The condition of lacking the material resources necessary for a decent human life. Every serious account has to specify two things: which resources count, and what threshold separates having enough from not having enough. The answers determine almost everything else.
The dominant 20th-century approaches were absolute (a fixed minimum, often pegged to caloric needs or a basic basket of goods) and relative (a fraction — typically 50% or 60% — of the median income of the surrounding society, on the argument that what counts as poverty depends on the standard of living against which one is measured). The U.S. official poverty measure, set in 1963 and only modestly modified since, is an absolute measure that most analysts regard as substantially too low and methodologically antiquated; the Supplemental Poverty Measure introduced in 2011 corrects some of the worst defects.
Amartya Sen's capability approach reframed the question more deeply: what matters is not the bundle of goods a person has but what the person is actually able to do and be — to be adequately fed, sheltered, and educated, to participate in the life of their community, to appear in public without shame. Two people with the same income may have very different capabilities, depending on disability, location, social standing, and surrounding institutions. The Human Development Index and the Multidimensional Poverty Index are downstream applications.
In the United States, poverty is a policy choice as much as an economic outcome — child poverty was cut roughly in half in 2021 by the temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit, and rose back to its prior level when the expansion was allowed to expire in 2022. The reporting tradition from Michael Harrington's The Other America (1962) through Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (2001), Matthew Desmond's Evicted (2016) and Poverty, by America (2023), and Sasha Abramsky's The American Way of Poverty (2013) has insisted that American poverty is structurally produced and could be structurally reduced. The Catholic Worker tradition of Dorothy Day, the settlement-house tradition of Jane Addams, and the agrarian tradition of Wendell Berry each offer different practical responses; all share the conviction that poverty is a moral and political problem, not a fact of nature.