International Analysis Poverty

Peter Townsend

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745013756
• eBook ISBN: 9781317866831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

First published in 1993. The scientific and political debate about poverty has been changing fast -with dramatic implications for intellectual interpretation and action by governments- and the intention in publishing this volume is to contribute to that debate. Scientists concerned to analyse poverty have been thrust by events into greater international service. But there are sinister forces at work which are seeking to divert them into petty issues, to blame the victims of poverty, or to cut them off from the resources or opportunities to investigate and report freely. This book is born of that frustration - and represents the changing debate during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

PART I

Theory and Measurement of Poverty

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Changing World Map of Poverty

The thesis of this book is that poverty is deep-seated in many rich and not only poor countries and seems destined to get worse in both groups of countries unless scientific means are mobilised to fully explain current trends, and international action is taken collaboratively to counter them. If poverty is to be fully understood so that it can be defeated or reduced, myopic and piecemeal preoccupation with particular cultural and regional meanings of the word, arising from misconceived theory and ideology, has to be relinquished. Instead, ‘poverty’ has to be given scientifically acceptable universal meaning and measurement. It has also to be explained primarily in terms of the huge influence of international developments - the policies of international agencies and global corporations and the institutions of the world’s economy and trade - on social class and on style as well as conditions of life in every country. All of this applies to poverty in a wide variety of rural and urban areas of the United States, Ethiopia, India, France and the United Kingdom no less than it does to the most wretched areas of the cities of New York, Addis Ababa, Calcutta, Marseilles and Manchester.

I realise that this statement of objectives is ambitious and begs a lot of questions. One step which may be helpful is to re-state the purposes of the argument of this book negatively, by excluding particular positions and perspectives, which I do not propose to emulate. Science progresses in part through the resolution of intellectual disagreements and quarrels or the isolation of minority views which attract, or deserve to attract, declining support.

The Liberal Custodians of Inequality

One quarrel in the intense debates about poverty is with those like Martin Anderson (1978) and Milton Friedman (1962) in the United States, and Lord Joseph (Joseph and Sumption, 1979) and John Moore (1989) in the United Kingdom, who explain the phenomenon away or wrongly minimise its extent. They are not protagonists of a new or original school of thought. They are bearers of a tradition of thought dating from medieval times and, on some accounts, much earlier than that. Almost as soon as they acquire notoriety for their beliefs and arguments others are found to be following eagerly in their wake, awaiting their turn to wield similar influence.

It is important not to mince words with this traditional school of thought. It is as destructive as it is unscientific. There have been hardliners for hundreds of years like Nourse (1700), Donaldson (1701), Defoe (1704), de Mandeville (1723), Eden (1797), Malthus (1807), Davidson (1817), Chalmers (1818 and 1821–26), the 1832 Poor Law Commissioners and Robertson (1884), who have fulminated about the poor and sidelined their conditions and needs. What also has to be acknowledged is the extent to which intellectuals who gained respectability for their theories, which in turn were gratefully quoted by liberal statesmen, took their cue from the state and from state policies.

The development of state policies concerned with the poor, and the parallel task of formulating, clarifying and reinforcing the ideology on which those policies were necessarily based, was one to which academics as well as statesmen contributed. It is this process of ‘institutionalising’ ideology and power in policy and law which I am eager to convey in this book. Often it can be shown to precede in time the reconstitution of class structure and the maintenance or development of different forms of inequality within society.

Using State Power and Policies to Stratify Society

The early history of the poor laws in the United Kingdom held lessons for Europe, and later for the United States and other parts of the world, which were subsequently digested. Administrative strategies and laws were often copied or adapted with only minor changes. This process of cultural transmission was aided by colonialism in general and not just British colonialism alone. It was primarily the exercise of power to maximise the selective accumulation of wealth.

Thus by 1579 the principles of both control of the poor and information about the poor which were to govern the entire approach to the administration of the poor in the United Kingdom and some other countries were already in place. The centralisation of control can be illustrated by the publication in 1630 of orders for the relief of the poor. Soon afterwards the rules for the settlement and removal of the poor showed the powers of magistrates and local elites to ‘deport’ undesirable elements and reduce costs.

