We often talk about poverty; to the point where, it could be argued, we are blinded to its meaning — a word which is caught in a metric that is based upon the relative income of citizens — as described in Wikipedia -

Povery — “A level is set and those who fall below this are seen as being ‘in poverty’ and those above it are not. The UK government, the European Union and many other countries use 60 per cent of median household income as the poverty ‘threshold’.

But maybe in a post industrial society, Poverty can no longer be understood as a relative phenomena to your peers, focused on the distribution and lack of access to the wage economy but as a combination of your measure of resilience to shocks AND the lack capacity to advance yourself — and perhaps more fundamentally as a measure of our lack of freedom as a citizens.

Poverty can be perhaps be better understood as us entrapped in a taut system of flows which no slack, or freedom to move or shift to higher ground – a network “prison” albeit with the pretence of being free.

This version of “poverty” aflicts many of us — for if we are unable to resign our jobs or don’t have the capacity to survive a few weeks - if we lose our jobs or if we suffer a change of our housing circumstances —we are “softly” imprisoned into our lives — imprisioned by a combination of debt, lack of savings, declining wages and time poverty.

Poverty in its current definition misses the point, and currently excludes many of us — mostly for the benefit of headline stats. We need a new metric looking at how many of us increasingly do not have the conditions to thrive, — economically, culturally and socially — to resign and look for alternative employment, to invest in our education, to invest and participate in the civic economy of neighbourhoods, cities and towns. Poverty in its current manifestation is not an active proxy of the lack of freedom and agency to make society in the the 21st Century.

Reframing Poverty as the lack of capacity to thrive is not the desire to extend the wooliness of the happiness index — but deeply examine the real conditions of all of us to economically thrive both as individuals and as society — from driving labour mobility to structural capacity to continuously up skill. Thereby reframing poverty as systematic destroyer of economic progress along with being an underminer of our social contract.

We need a new model of Poverty and it's inverse Thriving — to understand if we making a real dent in the capacity of all of us as citizens to grow — a new kind of citizen balance sheet focused on understanding our liquidity in terms of financial, time & attention capital.

We need to reimagine this institutional logic of Poverty, if we are to firstly, describe a more inclusive everyday politic which reflects the reality of peoples lives, where few of us are actually thriving in the 20th century institutional remnants, secondly reframe necessity of welfare as the means to invest to unlock the freedom of the many as opposed to a method to maintain the soft servitude.