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Should poverty be measured using an" absolute" or a" relative" approach? This age-old question in poverty measurement is once again on the agenda, due to the ambitious pro-posals of Patricia Ruggles (1990) and the Na-tional Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences (Constance Citro and Robert Michael, 1995) to alter the way US poverty is measured. Their wide-ranging sug-gestions include a new" hybrid" approach to setting the poverty threshold that, unlike the current absolute method, is sensitive to changes in the general living standard, but less sensitive than a purely relative approach. The proposals also recommend using aggregate in-dexes of poverty beyond the usual" head-counts," such as well-known" gap" measures and indicators of the distribution of resources among the poor. Important relative notions of poverty enter at this" aggregation" step as well. The effects of the various …