A/HRC/44/40 percent,14 South Africa, 18.9 percent versus 55 percent,15 and Mexico, 1.7 percent versus 41.9 percent.16 11. This section reviews many of the IPL’s principal shortcomings, as reflected in the “fierce technical debate” surrounding it.17 Whatever its merits, the IPL should not be treated as the pre-eminent basis on which to determine whether or not the world community is eradicating extreme poverty, let alone as the benchmark for SDG 1 on poverty. The line is set so low and arbitrarily as to guarantee a positive result and to enable the United Nations, the World Bank, and many commentators to proclaim a Pyrrhic victory. A scandalous lack of ambition 12. The IPL is explicitly designed to reflect a staggeringly low standard of living, well below any reasonable conception of a life with dignity. Under the measure, one can ‘escape’ from poverty without an income anywhere near that required to achieve an adequate standard of living, including access to healthcare and education. This standard is a world apart from the one set by human rights law and embodied in the UN Charter. 13. A number of alternatives illustrate the possibility of a very different approach. For example, David Woodward has proposed a “right-based poverty line” consistent with a minimum morally acceptable standard of living. He found that achieving an average infant mortality rate in 2010 would require a line 4.2 times higher than the Bank’s then-IPL.18 In 2006, Peter Edward proposed an “ethical poverty line” that would enable people to achieve normal human life expectancy, which produced a global headcount around three times higher than the IPL at the time.19 Failure to achieve frugality 14. While the Bank defends the line on the basis that it is intended to cover an intentionally meager set of basic needs, critics question how the line could cover even that. Robert Allen criticizes the line’s reliance on 15 mostly tropical countries, rather than using any direct assessment of basic needs, thus ignoring higher spending on essentials like fuel and clothing in cold countries, and housing in wealthy countries. Using an austere approach to determine the lowest possible cost of a balanced 2,100 calorie diet and allowing for three square meters of living space, he calculates higher lines of $2.63 in developing countries and $3.96 in highincome countries.20 His research generates a poverty headcount 1.5 times larger than the Bank’s line, and suggests that simply meeting food or housing costs under that line could be extremely difficult, if not impossible, in certain countries. 21 15. Sanjay Reddy has long argued that the Bank’s approach is neither meaningful nor reliable, in part because it is not directly connected to the cost of basic needs and does not reflect “any ordinary language conception of poverty.”22 He draws attention to the minimum food cost figure calculated by the US government of $5.04 per day in 2011, which vastly exceeds the $1.90 that the Bank implies should have allowed a person to escape extreme poverty in the United States.23 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 2016 figures. United States Census Bureau, “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2016,” 12 September 2017; World Bank, “Poverty headcount ratio at $1.90 a day (2011 PPP) (% of population) - United States.” 2014 figures. World Bank, “Poverty & Equity Brief: South Africa,” April 2020. 2018 figures. World Bank, “Poverty & Equity Brief: Mexico,” April 2020. Alex Cobham, The Uncounted (2020), p. 31. David Woodward, How Poor is ‘Poor’?: Towards a Right-based Poverty Line (2010), p. 38. Peter Edward, “The Ethical Poverty Line: A Moral Quantification of Absolute Poverty,” Third World Quarterly, vol. 27 (2006), p 388. Robert Allen, “Absolute Poverty: When Necessity Displaces Desire,” American Economic Review, vol. 107 (2017), p. 3713. Allen, “Absolute Poverty,” pp. 3716-17. Rahul Lahoti and Sanjay Reddy, “$1.90 Per Day: What Does it Say?,” Working Paper 25/2015, The New School for Social Research (2015), p. 12; Thomas Pogge and Sanjay Reddy, “How Not to Count the Poor,” in S. Anand, et al., (eds.), Debates on the Measurement of Global Poverty (2010), p. 42. Lahoti and Reddy, p. 13. 5