What a Person Is Able to Be

Abstract

In The Wealth of Nations , Adam Smith paused over a shirt. A linen shirt, he observed, is not strictly a necessity of life; the Greeks and Romans lived comfortably without linen. But in the Europe of his day, a creditable working man would be ashamed to appear in public without one. Custom had made it a necessary, and the want of it a sign of disgraceful poverty. Two centuries later, Amartya Sen picked the shirt up again and used it to settle an argument that had divided the study of poverty for a generation. Was poverty absolute, a matter of falling below a fixed minimum, or relative, a matter of falling behind one's neighbours? In a 1983 paper in Oxford Economic Papers , with the dry title "Poor, Relatively Speaking", Sen answered that it was both, and that the confusion came from measuring in the wrong place. Poverty, he argued, is absolute in the space of capabilities: the ability to appear in public without shame is the same need in every century.