Critical discussion: definition of poverty as suggested by experts 

 Debates on poverty have been bedeviled by an artificial academic formalism, which has insisted that there must be an agreed core of meaning, that contradictory examples showed that certain uses were ‘right’ while others were ‘wrong’, and that disagreement was based not on a difference of interpretation or the focus of concern, but in a failure to understand the true nature of the problem. Poverty does not, however, have a single meaning. It has a series of meanings, linked through a series of resemblances.

In the social sciences, poverty is commonly understood in at least twelve discrete senses. The senses overlap; many of the main protagonists in the debate take two or three positions simultaneously. They are discrete because they can be logically separated so that circumstances that apply in one sense do not necessarily apply in others.