Category: Poverty

Why we shouldn't think about ethnicity when we think about poverty

A blog from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation offers us ten reasons why we should think about ethnicity when we think about poverty.  Here are three reasons why we shouldn’t.

The first is that most people in minority ethnic groups are not poor.  Take one of the JRF’s killer facts:  “The poverty rate among ethnic minority families with disabled children is 44 per cent compared to 17 per cent of all disabled children.”  That’s terrible.  It’s unfair.  It shows that such families are disadvantaged.  But it also tells us that 56 per cent of minority ethnic families with disabled children are not poor.   Saying that people are more likely to be poor is saying something quite different from the idea that they are poor.

 

The second reason is that it’s a negative stereotype.   Identifying poverty with ‘race’ is used to reinforce prejudices about culture and the way people choose to live.  It feeds the idea that people come from other countries to be dependent in Britain.  This is wicked nonsense, used to fuel xenophobic sentiment.

Third, it’s a way of ‘othering’ poor people – making it seem that poverty is something that happens to other people.  The bad news about poverty  is this: it could be you.  All you need is to be ill, divorced, disabled, unemployed, victimised or otherwise caught by circumstances.  Most people in the country have had a spell in poverty in the last ten years; most of us will probably have a spell in the next ten.

The principal issue is not that people in minority groups are poor, but that they are disadvantaged – a sign of prejudice, discrimination and exclusion.  When we about the reasons why that happens, it’s not necessarily true that ethnicity is the key factor.  Tariq Modood has suggested that the groups which seem to be most often excluded – people from Pakistani and Bangladeshi origins – are distinguished not by their ethnicity, but by their religion.

 

Misunderstanding persistent poverty

The Government’s Child Poverty Strategy is based squarely on an argument that government has to break the cycle of poverty.

This Government is focused on breaking the cycle of disadvantage …  Children experiencing poverty face multiple disadvantages that often continue throughout their lives and are all too often continue on to the next generation.(p 17)

This is, more or less, a restatement of Keith Joseph’s idea of the ‘cycle of deprivation’ .  The Strategy explains:

We must continue with our mission to break the cycle of poor children going on to be poor adults. This process starts at the beginning of life and poor children are four times as likely to become poor adults as other children. (p 14)

The Strategy refers at both these points, and at three others, to research showing that poor children are four times more likely than others to be poor as adults.   The figure comes from a study published in 2006 by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.  Except that this is not really what the JRF study is about.  The authors of that study, Blanden and Gibbons, explain:

poor teenagers in the 1970s grew up to be poor because of more general family background disadvantages, in particular parental non-employment and low education – poverty itself had little or no direct effect over and above these teenage family factors. However, for teenagers in the 1980s, poverty had a direct effect on the chances of ending up in poverty, even when allowing for differences in these same aspects of family background.  … Our results find evidence of a significant persistence of poverty from teens to the early thirties and through to early middle age. Comparing the persistence of poverty from across the cohorts indicates that the strength of this persistence has approximately doubled (pp ix, 2).

The study is rather good.  Here is what they found (p 7):

Poor as teenagers Not poor as teenagers
Poor in their thirties (%)

 

 Not poor in their thirties (%)

 

 Poor in their thirties (%)

 

 Not poor in their thirties (%)

 
Teenage boys mid 70s 18.9 81.2 10.1 89.9
Teenage girls mid 70s 18.6 81.5 5.3 94.7
Teenage boys mid 80s 28.8 71.2 16.9 83.1
Teenage girls mid 80s 23.7 76.3 8 92

 

That certainly does show that teenagers who are poor are more likely to be poor when they are adults.  But it also tells us that most poor teenagers do not become poor adults;  and that the risks of poverty becoming persistent grow when the economy is depressed, as it was in the 1980s.  Poverty is persistent across different periods of people’s lives for a relatively small proportion of the population – 1.4% of men, 3.1% of women.

