Deprivation vs. Attribution in Defining Poverty

Sen (1999) makes an important turn in the way that the condition of poverty is defined and understood, and sets up an important difference between the meaning of poverty in the United States and in the United Nations and affiliated organizations. In the United States we tend to define poverty both from a utilitarian perspective and along a continuum of a single attribute that can be easily aggregated (the two tend to often go together). Poverty is utilitarian because it makes the assumption that wealth is tied to happiness. Those who have less wealth are necessarily less happy or context, less able to meet their material needs. Poverty is something that must be addressed from the perspective of material wealth, in particular increase in income, and all policy that is meant to address poverty issues is at its base driven by increasing income (e.g. provide better education so that those in poverty will be able to get better jobs, provide health care assistance to businesses so that they will be able to hire more workers). Interventions are viewed solely from an instrumental perspective - what will thise intervention do to increase the likelihood that the individual will be able to increase material wealth. One of the dangers in defining poverty along the lines of a single attribute is that it becomes part of the definition of the individual. That is a person in poverty is a person who does not have enough material wealth to achieve a level of happiness. It is very easy then to make this attribute a characteristic rather than a condition of the individual - it becomes who they are and something about the indvidual that can be "fixed." A second danger in defining poverty in this way is that the single attribute becomes a continuum along which you place individuals in order to determine their level of poverty. Comparisons between both societies and individuals become absolute where a person with a higher level of material wealth is considered to be in better condition vis a vis poverty than a person with a lower level of material wealth, and all judgments are made on this basis.

What is never taken into account as issues such as freedom, individual liberties, and individual differences. Most interesting of the three in the United States is individual liberties, because such a premium is put on this issue in public discourse, and it is very much what Rawls ( ) would describe as a "public good." To the contrary, usually when individual liberties are discussed in the context of poverty it is about taking away liberties "for their own good." Those who have less material wealth must be watched over and guided in the direction of greater wealth. Inherent in this position is the idea that any person who has lack of material wealth as a characteristic has in some way "failed" in society (a Malthusian position, but one that is either overtly or covertly taken across the political spectrum). A second issue almost never mentioned in the more utilitarian definition of poverty is freedom - in particular the way that limits of freedom are both a cause and a consequence of poverty. Those in poverty are often considered to have the same freedom as those who are not in poverty - if there is a lack of freedom it is in some way based on personal choice or personal actions.

Sen offers a counter to this utilitarian vision of poverty. He suggests that poverty is based far more on deprivation, unfreedom, the inability to achieve critical capabilities because of social circumstances, than on any one single attribute.