Question

With vivid examplefrom two countries make an assessment to the so absolute poverty and relative poverty

Answer 1

               Absolute poverty refers to the ability of the person or family to get the basic necessities of life, such as shelter, food, clean water, clothes, medicine. It is measured based upon the ability to purchase or otherwise garner these things regardless of the relative wealth in the neighborhood, province, country, or world. Relative poverty refers to the purchasing power a person or family has relative to the people in the same society. For example, a family living in a very small but clean house, who must walk or ride a bus to travel, who can get enough food to maintain normal weight and activity, but no more than that, and who can buy decent clothes, but only if they are used, would be considered to be fairly well off in many African countries, but would be living in relative poverty if they resided in San Francisco, or Tokyo. The idea of relative poverty is politically charged, since it can be used to argue for a change in political and social structure by showing the large disparity in wealth, and using the emotionally loaded word "poverty" to describe people who, in real terms, may live quite well. If absolute poverty were the scale, than very few people in the Western world could be considered to live in poverty, because almost everyone there has access to safe water, plenty of food, decent clothing, etc. This measure would undermine an argument for social change, and tend to minimize the effects of great disparities in wealth and power inside the same country. Using absolute poverty as a scale, it would be easy to say "Nobody in France (or any other Western country) lives in poverty, so we don't need to have policies to distribute wealth to the poorer classes". On the other hand, if one were to use an extreme form of relative poverty, one could easily claim that 10%, 25%, etc of people in France lived in relative poverty, and thus make a strong argument for massive redistribution of wealth. Which measure you choose would depend on your own political beliefs. However, measures of absolute poverty are very effective in showing just how immensely wealthy the western world is, in that one of our greatest health problems is that our poorest people are becoming obese. Relative poverty is useful in showing the amount of disparity in distribution of wealth, which is important in its own right because it can generate incredible social tension.