Poverty

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Poverty Social Exclusion Dr David
Gordon Professor of Social Justice School for
Policy Studies University of Bristol Social
Inclusion Forum National Economic Social
Development Conference Royal Hospital Kilmainham,
Dublin, 15th November 2007
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All cultures have a concept of Poverty

• In Wealth, many friends, in poverty not even
  relatives
• - Japanese Proverb
• Poverty is the worst form of violence!-
  Mahatma Gandhi - Indian Philosopher Freedom
  Fighter
• The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is
  poverty
• George Bernard Shaw - Irish Playwright
  Novelist

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Between the bays of Carraroe JM Synge Guardian
14/6/1905
I asked him if many of the people who were living
round in the scattered cottages we could see were
often in real want of food. There are a few
maybe have enough all times, but the most are in
want one time or another, when the potatoes are
bad or few, and their whole store is eaten and
there are some who are near starving all times,
like a widow women beyond who has seven children
with hardly a shirt on their skins, and they with
nothing to eat but the milk from one cow, and a
handful of meal they will get from one neighbour
or another
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The idea that poverty can be ended is over 200
year old
The French enlightenment philosopher Marie Jean
Antonine Nicolas de Caritat, Maquis de Condorcet
argued in Sketch for a Historical Picture of the
Progress of the Human Mind (published
posthumously in 1794 by the government of the new
French Republic) that poverty was not a result of
natural laws or divine will but was caused by
the present imperfections of the social arts
He argued that poverty could be ended by the
universal provision of pensions, grants to the
young, sickness benefits and state education
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Age at death by age group, 1990-1995
Source The State of the World Population 1998
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Make Poverty History Click Video
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Only the good die young? what kills children
Cause of death for children under five
Bars show estimated confidence interval
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• Severe Deprivation of Basic Human Need for
  Children
• Almost a third of the worlds children live in
  dwellings with more than five people per room or
  which have a mud floor.
• Over half a billion children (27) have no toilet
  facilities whatsoever.
• Over 400 million children (19) are using unsafe
  (open) water sources or have more than a
  15-minute walk to water.
• About one child in five, aged 3 to 18, lacks
  access to radio, television, telephone or
  newspapers at home.
• Sixteen percent of children under five years in
  the world are severely malnourished, almost half
  of whom are in South Asia.
• 275 million children (13) have not been
  immunised against any diseases or have had a
  recent illness causing diarrhoea and have not
  received any medical advice or treatment.
• One child in nine aged between 7 and 18 (over 140
  million) are severely educationally deprived -
  they have never been to school.

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Definitions of Poverty
Poverty can be defined as Command over
insufficient resources over time The result of
poverty is deprivation
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European Union definitions of poverty and social
exclusion The European Union (EU) definition of
poverty is one of the most longstanding and
widely known. First adopted by the European
Council in 1975, it defines those as in poverty
as individuals or families whose resources are
so small as to exclude them from a minimum
acceptable way of life in the Member State in
which they live. (Council Decision, 1975).
The concept of resources was further defined
as goods, cash income, plus services from other
private resources (EEC, 1981). On the 19
December 1984, the European Commission extended
the definition as the poor shall be taken to
mean persons, families and groups of persons
whose resources (material, cultural and social)
are so limited as to exclude them from the
minimum acceptable way of life in the Member
State in which they live. (EEC, 1985). These
are clearly relative definitions of poverty in
that they all refer to poverty not as some
absolute basket of goods but in terms of the
minimum acceptable standard of living applicable
to a certain Member State and within a persons
own society.
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UNICEF Child Poverty League of Rich
Countries Percent of children living below 50 of
median national income
Source UNICEF (2005)
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Definition of poverty
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Ruth Levitas three models of social exclusion
(The Inclusive Society, 2nd ed, 2005)

• Ruth Levitas has identified several different
  (and competing) discourses of Social Exclusion.
  She has called these
• Redistributionist Discourse (RED)
• Moral Underclass Discourse (MUD)
• Social Intergrationist Discourse (SID)

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RED

• Prime concern is to do with poverty and draws
  upon the analysis of Townsend who argued that
  when income and resources fall below a certain
  level people are excluded from the normal
  activities of their society.
• The solution is redistribution of income in the
  form of higher, non-means tested benefits, a
  minimum wage, financial recognition for unpaid
  work etc.

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MUD

• Prime concern is with the moral and behavioural
  delinquency of the excluded.
• The underclass is culturally distinct from the
  mainstream and is associated with idle, criminal
  young men and single mothers dependent on
  welfare.
• Welfare dependency on the state is problematic,
  but the economic dependency of women on men is
  not as women and marriage have a civilising
  impact on men.

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SID

• Prime concern is with inclusion through paid
  work.
• It focuses on unemployment and economic
  inactivity and social integration is pursued
  through inclusion in paid work. It ignores unpaid
  work (largely done by women)
• If RED is about no money, MUD about no morals,
  and SID about no work, political debate in the UK
  has shifted inconsistently between RED and SID
  and MUD

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Reasons why people do not participate in socially
necessary activities
()
Can t afford to 47
Not interested 44
Lack of time due to childcare responsibilities 18
Too old, ill, sick or disabled 14
Lack of time due to paid work 14
No one to go out with (social) 6
No vehicle poor public transport 5
Lack of time due to other caring responsibilities 4
Fear of burglary or vandalism 3
Fear of personal attack 3
Can t go out due to other caring responsibilities 2
Problems with physical access 1
Feel unwelcome (e.g. due to disability ethnicity, gender, age, etc) 1
None of these 8
Source PSE 1999, Multiple responses allowed
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Measuring Multidimensional Exclusion B-SEM Model
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The Causes of Poverty
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Structural Causes of Poverty

• Most poverty has a structural cause, rather than
  being the result of an individuals bad
  behaviour or choices.
• Since the pioneering scientific studies of
  poverty in 19th Century (such as Charles Booths
  in London), six groups have been identified as
  being especially vulnerable to poverty -
• the elderly
• the unemployed
• sick and disabled people
• the low waged
• large families, and
• lone parents
• In many developing countries two additional
  groups are also at risk of poverty
• Landless and small farmers, and
• fishermen and women

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Low Wages and Child Poverty
Source UNICEF (2000)
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Social Expenditure on Families and Child Poverty
Source UNICEF (2005)
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The Solutions to Poverty
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The Cost of Ending Child Poverty the amount
needed to raise the incomes of all poor families
with children above the poverty threshold
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Poverty The Solution?
This would mean restoring to the centre of the
tax system two basic principals the first, that
those who cannot afford to pay tax should not
have to pay it and the second, that taxation
should rise progressively with income. Programmes
that merely redistribute poverty from families to
single persons, from the old to the young, from
the sick to the healthy, are not a solution. What
is needed, is a programme of reform that ends the
current situation where the top 10 own 80 of
our wealth and 30 of income, even after tax. As
Tawney remarked, What some people call the
problem of poverty, others call the problem of
riches. (Gordon Brown and Robin Cook, 1983)