Existing international poverty metrics, including the World Bank’s International Poverty Line and the United Nations Development Programme’s Multidimensional Poverty Index, suffer from several flaws, including that they are incapable of revealing gender disparity, are insensitive to deprivations in a range of important dimensions, and are morally arbitrary or unjustified. The project of constructing a new measure of deprivation is an important one, but must be undertaken in consultation with those who are most acquainted with poverty and hardship.

Over the last two years, across 18 sites in six countries (Angola, Malawi, Mozambique, Fiji, the Philippines, and Indonesia), poor men and women have been engaged in participatory research to develop a new measure of deprivation. This lecture will briefly review the results of this participatory research and explicate a proposal for a new measure of deprivation based on these findings.

Thomas Pogge is Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University, and Professor in Philosophy at ANU. He has published widely on Kant, Rawls, and global justice. His recent books include World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, and Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric. Professor Pogge will be joined by Sharon Bessel, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Crawford School, and Scott Wisor, Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, who are also working on this project.

This lecture is presented by the Development Policy Centre at the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University.

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