Measures of standard of living and of poverty are plagued by the obvious gap between the relative simplicity of the indices and the infinite complexity of what they are trying to capture. Some trade-off between the simplicity desirable in an index, and real-life complexity is inevitable. The...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the case for viewing people as individuals, in a public policy context, and the case for viewing them as members of a family. In doing so, the author starts with the facts about low wage workers, unemployed workers and the welfare system. Section 3...

Our starting point is to re-examine the concept of poverty, in particular its ethical dimensions, in order to understand more clearly exactly what poverty lines are intended to capture. Our concern with poverty lines is twofold. First, they are not credible measures of poverty, because they...