The poor produce many goods themselves, so market-based poverty measures undercount them

Evidence

I include non-market consumption items because they are very important in measuring poverty. Figure 2.4 includes examples of this for each secondary-level dimension, such as home-grown food, self-made housing, or self-transportation in bicycling. These must be converted into dollars for aggregation purposes. Poor people tend to have much less recourse to the market for many goods, and often produce these goods themselves. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 237

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to debates over GDP and subsistence economies, and to Ambedkar-adjacent arguments that money metrics miss how the poor actually live.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘The garden that isn’t in the GDP’ — how non-market production quietly hides poverty and resilience from every standard measure.