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This paper presents a novel analysis about the capabilities of academic researchers and academic poverty. Adopting the capability approach, which Amartya Sen developed to address concerns such as poverty, inequality and development, we shift the focus of analysis and discussion around evaluating academic research and academics in the social sciences from measures of so-called 'quality', 'impact' or 'excellence' to the capabilities of academics. For us, the conceptualization and evaluation of academic research is a question about what academics have reasons to value, and about their ability to achieve valuable beings and doings. It is also about determining what might constitute academic poverty, and what academics are required to do in order to avoid that poverty. Relating our analysis to debates around universities, in particular about quasi-market pressures, we identify the possibility of basic capabilities in academic research, namely: the capabilities that are necessary to fulfill basic academic needs. Our proposition is that there is academic poverty when an academic researcher is not capable of fulfilling basic academic needs, such as: adhering to standards of coherence, robustness and rigour; searching for and disseminating the spirit of the truth. Moreover, if the academic has the capabilities to fulfill those basic academic needs and yet chooses not to do so, she renders herself in a state akin to academic poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the paper "Poverty, Income Inequality and their Measures: Professor Sen's Axiomatic Approach Reconsidered," by Noriyuki Takayama in a 1979 issue of "Econometrica." In the article, Takayama has recommended a new measure of poverty which is specified as the Gini coefficient of the censored income distribution truncated from above by the poverty line. However, the measure does not always conform with the monotonicity axiom which was postulated by Amartya Sen. It is shown by the author that the measure will violate the monotonicity axiom only in the unusual condition when the poverty line strictly surpasses the median income of the distribution. It is also shown that Sen's measure of poverty is more sensitive to the changes in inequality of income among the poor than the measure proposed by Takayama.