The Shame Index

In a paper presented at the "Missing Dimensions of Poverty Data conference last year, Diego Reyles of the University of Oxford makes a compelling case for a new poverty indicator - shame and humiliation. Although economists from Adam Smith to Amartya Sen have written about the role of shame and stigma as a social dimension of poverty, there are no current standard indicators being used to measure these feelings of shame and humilation on an aggregate level.

Reyles proposes a matrix of eight questions, ranging from respondent's perception of poverty and poor people, to experience with ethnic and socioeconomic discrimination, to general perceptions of social barriers to economic advancement.