Poverty and living standards of children since the early 1970s. The use of common baseline for countries makes it possible to consider convergence or divergence of living standards between countries. The selection of the reference poverty baseline is necessarily arbitrary, but following (Scruggs and Allan, 2006[i6]), the poverty line prevailing in the United States in 1974 (adjusted for price inflation) was taken as a pre-oil shock benchmark to measure absolute progress in the living standards of low-income families.