Who decides how much is enough? Why we want to ask thousands of Europeans what it takes not to be poor

Every poverty statistic hides a judgment call. Behind each headline - “one in five children at risk of poverty” - someone, somewhere, decided where “enough” ends and “too little” begins. How much food is enough? How much living space? How quickly should you be able to see a doctor before we call your situation deprivation?

Here is the uncomfortable part: that someone is almost never the public. It is an expert, a statistician, a committee. And this sits oddly with what social scientists have argued for decades. Back in 1967, the economist Victor Fuchs wrote that deciding who counts as poor should happen “openly through the political process”. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum placed public reasoning at the heart of how societies should think about living standards. Yet sixty years on, the thresholds in our poverty statistics still come from technical desks, not from the people they are meant to describe.

Pricing the basket

One of us (Michalis) has spent much of his research career on one half of this problem: making poverty statistics honest about what they actually measure. The official global numbers descend from the World Bank's famous “dollar-a-day” approach, whose line is set at the typical national poverty line of the world's poorest countries. It is a convenient number, but it cannot tell you what life at that line contains — how much food, what kind of housing, which services.

His ongoing project at King's College London, Unified Global Poverty (UGP, funded by UKRI Grant Ref: EP/X021149/1), takes the opposite route. It starts from a definition of absolute poverty that virtually every government on Earth has already signed: the UN's 1995 Copenhagen Declaration, which describes poverty as severe deprivation of food, safe water, sanitation, health, shelter, education and information, and expands it by the adequacy requirements of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. UGP translates that definition into a concrete basket - a healthy diet inspired by the EAT-Lancet reference, a place to live, schooling, health care - and then prices that basket, country by country, year by year, using local prices. The result is a poverty line you can open up and inspect: every item in it is visible, and every euro can be traced back to something a person actually needs.

But building baskets this way exposes the next problem. Someone still has to decide the quantities. Nutritional science can tell us how much protein a body needs - but how many square meters of housing does dignity require? How often should someone be able to meet or directly contact friends without being socially excluded? These are not technical questions. They are questions about what we, collectively, consider a decent minimum. And in every serious poverty framework today - including the EU's impressive new absolute poverty work, the ABSPO project - they are answered by experts and statistical procedures.