The JRF study is concerned with the prospects of teenagers and the persistence of poverty into adulthood.   It is not, then,  a demonstration of the ‘cycle of deprivation’.  On the contrary, it points again to issues which have been shown repeatedly in the past:  that there is considerable movement in and out of poverty, that persistent poverty through a person’s lifetime is already relatively unusual, and that consequently transmission between generations is going to be more unusual still.  The authors note that “teenage poverty is much more important in determining poverty in adulthood than poverty in earlier childhood” and go so far as to suggest that “addressing the adulthood causes of poverty directly is likely to be much more beneficial over adults’ lifecycles than tackling poverty faced in childhood.”  (p 34)

 

'Multiple cuts for the poorest families'

A report for Oxfam and the New Policy Institute looks at the interaction of three main benefit cuts:  Council Tax Support, the bedroom tax and the limitation of local housing allowances.  In summary, the numbers of people affected are

  • 970,000 families have cuts in Council Tax Support only
  • 280,000 lose through council tax support and LHA
  • 200,000 through Council Tax Support and the bedroom tax, and
  • 140,000 through the bedroom tax alone
  • 100,000 through LHA alone.

These figures do not cover all the cuts to the poorest families.  The most important omissions are probably the sanctions regime, which has affected half a million unemployed people, and the impacts of the reassessment of disability benefits.  The total effects are certainly worse than this report suggests.  I think, too, that the report plays into the government’s hands when it adds in a further 28,000 victims of the benefits cap – people who can reasonably say they are being badly treated, but who are not (by definition) among the lowest income families.

 

 

 

 

Nigeria's GDP has grown by 89% since Saturday

This item, which I have from the Economist, is one of the strangest reports I’ve seen in years.  Assessments of GDP are supposed to be regularly revised, and Nigeria has not done it in an age.  In its latest revision, the assessment of GDP has grown by 89%, making Nigeria the largest economy in Africa.  GDP per capita has risen from $1500 a year to $2688.

At the same time, Nigeria also has one of the worst rates for infant mortality in the world.  UNICEF puts the death rate for under-5s at 124 per 1000.  This is much better than it used to be – there have been improvements across most of Africa – but Nigeria’s rating is still the 9th worst in the world.  There are more important things than GDP.

 

 

Poverty as a violation of human rights

I’m grateful to CROP, the Comparative Research Group on Poverty, for drawing my attention to a development in the UN: the declaration that poverty is a violation of human rights.  The Guiding Principles on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, agreed in 2012, begin with an understanding of poverty as “a multidimensional phenomenon that encompasses a lack of both income and the basic capabilities to live in dignity”.  States have duties, for example

  • to protect people in poverty from stigmatisation, and to “prohibit public authorities, whether national or local, from stigmatizing or discriminating against persons living in poverty” (pp 5-6)
  • to enhance the involvement of women in decision-making (p 6)
  • to give poor people rights of redress (p 11)
  • to ensure that persons living in poverty have access to at least the
    minimum essential food that is nutritionally adequate and safe, basic
    shelter, housing and sanitation (p 15)
  • to “repeal or reform any laws that criminalize life-sustaining activities in
    public places, such as sleeping, begging, eating or performing personal
    hygiene activities” (p 17)
  • to provide legal aid for criminal and civil cases (p 19), and
  • to ensure that all workers are paid a wage sufficient to enable them and
    their family to have access to an adequate standard of living (p 27)

The document has no direct legislative force, but breaches of human rights are in principle justiciable, and members of CROP have been arguing for some years that developing legal rights against poverty could have a major material effect on government policies.

 

Development and fertility rates

The Economist argues that the main thing holding back nations in sub-Saharan Africa is the high birth rate, and that the primary reason for this is the lack of contraception.  I think they are mistaken.  I have linked to two dynamic graphs.  The relationship between fertility rates and contraception is uneven.  Far, far stronger  is the relationship between fertility rates and infant mortality.  The main single factor determining how many children a woman has is how likely it seems that those children will survive.

