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Most articles on poverty start with a definition of poverty. Unfortunately, exact definitions are often chosen with a view to reaching political conclusions. Poverty is an emotive word which carries political weight. Clearly poverty is about people who are poor. Clearly many people feel that poverty is a bad thing which should be addressed.
However, poverty may mean people who are relatively poor, absolutely poor or something in between.
Relative Poverty: Most statistical bodies use the word poverty to mean people who are more than a certain percentage poorer than average. The difficulties with this definition are:
1) Which "average" is most appropriate? Does average mean the average level of wealth in that community, in that country or in the world? If poverty means compared to the average in that country, then a US citizen (of which officially 30-40 million are poor) who struggles to afford a computer may be "poorer" than someone in Malawi who struggles to feed their children at all.
2) Use of poverty in this way makes poverty the same issue as social inequality. Whereas almost everyone thinks that whatever they mean by "poverty" is a bad thing, social inequality is not necessarily an entirely bad thing. Societies where completely abolishing social inequality is made a priority are typically communist, and generally unsuccessful.
In conclusion, use of poverty to mean "relative poverty" tends to make "abolish of poverty" a confusion of philanthropy and left wing politics.
Absolute Poverty. Fundamentally, there is a great appeal to having an absolute definition of poverty. "Poverty" could be defined as being unacceptably poor, and society could work to get reduce the number of people who were that poor. Unfortunately it quickly becomes apparent that our judgements on absolute are culturally based and shift over time and between places; what is "unacceptably poor" changes over time.
All of this confusion serves to hide the real issue. There are people in the world today are so poor that many other people would feel they should make a reasonable effort to alleviate it (provided of course that they knew about it and thought they could help).
Further reading
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