In an arti­cle where the some­what con­tro­ver­sial philoso­pher Peter Singer—author of Famine, Afflu­ence and Moral­ity—argues that the teach­ing of the issues sur­round­ing world poverty should not be con­fined to spe­cial­ist courses and should be an edu­ca­tional pri­or­ity*, I was shocked by the clar­i­fi­ca­tion of some­thing I’ve oft won­dered about the def­i­n­i­tion of poverty:

The World Bank defines extreme poverty as not hav­ing enough income to meet the most basic human needs for ade­quate food, water, shel­ter, cloth­ing, san­i­ta­tion, health care, or edu­ca­tion. One widely quoted sta­tis­tic is that a bil­lion peo­ple are liv­ing on less than one U.S. dol­lar per day. That was the World Bank’s poverty line until 2008, when bet­ter data led to a new poverty line of $1.25 per day. As a result, the num­ber of peo­ple whose income puts them under the new poverty line is 1.4 billion.

On hear­ing the “$1.25 a day” fig­ure, the thought may cross your mind that in many devel­op­ing coun­tries it is pos­si­ble to live much more cheaply than in indus­tri­al­ized nations. But the World Bank has already made that adjust­ment in pur­chas­ing power, so those it clas­si­fies as liv­ing in extreme poverty are exist­ing on a daily total con­sump­tion of goods and ser­vices — whether earned or home­grown — com­pa­ra­ble to the amount of goods and ser­vices that can be bought in the United States for $1.25.

via Arts and Let­ters Daily

The orig­i­nal arti­cle has, since post­ing this, gone behind a pay­wall. Sim­i­lar infor­ma­tion can be found in Ran­dom House’s excerpt of his Singer’s lat­est book, The Life You Can Save.