Poverty
Poverty
Poverty has always had several not entirely separable meanings and is always defined according to the conventions of the society in which it occurs. For administrative reasons definition may also take the form of fixing an absolute criterion of poverty (e.g., a “poverty line”). We may distinguish three meanings: (1) social poverty, (2) pauperism, and (3) moral poverty.
Social poverty implies not merely economic inequality (of property, income, living standards, etc.) but also social inequality, that is, a relation of inferiority, dependence, or exploitation. In other words, it implies the existence of a social stratum definable by, among other things, lack of wealth. In this sense poverty is relative, implying no particular level of income or amount of property, although in preindustrial and underdeveloped economies the level normally qualifying the individual (but not always the class) as “poor” is one not far removed from subsistence.
Pauperism describes a category of people unable to maintain themselves at all, or to maintain themselves at the level conventionally regarded as minimal, without outside assistance. At any given time this implies the fixing of a minimum standard below which men are not supposed to fall and often also implies a model of social relations that indicates which paupers have a claim upon public assistance and who is to assist them. Pauperism arose historically beyond the border of the functioning primary social group (e.g., the kinship group) within which the economically dependent can expect assistance or maintenance without special institutional provisions. It therefore reflects the fluctuating fortunes of such primary groups, and in recent periods their secular diminution and functional decline. A man’s wife and children are not ipso facto paupers, but widows and orphans are perhaps the earliest clearly defined category of persons with a call upon public assistance. Some societies make a further distinction between types of paupers who “deserve” assistance and the equally indigent who do not.
Moral poverty defines the place of poverty in the value system of a society or of its subgroups and institutions; that is, it defines whether poverty is morally acceptable and what status it confers or prevents the poor man from enjoying. It is therefore difficult to separate from (1) and (2), except where it finds expression in specific bodies of men, in the past normally religious bodies, who voluntarily undergo poverty. In stratified societies several values of poverty will normally coexist; for example, it will be a “shame” or a punishment for sin for some, a cause of pride for others, or both at the same time.
The origins of poverty. The social category of the poor arises in stratified societies in which the upper and lower strata have direct experience of each other. It may also arise in situations where economically unequal groups coexist spatially, e.g., townsmen and peasants or nomads and agriculturalists. However, with spatial coexistence it is likely that the poorer will distinguish themselves from the richer and vice versa by qualitative rather than quantitative criteria—for example, as (poor) peasants and (rich) townsmen, rather than simply as “the poor” and “the rich.” Even elsewhere poverty is rarely the only criterion of stratification as seen from below. It is combined with numbers (Aristotelian democracy); very commonly with labor (“the laboring poor”); or with a complex concept of “the people” or “the community,” as perhaps in the phrase “the poor commons” familiar in English usage from the later Middle Ages.
Seen from above, however, poverty may adequately define the lower strata, as in medieval legal terminology, where they are simply arme liute (poor people). The poor are normally contrasted with the rich; and a causal relationship is often assumed, as in the German proverbs “Poverty is the rich man’s cow” and “Poverty is the hand and foot of wealth.” However, the contrast is also and at all times with the power and privilege that go with wealth; and consequently poverty always implies weakness and a low position in the social hierarchy, or personal inferiority. That the upper social classes are rich, the lower poor, is generally taken for granted. In the industrial period these broad distinctions are increasingly supplemented or replaced by the familiar distinction between economically defined classes. The “laboring poor” became the “laboring classes” and eventually the “working class.”
Pauperism. Although poverty was assumed to be normal and, in the ordinary course of events, irremediable for most people, the basic view of pauperism in preindustrial societies was that it was abnormal and called for remedial action. The question was by whom. Intermittent general pauperization, such as that due to famines and other catastrophes, required general public measures of remedy and prevention. The traditional “policy of provision” that imposed on the public authorities the duty of ensuring regular food supplies at reasonable prices, rather than the “poor law,” is the ancestor of modern welfare policies. Under normal circumstances it was assumed that the primary communities of men (in practice, determined by kin or locality) should and would be able to make adequate provision for members unable to maintain themselves. This assumption survived the emergence of recognized supralocal pauperism in the late Middle Ages and led to an almost universal tendency to make each local community formally responsible for poor relief within its boundaries. It dominated public policy until the twentieth century. Relief, except in the case of general catastrophes, was the formal and institutionalized supplementation of the voluntary aid for the helpless within primary communities, whether “natural,” like the kinship group that remained the tacit model, or “artificial,” like the various kinds of “brotherhoods” or corporations.
