Chapter Summary for Chapter 12
Lisa’s experience and living standard opens the chapter as an individual example of the multiple deprivations suffered by those at or near the poverty line.
Absolute poverty refers to the absence of a subsistence level of income and is therefore, in theory, universally applicable. In practice, absolute poverty applies to sections of the populations in many developing countries. Relative poverty, on the other hand, is contingent upon the overall standard of living enjoyed by the majority in a society and is usually applied to some areas of the developed societies. Both measures present technical problems for researchers.
The ‘poverty line’ is a common device employed to benchmark absolute levels though it struggles to accommodate regional and national variations. The relative poverty measure is compromised by its perpetual upward drift as average living standards rise. In the UK there is no officially sanctioned ‘poverty line’, so researchers have used the benefits system to establish which groups are in poverty or on the margins of poverty.
Townsend’s studies, the Breadline Britain surveys and the Millennium Survey of Poverty and Social Exclusion used subjective perceptions of deprivation in order to explore the experience of poverty. One widely used definition of poverty in Europe is households below 60% of median national income, which allows comparisons to be made across both countries and time.
Current levels of polarization are blamed on government policies, changes in the occupational structure and the ‘work rich/work poor’ dichotomy caused by male unemployment and greater female labour force participation.
The unemployed, part-time workers, children, older people, the sick and those from ethnic minorities are all much more likely to find themselves in poverty than the rest of the population.
Two main paradigms exist for explaining poverty: ‘blame the victim’ and ‘blame the system’. The first has a long history from the culture of poverty thesis of the 1960s right through to Murray’s work on the welfare state and its supposed ‘dependency culture’. The competing explanation lays much more stress on misfortune, the accident of being the wrong people in the wrong place during the wrong economic circumstances. Statistics from the BHPS are used to show the ‘life-cycle of poverty’ and the degree to which there is mobility in and out of income groups within the population.
The idea of the underclass, a whole segment of the population living semi-permanently on the margins of society, goes back to Marx’s notion of a lumpenproletariat, but has its recent significance in the work of Wilson and Murray. Both agree that racial discrimination is not directly to blame; Murray, however, recycles the culture of poverty thesis, while Wilson examines the economic mechanisms constraining the ghetto poor.
European cities also have racially concentrated neighbourhoods where poverty is high – Turks in Germany, Algerians in France, Albanians in Italy – and immigration becomes part of the policy equation. Research in the UK shows the persistence of working-class values among those even in long-term unemployment.
The concept of social exclusion looks at how people get into the states they are in and it implicates others in that process. Three more specific forms of social exclusion are residential segregation, the problems of youth transitions and spatial isolation in the countryside. Weak versions of social exclusion focus on how excluded groups can be included within society; strong versions also look at the processes through which powerful groups can exercise the capacity to exclude others. Social exclusion is generally seen as a broader concept than poverty, though the latter remains necessary for a full understanding of inequality and disadvantage.
Homelessness can be viewed as an extreme form of social exclusion. Some of the homeless in Britain are former mental patients cut adrift by deinstitutionalization. Others suffer from multiple traumatic life-events that quickly result in their ending on the streets.
Welfare states vary between countries. The universal benefits of Sweden can be contrasted with the means-tested benefits more common in the UK.
The welfare state was created amidst very specific assumptions about the shape of the future: full employment defined as paid male labour; using welfare to promote national solidarity; and state provision as a form of insurance against lifetime uncertainties. These conditions began to break down during the 1970s, and during the 1980s there were all-out attempts on both sides of the Atlantic to roll back the boundaries of welfare. These attempts largely failed, a key explanation being that welfare had become so embedded in social life that ‘rolling back’ the welfare state was far from the mirror-opposite of welfare expansion. For governments of all political hues, however, some type of reform remains on the agenda.
Equality remains an aspiration, but inequality remains a fact. The policies of tax and spend have not eradicated poverty and the emphasis now is on equality of opportunity. Other inequalities such as gender are as important for policy-makers, and many social problems, such as urban decay and pollution, are more indiscriminate in their effects.
