01| Somebody sat down and decided what a poor person needs. That decision became a number, the number became a threshold, and everything built afterwards inherited it — who gets counted, who gets served, and what counts as having succeeded. The line is not a discovery about the world. It is an instrument, and instruments have designers. 02| The Stiglitz–Sen–Fitoussi commission, convened in 2008 to examine the limits of GDP, put the general principle in a single sentence: "Wha

01| Between a programme that exists and a person who has it, there is a distance. The sector has consistently under-priced that distance, and where it has tried to shorten it, it has usually tried the cheapest thing first. 02| The cheapest thing is language. Change what the programme calls people, soften the vocabulary, remove the words that sting. Bhargava and Manoli tested exactly this at scale. Among 35,050 people who had failed to claim substantial Earned Income Tax Credi

01| Most anti-poverty policy is written for categories of person and applied evenly across territory. The alternative is to target the territory: draw a boundary, concentrate resources inside it, vary the programme by local conditions. Enterprise zones, area regeneration, slum upgrading, promise neighbourhoods, participatory budgeting and special districts are all instances of it. 02| The intuitive case is that uniform programmes miss local context. The case against is an eco

01| Positions on poverty are usually catalogued by faction — the right thinks this, the left thinks that. That framing obscures more than it shows, for two reasons. Factions divide internally more sharply than they divide from each other on several questions. And parties in government routinely do things their stated position does not predict. 02| So take the positions by what they answer rather than who holds them, then test the map against what governments have actually don

01| No village asked for this. 02| The money exists because a government decided to borrow and a bank decided to lend. For the first two phases of Indonesia's national community development programme, the World Bank's share was $531.19 million against a total project cost of roughly $2.1 billion. So the Bank financed about a quarter. Indonesia's national and local budgets carried the rest, with local governments required to contribute up to 20 percent of block grant funding f