Saturday, February 24, 2007

What Is Poverty?

The Economist:

Now that poverty means a risk of obesity, rather than starvation, it is harder to decide what constitutes the minimal decent standard of living a society should provide. On the one hand, there are those who feel that the minimum should basically be some fixed fraction of the top incomes—in essence, that it is indecent for anyone to be more than X times richer than the worst off. On the other hand, there are those who believe, as P.J. O'Rourke so pithily put it, that "the biblical injunction is to clothe the poor, not style them."

(HT Joe Carter)

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