Riches on different Levels

Can a "level of poverty" be established for the whole world to refer to? Absolutely not. World wide aid organizations can do what they are meant to do by supplying basic goods and services to impoverished people, but for some, the goods mean nothing. People who use these organizations to their advantage may see themselves as poor, but what about the populations in the world that do not even know they exist? Uncontacted Amazon tribes do not even know such organizations because they have never seen beyond their proximal areas.

Say for example a member of one of these "uncontacted" Amazon tribes found out about the development and advancements in our world. This Amazonian has now been exposed to the real world. He now knows that he does not have what others in the world have and take for granted. He is now labeled as poor by what we would see him to be.

Now what if he had stayed in his sheltered area and not have undergone that exposure? He was very respected in his tribe due to the number of wives he had and his hut was also one of the largest in the village. In this culture, that means this guy has it all. It all depends on the cultural perspective when determining poverty levels.

The use of relative/absolute measurements to gauge poverty can be used only within a culture. Perspective plays a very important role when discussing this issue of measuring poverty. Therefore, comparisons cannot be made across cultural boundaries unless one knows what the perspective would be like from each individual culture being compared.