Setting ‘poverty thresholds’: whose experience counts?

Abstract

According to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), poverty eradication in the 21st century means everyday access to decent health care, education and livelihoods, political participation, social inclusion, a clean and safe environment, and more. These are aspirational goals that together support a decent quality of life. Crossing monetary, ‘poverty thresholds’ may enable such goals. Most estimates of ‘where’ the monetary threshold lies derive the estimates circularly from monetary costs of living. The link to quality of living is thereby made by fiat, untested empirically in everyday human experience. We already know we can measure income independently of middle class quality of life, and probe for relationships between the two. Why not for poverty too? A quantity of money where quality of life changed would mark a genuine threshold required for example to escape from poverty traps. Using this approach, studies in quality of work–life, using multiple indicators, have identified at least three thresholds where quality of life ticked markedly upwards, including inter-threshold ranges where gradients went from zero to positive. The concept of work–life balance suggests that this approach may be usefully extended to include quality health care, education, and other SDGs in sustainability science.