Last year the Trump administration changed the poverty measure from a more conventional income-based approach to a proxy-means approach, and in the process reduced the measurement of poverty in the US from 18.5 million people living in extreme poverty to about 250,000. And then Trump proudly declared that poverty had been eliminated from the US just by adopting this new measure. These types of measures are problematic because they can be arbitrary in terms of what variables you include and don't include.

Political economist Andrew Fischer studies poverty, and the study of poverty, beyond the neoliberal frame - from the deeply flawed metrics and methods used by global development groups, to the ways consensus capitalist logic reinforces a set of 'de-politicized' poverty reduction policies that amplify inequality across the globe.

Andrew is author of Poverty as Ideology: Rescuing Social Justice from Global Development Agendas from Zed Books.