures, but they do spend years studying diseases and conducting clinical trials in order to show which treatments work.  And firefighters don’t wait to put out the fires in front of them, but materials engineers work tirelessly to make sure that they don’t start in the first place. 

Individuals and organizations that measure poverty perform a similar function. They examine what exactly is meant by the term “poor” when it gets applied to a particular group of people in a certain time and place. Then they try to make inferences about the conditions that allow poverty of a specific kind to exist, and what interventions might be effective in reducing it. All of these lines of inquiry–what are usually, and sometimes derisively, called basic research–provide data to those on the front lines working to reduce poverty.  And without that data, they run the risk of spending their resources in ineffective and potentially even harmful ways.  

I think we Christians who hope to do something about the problem of global poverty should conceive of its measurement as an act of love–a necessary condition for intervening in it effectively.  When Jesus gave us the Great Commandment in the Gospel of Mark, he didn’t give a dictionary definition of love.  But he did break it down into the four faculties through which a person can express it:

“The most important [commandment] is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

The study of poverty is a way of loving our neighbors with our whole minds. Because before we can love anyone well, we need to understand them.  We need to have a lot of information about them and their circumstances in order to act in a way that will benefit them.  Understanding the poverty of others is the first step towards walking in solidarity with them.  

COMMUNICATING

In a 2005 book on poverty in Mexico, Miguel Szekely wrote: "A number can awaken consciences; it can mobilize the reluctant, it can ignite action, it can generate debate; it can even, in the best of circumstances, end a pressing problem." He recognized that the numbers that we use to aggregate and represent the poverty of others can be powerful tools in advocating for them.  Statistics have a way of bringing even large, complex social issues into sharp relief, of changing problems that previously seemed vaguely discomforting into outrageous injustices in the popular imagination. 

Let me give an example.  According to the World Health Organization, Tuberculosis caused the deaths of about 1,250,000 people in 2023.  TB is a disease which has received extensive study since the bacterium which causes it was discovered in 1882. We have invented vaccines and robust, inexpensive treatments for it, and accurate testing is widely available. For all intents and purposes, it has been eradicated in developed countries like the US.  And yet, 2-3 people die of TB every minute on average. 

Those numbers have a way of distilling the outrage we ought to feel about TB, which is otherwise invisible in countries where it isn’t transmitted.  The idea that 2-3 families are rent with grief over the death of a loved one every minute because of a completely preventable disease makes the problem immediate, proximate, urgent.  It gives unfamiliar people insight into the nature of the problem, helps us develop a shared appreciation for its scale and scope, and can help catalyze the change in attitudes needed to solve it.  

This may just seem like an exercise in marketing.  But the best marketing tells the truth in the most effective and compelling way possible.  It respects the trust of its audience by refusing to guilt-trip or cast aspersions, but it asks that audience to consider what the right response to the truth is.  What should we do if it really is the case that 2-3 people are dying of a preventable disease every minute?  There may be many valid responses to that question.  But my hope was that the marketing would convince you that “nothing” is not one of them. 

We can do the same marketing for every lower-case-p poverty that exists in the world today–but only once we have done the work to measure and understand them.  And that marketing is just as important as the basic research.  It may take only a few researchers and front-line workers to implement effective solutions, but it’s going to require everyone who enjoys some degree of wealth to fund those efforts.  

DEFINING

Which returns us to the problem we examined at the beginning of this piece.  There are many factors that contribute to a person’s wellbeing over the course of their life–and many corresponding lower-case-p poverties.  Some of these are easy to put a number to, like annual income, total wealth, and years of formal education, but others can be very difficult.  How might you quantify a person’s overall satisfaction with their social life?  Or their sense of spiritual fulfillment and purpose?  Or even something more mundane, like their access to affordable, healthy food?  And if you did, how would you weigh each of these factors in your assessment of the capital-p Poverty?

In the next post, we’ll begin with the simplest and one of the most widely used ways of doing this: income-based approaches. 

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about the global TB crisis, I suggest the excellent resources available at Partners in Health.