Poverty & Social Exclusion

Dr David GordonProfessor of Social JusticeSchool for Policy Studies

University of Bristol

Social Inclusion ForumNational Economic & Social Development Conference

Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin, 15th November 2007

“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

All cultures have a concept of Poverty

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”

Between the bays of Carraroe

JM Synge Guardian 14/6/1905

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

Age at death by age group, 1990-1995

Source: The State of the World Population 1998

Make Poverty History: Click Video

Cause of death for children under five

Bars show estimated confidence interval

Only the good die young? – what kills children

Severe Deprivation of Basic Human Need for Children

•Almost a third of the world’s 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.

Definitions of Poverty

Poverty can be defined as;

Command over insufficient resources over time

The result of poverty is deprivation

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 person’s own society.

UNICEF Child Poverty League of Rich CountriesPercent of children living below 50% of median national income

Source: UNICEF (2005)

Definition of poverty

IncomeLow Income High

Income

Standard of Living

High

Low

Optimal Position ofthe Poverty Threshold

Poverty ThresholdSet Too High

Poverty ThresholdSet Too Low

Not Poor

Poor

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)

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.

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.

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

(%)

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

Reasons why people do not participate in socially necessary activities

Source: PSE 1999, Multiple responses allowed

Measuring Multidimensional Exclusion: B-SEM Model

The Causes of Poverty

Most poverty has a structural cause, rather than being the result of an individual’s ‘bad’ behaviour or choices.

Since the pioneering scientific studies of poverty in 19th Century (such as Charles Booth’s 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

Structural Causes of Poverty

Low Wages and Child Poverty

Source: UNICEF (2000)

Social Expenditure on Families and Child Poverty

Source: UNICEF (2005)

The Solutions to Poverty

The Cost of Ending Child Poverty: the amount needed to raise the incomes of all poor families with children above the poverty threshold

“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)

Poverty: The Solution?