A Floating Poverty Line

“Sentimentality, as we have seen, finds expression in autonomous, pragmatically based decisions on right and wrong, and in the refusal to declare absolute standards on all matters, including poverty. What sometimes seems to be an intellectual vacuity in humanitarian polemics is associated with this trait, which we may think of as the propensity to define or to classify rather than to make judgments. As long as the conception of poverty is relative to what others have, the humanitarian retains his freedom to declare poor whomever he wishes” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 74).