Standard poverty measurement begins by drawing a dichotomizing poverty line.

Evidence

Indicators and measures of poverty illustrate how ingrained the dichotomization reflex is. Standard practice is that the first order of business in assessing how much poverty there is in a country is to establish a poverty line. This poverty line often is a dichotomization procedure (and is often closely related to thresholds discussed at length in the next chapter). The World Bank textbook on poverty measures states this very clearly: “Three steps need to be taken in measuring poverty: (1) Defining an indicator of welfare, (2) Establishing a minimum acceptable standard of that indicator to separate the poor from the nonpoor (the poverty line) (3) Generating a summary statistic to aggregate the information from the distribution of this welfare indicator relative to the poverty line” (Haughton and Khandker 2009, 9; see also Ravallion 2016; Alkire et al. 2015). — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 407

Categorization

• CANDY: The World Bank’s own poverty methodology literally begins by classifying people into two boxes — a clean, tweetable illustration of how deep the binary reflex runs.
• ADDENDUM: The dichotomization-plus-threshold logic here echoes the threshold mechanics in ‘On Sacrifice,’ where a line must be drawn to separate who counts as eligible for sacrifice.