Concept pairs like poverty–wealth are semantically asymmetric, not mirror opposites.

Evidence

A key point is that semantically these are not inverses or mirror images of each other: they have different semantic transformation functions. One can see this already with the airplane example: an “empty” plane is semantically not the mirror image of a “full” plane. In statistical practice, however, these pairs are almost always treated as semantically symmetric. For example, if the causal hypothesis involves poor countries one uses GDP per capita; if the hypothesis is about wealthy countries, GDP per capita is also used. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 585

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s running theme in earlier chapters that concepts come in pairs with distinct, non-inverse semantic transformations.
• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘semantic transformation function’ — the mapping from an indicator scale to the meaning of a concept.