The position is of course more complex.  Fertility rates fall wherever women have economic opportunities, education and better health; the reason is partly because they then have alternatives, and partly because they are more likely to delay childbearing.  Contraception contributes to this process, but it is not decisive.  Economic development is far more important. 

This, by the way, is the 400th entry I have made on this blog.

Measuring hunger

In the process of catching up on stuff from the World Bank, I came across another ill-conceived paper, published in January:  The challenge of measuring hunger.  Different methods of measurement, the authors complain, yield radically different results:  “In our survey experiment, we calculate hunger to range between 19 and 68 percent”.  Perhaps they might have worked out from this that there is something fundamentally wrong with the approach they’re taking.  It’s more than fifty years since the indicators movement first argued that we had to stop thinking about social issues in terms of single, accurate, precise measures.  What we need are indicators, pointers or signposts – multiple sources of evidence where we look for direction, reinforcement and corroboration, rather than authoritative answers in tablets of stone.  Anything else is doomed to failure.

Poverty in India

I was drawn to a paper from the World Bank by its title:  “A comprehensive analysis of poverty in India“.   In recent years the World Bank has published some remarkably rich, subtle, multidimensional, participative studies of poverty.  This isn’t one of those.

The authors define poverty in terms of a minimum basket of goods; although there are nominally two poverty lines, they are both subsistence measures, largely based on a minimaum calorific intake.  They write:

the  poverty line should be set at a level that allows us to track the progress made in helping the truly destitute or those living in abject poverty, often referred to as extreme poverty.

Back to Bowley, it seems; it’s as if the last eighty years of poverty research never happened.  The authors explain:

To appreciate further the folly of setting too high a poverty line for purposes of  identifying  the  poor,  recall  that  the  national  average  poverty  line  was  22.2  rupees  per person per day in rural areas and 28.26 rupees in urban areas in 2009-10. … raising these lines to just 33.3 and 45.4 rupees,  respectively, would place 70% of the rural and 50% of the urban population in poverty in 2009-10. …   Will the fate of the destitute not be compromised if the meager tax revenues available for redistribution were thinly spread on this much larger population?

Peter Townsend used to complain, long and loud, that subsistence measures were liable to be used to justify limiting support. (It’s a caution that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, currently investigating destitution, might do well to note. )   The idea that extending and generalising support undermines the position of the poor is plainly wrong.  Many of the gains that have been made in antipoverty programmes in recent years have been through austere universal measures, such as Essential Health Packages, and the extension of social protection and assistance in a range of transitional economies.   We might ask, on the contrary, whether there is any prospect of people receiving the help they need if the only benefits are focused on a limited, marginal population.

Some "disturbingly Marxist" theology

I am not a Christian, which might go some way to explaining why I was cruelly passed over in recent contests both for the Papacy and for the position of Archbishop of Canterbury.  Both the current post-holders however are in the sights of Simon Heffer, writing for the Daily Mail, who is perturbed that Anglicans and Catholics alike are failing to condemn the welfare state as good Christians should.  Heffer complains:

what Archbishop Nichols and the 27 prelates and their friends do not seem to understand is that there is nothing remotely Christian about living off the efforts of others when you could perfectly well live off your own.

Speaking as an outsider, I am generally reluctant to suggest I understand anything at all about other people’s religion.  I had been under the impression, however, that there was indeed something vaguely Christian about sharing property.

And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.  (Acts 4:32)

Chapter 25 of Matthew seems to suggests that there is some merit in feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked and visiting prisoners.  Perhaps I misread it, and Matthew left out the moral conditionality and consideration of the public purse that every modern Christian needs to consider.

Heffer also condemns the assembled clerics for taking a “disturbingly Marxist line.”   I don’t know what there is in Marxism that supports the position of the poorest.  Marx held that property should belong to the people who produce it, dismissed the lowest class as the ‘social scum’ and the Soviet Union had laws to prosecute ‘parasites, tramps and beggars’.  It strikes me then that Heffer’s position may have more in common with Marxism than the bishops do.