Poverty of what?

Truth is told that a large number of socio-economic policies that benefit the rich are made by the rich in the name of the poor. Who is the poor, however, is a question hotly debated in economics communities, at home and abroad.

There used to an old measure of poverty, based on the level of income in relative or absolute terms. Later, inspired by the Haq-Sen’s ideas on human development, the understanding of poverty evolved, and the global economics community started measuring poverty using multi-dimensional poverty indices, which included measurements of health, education, and living standards, although, to many a worthy minds, multi-dimensional poverty index is a good indicator of deprivation than a measure of poverty.

It is of little surprise that Pakistan’s consultant economists adopted multi-dimensional poverty index (MPI) as the latest unquestionable wisdom from abroad. Especially considering the fact that the MPI was inspired by the Haq-Sen’s ideas on human development, made it holier than it is.

Meanwhile, nobody in Pakistan bothered to ask the poor what poverty really is. Worse, for the all the talk of bottom-up development, nobody knows how Pakistanis in general would define poverty and what the understanding of poverty is across various cultures or ethnicities in Pakistan.

It is quite possible that the question ‘ghareeb kon’ (who is poor) will elicit a wide array of responses across various cultures or ethnicities; the solutions to end poverty may also vary. Yet there is little realization of the need to understand cultural notions of poverty.

Culture, box standard economists say, is a slippery slope. They don’t want to touch it with a ten foot pole, arguably because economists these days are mostly trained in quantitative framework, and their training is by large divorced from the social-cultural basis of society.

But a growing body of research points to the need to put culture on the poverty research agenda. For instance, in their 2002 paper (titled Identity and schooling: Some lessons for the economics of education), the Nobel laureate, George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton argued that whether students invest in schooling depends in part on their “cultural identity”.

Developing a cultural understanding of poverty may be a complicated affair; and in Pakistan even more so, given the dearth of social scientists and scarce funding for social science research. But the question Pakistani economists need to ask themselves is whether complicated thinking is a luxury or a necessity.