These assumptions, destined to break down with economic and social evolution, were first felt to be inadequate when the pauper was frequently an able-bodied adult not belonging to the community in which he claimed relief, or to any community (as in cities with a large fringe of the socially marginal), but especially when he appeared as the migrant or vagrant “sturdy beggar.” Modern European pauper policy began in the mid-fourteenth century with attempts to stem such interstitial pauperism (prohibitions of beggary). The regulation of beggars was then gradually transformed into the regulation of other kinds of paupers. From the sixteenth century on, central authority tended to control, supplement, or establish a basically local system of financing and administering poor relief. Central control appeared in the most elaborate form in England, although local autonomy tended to revive there subsequently. In regions that were Protestant or economically advanced or both, the direct intervention of central and local authorities tended to prevail. In Roman Catholic or less developed regions, there was a somewhat greater systematization of private organized charity. Given the circumstances of its emergence, pauper policy set out to provide not only relief but also, and perhaps chiefly, social reorganization, often conceived as the restoration of a lost norm of traditional social and economic stability. However, increasingly it might also aim at assisting the development of a capitalist economy. The two aims were incompatible, although in the short term both tended to rely partly on penal sanctions against the ablebodied unemployed and to make compulsory labor a condition of relief.
Before the industrial revolution this incompatibility was more visible in the theory of moral poverty than in the practice of relief. The ideologies of preindustrial societies left a large place for poverty as an ideal, or a comfort for the poor, expressing such values in the comportment of saints, holy men, mendicant orders, etc. The value systems of societies devoted to economic development left room at best for the ideal of nonacquisitiveness (e.g., modestly recompensed public service), but not for one of poverty as such. Conversely, while traditional societies often recognized a category of culpable pauperism, they resisted the view that all poverty reflected personal inadequacy (guilt, sin), a view that became characteristic of early capitalist society, especially in its Protestant versions.
Poverty in industrial society. The industrial revolution opened a new era. The social category of the poor divided into the now familiar socio-economic classes, the urban poor tending to be assimilated conceptually into the “working class” or “proletariat,” although the rural poor tended (with some exceptions) to be less readily redefined. On the other hand, with the creation of a single world economy in the nineteenth century, entire national or racial groups increasingly came to be considered, or to consider themselves, as “poor” (and also as exploited, oppressed, or underprivileged) relative to the minority of “rich” peoples. With the mass emergence of new nations from former dependence in the mid-twentieth century, these international contrasts increasingly dominated the discussion of poverty, all the more so because they served as a measure of economic development. Moreover, the poor country was almost invariably also the one in which the proportion of the poor in the population was higher and the degree of poverty was more acute than in the rich country.
The era of industrialization also saw the rise of specific forms of the supralocal social organization of the poor, for both narrow and wide purposes. Among workers employed for wages (“proletarians”) the labor union established itself universally as the form of organization for the protection and advancement of the standard of life, insofar as this depended on employment. No equally well-defined or uniform type of organization developed for equivalent purposes among the nonwage-earning poor. Until the increasingly systematic provision of welfare by the state, and of goods and services by economies oriented to the mass market, formal and informal community organizations of the poor developed with a variety of functions, initially often on the basis of preindustrial institutions (kinship, religion, common geographic origin, etc.). Others were later improvised to meet new needs (mutual economic aid, education, public entertainment, and sport), sometimes under the wing of global mass movements of the poor, such as socialist parties. These (but not the labor unions) may be regarded in the main as phenomena of the transition to a fully developed industrial society. However, they contributed to the formation of that complex of attitudes and behavior (“working-class culture/’ “culture of the poor,” and other subcultural phenomena) which reflected and still reflect the economic and social separation of the poor from the rest of society.
Together with the labor union, the most characteristic new development in the era of industrialization was the emergence of political mass movements and parties committed to socialism, a theory first elaborated to fit the situation of the industrial proletariat. Socialism also acquired a wider appeal, especially in “poor” countries anxious to overcome economic backwardness. Socialist movements in the broadest sense of the word became the major global form of social organization of the poor, with the object of abolishing poverty. They were often international in scope.
Although the early phases of industrialism produced an unusually large and unmanageable problem of pauperism, the actual needs of the poor played only a subordinate part in the formation of public policy until the decline of economic liberalism and the emergence of powerful organizations of the poor or those prepared to utilize the political power of their numbers in elections and otherwise. Before this, no criterion of poverty was usually recognized other than destitution positively asking for relief. Although quantitative inquiries into the “state of the poor” have been made in Britain since the late eighteenth century, and on a firmer statistical base in industrializing countries since the 1830s, no definition of a “poverty line” or survey of the proportion of citizens normally living below it that would be regarded as acceptable today occurred before the late nineteenth century, nor did any comprehensive public collection of unemployment statistics.
