How poor is poor? Does the inability to pay your bills on time make you poor? Can you be classed as poor on a world scale if you can put food on the table? If you have a table?
The debate about what makes the poor poor has been heightened as the world financial crisis sinks deeper into self-absorbed western psyches and the apparently scarce pennies start to drop.
So, things are bad. Can things really be this bad? If so, just how bad can they get? For me?
In times of uncertainty it helps to compare - to try and make sense of the unknown by trying to judge it against the past and what we think we know.
And so a mini-debate has begun in Britain with a Telegraph writer dismissing claims by those hard hit that they are in any way experiencing the hardship that those unlucky souls endured in the Great Depression.
His yardstick? George Orwell's harrowing and compelling work The Road To Wigan Pier, which details the grim, ordinary lives of the poor in northern England in the 1930s. And he makes a good case. No matter how much you lost in the sharemarket or how bad your public housing is (and some is very bad as we have seen recently) nothing can really compare in modern-day Western societies with the horrors that Orwell details. The families sleeping 10-abreast in freezing northern beds with no bedclothes. The rotten food and stinking outhouses. The rats. How can you compare, he asks, the hardships of that suffering generation of people with the "plight" of today's well-rounded - often too-well rounded - people scoffing chips in front of quite possibly a big telly?
He has a point. But he is also missing a rather big one.
The truth is one man's feast is another's famine and vice versa - it has always been thus.
Nothing muddies the waters more than trying to compare who is the worse off, who is the poorer - or who is the richer for that matter. It's the stuff of many a generational argument and the basis of a nerve-hitting Monty Python sketch … "You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank" …
This point has been brought home clearly in the past few weeks with the success of the film Slumdog Millionaire, which showcases the lives of the poorest of the poor in a Mumbai slum. The film does not flinch from the everyday squalor and horror surrounding the slum but also showcases the hope and beauty and fun that are also part of the characters' hard lives.
Director Danny Boyle was accused of romanticising poverty - of portraying the poor in a way to make Western audiences feel a little less ashamed of the poverty, a little less greedy.
Juxtapose this with the recent suicides of billionaires caught up in the credit crunch who felt they couldn't face the world any longer if the bulk of their money - literally their raison d'etre - disappeared.
The fact is that there are people - like my father - who grew up in grinding poverty in the 1930s in a one-bedroom flat with his four siblings and mother, yet who talk about their wonderful childhoods. And there are those who live on the poverty line in much bigger homes today - even maybe ones with big tellies - who suffer untold stress.
Today's poor are no better off than the poor of the past if they feel poor and they see their situation as helpless. Poor physical and mental health and a lack of access to education have always been the byproducts of poverty.
To some degree financial safety nets have helped prevent the worst indignities. But modern-day poverty may have its own particular hardships - a greater sense of alienation and failure.
The Great Depression was a long time ago. Standards, conditions and cities have changed.
But to pass judgment on the poor for somehow not being poor enough, well that's a bit rich.
Jane Richards is a Sydney Morning Herald journalist.
Email a friend