The struggle for the establishment of the workhouse during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lay at the heart of the question of control by the central government on terms satisfactory to ruling classes. In dealing with the poor the government believed the principle of deterrence had to be balanced with the principle of relief. Some advisers veered to one; and some to the other. Among many of the authorities listed in the literature of political economy, particularly up to the end of the nineteenth century, punitive values can be clearly illustrated. Nourse, for example, suggested in 1700 that breaking on the wheel would be a more successful deterrent to crime than hanging. In 1701 Donaldson argued that begging should be banned and beggars housed in workhouses. In 1752 Alcock argued that the poor laws caused the very problem that they were intended to relieve and that charity rather than relief should be the watchword. In 1753 Fielding proposed a workhouse in Middlesex admitting 5,000. Any vagrants or petty criminals would be sent there. Men and women would be separated. A pass would have to be sought by any poor person wishing to go further than a radius of six miles. Inmates had to wear a large badge on the shoulder, rise at 4 a.m., go to prayers at 5 a.m. and work until 7 p.m. Theft would be subject to corporal punishment; escape to severe whipping; refusal to work to transportation, and attacks on staff to sentence of death. In 1757 Turner called for an Act of Parliament to order the immediate return of all beggars, vagabonds, strollers and gypsies to their parishes. Any caught begging should be transported for five years to the colonies and any returning before that time put to death as felons.

The reader will appreciate that I have given just a few examples of how conditions of poverty have been interpreted. Prejudices about their cause and prevalence have coloured the construction of policies and hence the institutions set up to deal with the phenomenon. The examples help to convey the truth that the conditions experienced by the poor cannot be separated from the policies and institutions which have shaped them over many years to reflect how different sections of the population are allowed, and encouraged, to live their lives, irrespective of their own qualities, choices and efforts.

Many of the severest proposals were framed on the highest moral principles for the good of society at large as well as for the good of the poor themselves. Or they were framed according to economic principles of national growth and efficiency. They are very relevant to the debates about welfare in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1990s.

Liberal-pluralists who have been influenced by the classical, neoclassical and monetarist approaches in economics, the functionalist and post-industrial approaches in sociology and the democratic pluralist approaches in political science adopt a relatively compliant approach to the continuation of widespread and severe poverty. They have tended to support the individualistic, minimalist, inevitable and ‘undeserving’ interpretations of the phenomenon.

The Perils of Narrow Individualism

In the above I have suggested that there has been a long intellectual tradition justifying severe inequality. At the same time, on grounds which have to be shown to be specious, there has been a parallel tradition of thought excusing, upholding and reinforcing the conditions which are experienced by the poor. They are represented as bringing those conditions upon themselves, or as lacking the qualities or skills to deserve anything different. The quarrel with these two insidious traditions is as relevant to world society at the end of the twentieth century, and therefore present-day conditions in Peru, Nigeria, Indonesia and Bangladesh in the 1990s, as it was to Elizabethan or Victorian England.

However, the school of thought involves more than the legitimation of inequality on the one hand and of widespread poverty on the other. It involves the identification of the causes of poverty in individuals and local groups. The causes of poverty are believed to rest overwhelmingly in individual and sub-cultural defects and dispositions. Responsibility is deflected from states and national and multinational economic, administrative and legal organisations to individuals and groups - especially racial groups. Little or no attention is given to the interacting consequences for families of national and multinational policies to do with employment, taxation, housing, social security and public services. Instead of structural factors and state laws and policies prominence is given in analysis to individui and sub-cultural factors. One seems to go with the other. What is exploited is popular readiness to assign blame for poverty to individuals or families, or alternatively to minority groups. Laisser-faire individualism and the legitimation of racial discrimination are in fact the intellectual sources of this tradition.

Absorbing the Importance of Comparative Analysis

The intellectual quarrel about the interpretation of poverty is not only historical, theoretical and ideological. It is comparative too. In recent years many people have argued that it is Third World and not First World poverty which matters. While understandable, this view can be dangerously diversionary. Because national income in the rich countries is many times larger than in the poor countries members of the former are tempted to dismiss the severity of conditions experienced by the poorest in their own countries in the belief that they have food enough and access enough to a variety of modern facilities. At the same time they respond sympathetically to reports and pictures of the raw scarcities of sub-Saharan Africa and other deprived regions. People who react in this way ignore common (international) causes of impoverished conditions in the two places. They also ignore respects in which poverty in a rich society takes forms which can be as bad as, if not worse than, those in a poor society. And the problem becomes far less immediate to, and more remote from, them. They are relatively uninvolved; they do not consider they have much responsibility for those conditions. Although sensitive observers strive to work for understanding and improvement it is difficult for them to behave other than as intellectual voyeurs. They turn away from societies in which they can exert influence to others where they can merely watch.

Extreme Variations in Poverty Across the World

This is where the discussion has to become acutely methodological, comparative and empirical, and not just critical of mainstream theoretical and intellectual tradition. Our capacity to deal with poverty depends on giving equal and simultaneous attention to meaning, measurement, explanation and policy analysis. Table 1.1 illustrates the varied pattern requiring explanation. Poverty is not the same as inequality. Although the two have to be distinguished, they are connected. In the present state of know...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Theory and Measurement of Poverty
• Part II The Third World
• Part III The First World
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index