Public assistance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Liberal capitalism left the solution of pauperism to the spontaneous absorption of the able-bodied into employment by economic expansion, and the rest to self-help, mutual aid, charity, and ad hoc emergency measures (preferably voluntary). It reserved public assistance for the irreducible residuum, or for catastrophic famine, increasingly rare in industrial, but not in underdeveloped, regions. The object of poor laws was primarily to assist the uninhibited working of the free economy, as by facilitating labor mobility, discouraging excessive population growth, etc., and to separate the residuum of involuntary and irremediable pauperism from the rest. The English Poor Law of 1834 was the prime example of such a policy, although mere abstention from ambitious public action was more common. In fact, and in spite of this bias toward abstention, economic conditions made it necessary even in the nineteenth century to establish or extend public systems of relief in the growing areas of relative social disorganization, such as the cities and industrial regions.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a more positive public policy developed, reflecting the abandonment of confidence in an essentially self-regulating capitalist economy, the growing political influence of the poor, and the appearance of planned socialist economies. Pauperism was reabsorbed into the wider problem of providing all citizens with a minimum standard of life at all times. Since neither traditional social organization nor economic growth as such could ensure this, it was increasingly, although sometimes reluctantly, seen as the responsibility, in the main, of national central government. Where special poor laws existed, they disappeared, as in Britain in 1929. In socialist countries, and with the great depression in advanced industrial countries, even such wider welfare policies tended to become part of still more comprehensive policies of economic management, e.g., policies of full employment. Backward regions entering upon development in recent decades have therefore, even when adopting the patterns of capitalist enterprise, rarely shown the nineteenth-century confidence in pure market forces. In such countries the adoption of ambitious policies of public welfare, simultaneously with economic development, has normally been a function of the political importance of the poor as voters or as revolutionaries, or of the attempt to forestall their revolutions. Paradoxically, therefore, the most socially conservative regimes have continued to show the greatest attachment to the policies toward pauperism of economic liberalism.
Present attitudes toward poverty. The vast increase in wealth offered or achieved by modern technology, the growing role of social planning and management, and the political changes connected with both have led to a sharp devaluation of moral poverty. Poverty is no longer widely accepted as inevitable or desirable, and its abolition is universally advocated. This implies not only the universal elevation of the minimum standard of material life to a level for which the actual standards in richer countries or among wealthier strata provide a guide, but also the abolition of the social inequalities inseparable from the concept of poverty. Governments or bodies of opinion that do not publicly subscribe to these aims are now rare. However, the belief in the desirability of unlimited enrichment is by no means universal, although the belief in the abolition of poverty is. Those who voluntarily abstain from enrichment may continue to enjoy considerable respect, but rarely institutionalized status. Nevertheless, industrialization is marked by a fundamental alteration in the place of poverty in the value systems of societies.
The measurement of poverty
Increased public interest has since the late nineteenth century led to a notable improvement in the quantitative information about poverty. Various relevant data (e.g., on incomes, cost of living, unemployment, consumer expenditure, housing) are now gathered as a matter of routine by many governments and collated by international organizations, but adequate knowledge still demands periodic ad hoc surveys of the type pioneered by Booth and Rowntree before 1900 (see Booth et al. 1889–1891; see also Rowntree 1901). Measurement, moreover, poses problems both of technique and of definition.
Material poverty
At the lowest level, the criterion of material poverty is an inability to achieve a minimum of physiological health and efficiency, and attempts to define a minimum nutritional standard (at present expressed mainly in calories, with allowances for other aspects of the diet) have been made since the mid-nineteenth century. Their object, not always achieved, is to eliminate subjective and conventional elements in the assessment of basic poverty. Where the “poverty line” separates the hungry from the properly fed, as it still does in many parts of the world, such minimum standards have some value, although there is no absolute certainty as to what constitutes the physiological minimum. However, in economically developing and richer countries a conventional minimum, tending to rise with time, must and always does determine poverty. Comparisons between richer and poorer countries and between poverty in one country at different times therefore become increasingly difficult. An objective minimum or an unchanging conventional standard measures not what is socially accepted as poverty in the richer country or at the later time, but only the difference between countries or points of time. The periodic “rediscovery” of poverty in countries whose standards of living have markedly improved, as in Britain in the 1880s and in the United States and Britain in the early 1960s, is due largely to the lag in adjusting standards to changing bases of assessment.
