The cost of some forms of social expenditures - such as mutual gifts - is conceivably proportional to standards of living, as it is relevant to the extent that the social group can partake in it. Other expenditures may impose a lower bound on the cost of social inclusion even at very low levels of income. In the proposal of this paper, such a fixed part of the cost of social inclusion should be included in the absolute poverty line. Based on poverty line data collected by Ravallion, Chen and Sangraula (2009), the elasticity of national poverty lines with respect to mean consumer expenditure is estimated to be significantly lower than unity (at about 2/3).