Poverty Analysis Quotes

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

I've been working on issues of poverty for more than 20 years, and so it's ironic that the problem that and question that I most grapple with is how you actually define poverty. What does it mean?

Finally I got to the point where I said, I'd like to start a project where we can actually talk about race and poverty, not through the lens of a particular case, but much more broadly.

The World Bank is the monopoly provider of poverty data and, partly due to a leadership change there, the World Bank's reporting has been heavily on the rosy side since about 2000. The Bank's cultivation of an upbeat picture affords a very interesting lesson in statistics and how you can, depending on which numbers you present and how you present them, create a more positive or more negative impression of the evolution of poverty.

I hear, 'But why do poor people make such bad decisions?' But actually, their decision-making can be far more complex than that of the better-off in many ways. They're not financially illiterate: they're constantly weighing up choices based on the reality of poverty. Somehow the international development community has resisted accepting this.

Like navigation markings in unknown waters, definitions of poverty need to be distinctive and unambiguous. A definition that is not precise is as bad as no definition at all.

If we cannot accurately measure poverty, we surely cannot accurately measure our efforts to tackle it.

The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.