Nonmaterial poverty
More serious difficulties arise in the measurement of nonmaterial aspects of poverty, that is, of the part played in it by the inferiority of rights, opportunities, and status of the poor and their sense of such inferiorities. Certain of these aspects may be measured separately (for example, access to educational facilities and jobs), but the entire syndrome of frustration, resentment, and underprivilege has so far eluded quantification and comparison. The problem is complicated by the effects of social change or social disintegration on felt poverty. Such difficulties are illustrated by the inability of historians of British industrialization to agree on a generally acceptable weighting of material and nonmaterial factors in the poverty of the period they have studied.
Measures of consumption
The most convenient measure of material poverty is through consumption, assessed directly or through income and expenditure. The latter has been found useful for comparisons, since Engel’s law, first formulated in 1857, showed that—subject to reservations that are sometimes of major importance–the proportion of total expenditure on food, or more generally on basic needs, tends to vary inversely with income (Engel 1895). Thus, in about 1960 the mean percentage of family expenditure on food ranged from 25 to 30 (Canadian towns, white families in Northern Rhodesia) through 30–35 (northwest Europe: Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Great Britain), 50–55 (in the poorer countries of eastern Europe), over 60 (urban populations in parts of north Africa, Asia, and Latin America), to 70–80 in rural and poorest urban strata in underdeveloped regions (International Labor Office 1963, tables 22 and 23). Higher percentages occur in abnormally depressed zones, as during and after food shortages; lower percentages are found among the wealthy—for example, 15 per cent among the “rich” in the United States in 1935–1936 (U.S. National Resources Committee …1939). Such juxtapositions allow us to make rough initial comparisons between countries and social strata, but no more.
Data on absolute per capita consumption also are often available, although without special inquiries they are commonest in the crude form of “per capita availability” of certain commodities and facilities, which neglects or underestimates qualitative differences and variations between social strata. Such data are therefore of limited value, although they are of some use in discussions of economic backwardness and growth. They show that the mean per capita food supply (in calories) in the poorest countries (south Asia, parts of the Far East and of Latin America) in the late 1950s was more than a third below that in the best-fed (North America, white Australasia, northwestern Europe, Argentina). Considerably wider disparities exist in the mean per capita availability of such elementary consumer goods as textiles. The same data can also be used to demonstrate such changes in consumption levels as the rise in mean per capita food supply in southern Europe during the 1950s (Food and Agriculture Organization …1948; International Labor Office 1963).
Income distribution
Data on the distribution of incomes and property provide some guidance to intranational economic inequality, but extreme caution is needed in the use of official statistics on these subjects, especially in areas where incomes remain partly nonmonetary (see Titmuss 1962). Whatever the relevance of such inquiries to the measurement of poverty, they cannot replace specific inquiries into its extent. Since the major improvement in living standards following the recovery from World War II, relatively few such investigations have been made in the industrialized countries. Estimates for the United States suggest that about 20 per cent of the population is below a “poverty line” appropriate to the current standard of living in that country, including a high proportion very much below it (Morgan et al. 1962). British estimates suggest a comparable figure of 8–10 per cent, most (thanks to the more comprehensive welfare provisions usual in western Europe) only a little below the appropriate minimum standard (Townsend 1962). Comparisons of absolute minimum standards are possible with earlier industrial periods but difficult with preindustrial ones, although simple inspection normally reveals considerable improvement in the minimum in the past half-century. It is extremely difficult to make comparisons with periods before the twentieth century of the per cent of the population below changing conventional minimum standards, although in industrialized countries there has probably also been improvement in this percentage. Comparisons of the effects of different types and levels of welfare provision are theoretically feasible, at least for the documented recent period, but the question has not attracted a great deal of attention.
While the special problem of pauperism remains, and there is universal hostility toward poverty in most modern social value systems, the general problem of the abolition of poverty has increasingly merged with, and has often become the foundation of, the social and political policy of governments. A separate discussion of the abolition of poverty therefore goes beyond the limits of this article. Broadly speaking, in most countries of the world the solution to poverty is assumed to rest on economic development, although it is no longer generally believed that this will in itself—and without the systematic, planned, and ambitious intervention of governments–eliminate a large residue of pauperism. Nor is it believed that development can be expected automatically to abolish, or perhaps even to diminish, the range of social and economic inequalities (see Paukert 1965). How far these can in fact be reduced or eliminated remains a thorny question. On the other hand there is general agreement that any notable degree of economic development will—although not necessarily in the short run or at all times–notably raise the average standard of material consumption. There is also general agreement that material destitution, or poverty as denned in most preindustrial periods or regions, can be eliminated.
E. J. Hobsbawm
[See alsoConsumers, article onconsumption levels and standards; Income distribution, article onSize. Other relevant material may be found inFamine; Labor Unions.]
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