"Do we get enough of a diagnosis of individual in poverty by comparing the individual's income with a socially given poverty-line income? What about the person with an income well above the poverty line who suffers from an expensive illness (requiring, say, kidney dialysis)? Is deprivation not ultimately a lack of opportunity to lead a minimally acceptable life, which can be influenced by a number of considerations, including of course personal income, but also physical and environmental characteristics and other variables...?"
That is from Amartya Sen's New Introduction (2017) to the expanded edition of his classic COLLECTIVE CHOICE AND SOCIAL WELFARE.
The original edition of this work is dated 1970.
The point Sen is making in that quote is in a sense a trivial one. OF COURSE, you might want to say, the mere numerical fact of an income level, contrasted with some arbitrary poverty-line number does not give us a full picture of the condition of any particular "individual in poverty." Of COURSE there is more involved.
Why even make a point of it?
There is an obvious reason why Sen makes a point of it, and once you are cognizant of that point you understand a fair amount about Sen.
I don't find the reason that Sen makes a point of it to be obvious.
ReplyDeleteIn general the most worrisome of all premises are the unacknowledged premises, and indeed the premises that those who engage in them will hotly deny if made explicit.
ReplyDeleteIn developmental economics, there is a great deal of talk about how large the middle class of a specific nation is, how it could be made larger, and this inevitably leads to discussion of how that might be measured. Much of this talk involves adjusting for the fact that a particular country's currency might be too volatile or inflated even to draw lines on that basis that everyone would regard as arbitrary, yet stil somehow useful.
The economists proceed with "how can we account for those metric difficulties" rather than "what is there more substantive about the situation we might discuss."
One solution might be: define as "middle class" any family with at least one large appliance at its command -- a working washing machine, for example. That family not only has an asset valuable for its own use but one that could be the productive center of a "micro-business" in the neighborhood, using whatever the people of that neighborhood happen in fact to use in their exchanges.
Thinking in that way is less quantitative and so involves abandoning lazy quant-oriented habits.
For such reasons as that it is worthwhile making a point of the fact that a numerical line doesn't tell us much about deprivation, or about escape from the same.