Independently of the other parts, I like this notion of poverty. I head-chunk the idea as any external thing a person lacks, of which they are struggling to keep the minimum; that is poverty.
This seems very flexible, because it isn’t a fixed bar like an income level. It also seems very actionable, because it is asking questions of the object-level reality instead of hand-wavily abstracting everything into money.
I would like to more about how the law views opportunity costs. For most things, such as liability, it seems to only accept costs in the normal sense of literally had to pay out of pocket X amount; for other things like worker’s comp it is a defined calculation of lost future gains, but only from pre-existing arrangements like the job a person already had. It feels like the only time I see opportunity costs is lumped in with other intangibles like pain and suffering.