Poverty is a subjective perspective

Why do social "scientists" assume that "poverty" is an adverse condition? Whether "poverty" is adverse or not, would appear, by all counts, to be a subjective perception, of how one reflects that their needs/values are met.

What is the price of a commodity in the market, other than the aggregation of demand in regard to the aggregation of the supply in the vicinity of where the exchange is desired to take place?

The price of any good therefore, is a result of an aggregation of all of the market decisions by individuals in the market place, and thus, the "price" of a good, comes about as what most people are willing to sacrifice in exchange to obtain the good; this exchange of goods presumes each party approves of the exchange at the time of exchange and believes they will be able to better meet-their-needs/satisfy-their-desires than if the exchange were not to take place.

Ipso facto, the "value" to one party from an exchange is a subjective affectation/value of the party. The value of a material good is subjective/relative to the valuing individual, who desires the good, more than that which they would exchange for the good.

Therefore, an aggregation of material abundance necessary to satisfy the individuals wants/needs is subjective/relative to that individual.

Therefore the accumulated value of a person's personal possessions as represented by their market "price" are in no way measures of how the individual values her possessions or how those material goods meets her needs.

A woman in the wildness could be meeting all of her needs; she could have perfect satisfaction living in isolation, owning nothing more than a few hand tools. She could prefer this lifestyle to all others and therefore, could in no way be said to live in "poverty" in any meaningful sense.

Yet a man with a "wealth" of gold in the same wilderness could be very unsatisfied with his condition. Though he carries with him great wealth of other items, his hunger, thirst, and isolation could be very unsatisfactory to him, such that he would, if given the opportunity, exchange all of his gold, to be taken out of the wilderness and taken back to London where he would be more satisfied.


Therefore, IF "poverty" is to be more than an arbitrarily assigned value of possessions, it must be considered as a subjective perspective of the satisfaction of the individual's needs, and therefore "material equality" as a standard of justice, is necessarily, an irrational premise.










“...the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

-John Maynard Keynes
[the irony is, that John Maynard Keynes would BECOME THAT DEFUNCT ECONOMIST]