Tom Smith (San Diego Law) has linked to an American Economic Review article showing the U.S. to have much lower "absolute" poverty than countries like Sweden and the U.K., where, according to this data, one out of three people were in poverty in "absolute" terms. The latter strikes me as rather extraordinary, which leads me to wonder how "absolute" poverty is being measured: I could not tell from the bit of the article I could access, but I will check on JSTOR during the week for the full article (or perhaps, in the interim, some more expert reader, or Tom himself, will clarify). If "relative poverty" measures--which appear to be the ones standardly employed in the literature--have the drawback of making really poor countries look better off than they really are, "absolute" poverty measures may, it appears, obscure the extent to which state subsidies provide for higher quality of life (if one of out three Swedes were really impoverished, how to explain all the other stats suggesting high levels of well-being?). But, at this stage, I'm just speculating, since I don't know the underlying definition of absolute poverty.
More in a bit...
UPDATE: A Scandinavian reaction here; I share the author's skepticism, though am witholding final judgment until I can look at the whole article and its definition of "absolute poverty."
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