The dollar-a-day standard reduced poverty to market consumption capacity.

Evidence

The poverty-alleviation framework hardly disappeared, however. Indeed, McNamara started a more global shift toward monetized definitions of poverty that would culminate in 1990 with the “dollar-a-day” standard. This abstract vision of poverty would more or less cast aside the “causal processes that create poverty” to focus only on the level of the floor. What Rob Konkel called the “monetization of poverty” would soon narrow its definition “to a person’s ability to consume and to participate in a market economy.” — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets, 337

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the monetization-of-poverty process and the dollar-a-day measure as flattening poverty’s causes into a consumption floor.
• QUESTION: When did the World Bank’s dollar-a-day threshold actually become official, and how was it computed country by country?
• XREF: connects to: Absolute poverty lines replaced relative measures because they avoid confronting inequality. — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History…, 328