Any poverty line intended to represent a minimum acceptable standard of living in the industrialized world today implies higher standards of food, clothing, housing, water supply, sanitation, health care, education, transport and entertainment than were available to even the wealthiest households of previous eras. Unless we wish to argue that the threshold should be set at the minimum income necessary for sheer physical survival then there can in fact be no such thing as an absolute poverty line. If the decision is taken, for example, to draw an ‘absolute’ poverty line at some fixed point and to update it only for inflation, then this means that a relative poverty line is being anchored to an arbitrary point in time.