Category: Poverty

Counting the cuts

Simon Duffy, for the Centre for Welfare Reform, has produced a short, hard-hitting report on the cumulative effect of cuts, focused particularly on England.  The report is short, but it’s backed up by a detailed Excel file where Duffy lays out his sources in some detail.

I’m not sure I agree with every word – Duffy argues that a shrinking proportion of national income should be seen as a cut in itself.  The stark facts are, however, that cuts are falling disproportionately on the poorest, more disproportionately still on people with disabilities, and most directly on people receiving social care from local authorities.

While this has been going on, the Prime Minister is having a go at the Archbishop of Westminster for saying that

The voices that I hear express anger and despair.  Something is going seriously wrong when, in a country as affluent as ours, there are people left in that destitute situation and depend solely on the hand-outs of the charity of food banks.

David Cameron’s response is that “Archbishop Nichols’ claims that the basic safety net no longer exists are simply not true”, while a Conservative source is quoted as saying the Archbishop is “ill-informed”. But the Archbishop is right. People are being left destitute and without food. And if you cut off the benefits of one unemployed person in five, there isn’t a basic safety net.

Slums as poverty traps

An article in the Economist led me to a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, arguing that that slums can trap people in poverty.  This is not exactly fresh – the description of slums as “poverty traps” (p.190) can be found in Charles Booth’s studies of London in the 1880s.

Who thought differently?  The crucial arguments were made by Turner and Perlman in the 60s and 70s: they argued that squatting was in many places a normal form of tenure, which allowed people first to form a ‘bridgehead’ and then to consolidate over time.  This article has data from five cities in Kenya, Bangladesh and India.  They all had a system of landholding imposed by the British Empire,  and squatting has a limited role in all of them.  The article confirms that when people living in slums have to pay rent, they may not be able to afford to do more.  That’s not new, but it doesn’t get to grips with the main point of the argument.

Amartya Sen on tolerating poverty

I pressed home yesterday in good time to watch Amartya Sen’s LSE lecture on “Poverty and the tolerance of the intolerable“.  The lecture is now available in audio format here.

After a moving introduction, Sen identified three main reasons why people (and particularly people in India) accept the existence of poverty:  ignorance, supposed ‘realism’, and a self-centred denial of responsibility.

There are two others he might have mentioned.  One is the argument that poverty is in some way necessary, functional or advantageous to the development of the economy – a position put by Herbert Spencer, and implicitly accepted by Rawls.  Sen didn’t address that argument directly, but he gave an effective response to the point nevertheless:   that the existence of public services, including education, health, social security and housing, is complementary to economic development and growth.

The other argument may be less important in India, but it’s crucial in Britain and the USA.  It’s possible to deny moral responsibility if there is some other moral judgment that runs counter to it – if the poor somehow  deserve their poverty.  The moral condemnation of poor people is central to current debates.  The strident attacks on people who are unemployed or disabled or caring for children are not new, but they have clearly tapped into a well of poison that has been there for centuries.  The founders of the Welfare State thought they had broken away from the past; they were wrong.  We may never be free of this.

International aid can work

An article in the Independent suggests that Jeffrey Sachs has lost the argument:  international aid can’t save places that are mired in poverty.  This is based largely in criticism of Sach’s favoured Millennium Villages Project, which have sought to show that intensive aid can make a difference in a locality.  The projects aren’t what they’re cracked up to be; there are no experimental controls; other places with no such projects have done better.

There are three problems with those criticisms.  The first is that many of the criticisms are untrue, or at least disputed.  The second is that even if the MVPs had been completely misconceived and crackpot (they’re not – they’re just small scale), it wouldn’t be possible to generalise from their success or failure to the whole concept of overseas aid.  The third is that all of this has been happening during a period when international aid has been visibly more successful than ever before (which of course upsets any potential finding from a control).    The combination of aid with Poverty Reduction Strategies and partnership working has paid handsome dividends, with many of the poorest places in the world showing a spectacular drop in infant mortality, typically of a quarter.  Even if we don’t buy the economics, we can still believe in that.

Homeless Link: homeless people are liable to be sanctioned

A depressing report from Homeless Link explains that homeless people are particularly likely to suffer from sanctions and penalties. The numbers are iffy, but the trend seems clear – sanctions are applied disproportionately for young people with problems in mental health or substance abuse.

“While the intention of sanctions is to incentivise claimants into work, our research shows that this is not happening for homeless people. Instead, sanctions are effectively punishing vulnerable people – who are trying to engage with finding work – for making mistakes.”

More open access material

I’ve added some more links to my open access page.  CROP, the Comparative Research Group of Poverty, has posted an online version of Poverty: an international Glossary, which I co-edited with  Sonia Alvarez Leguizamon and David Gordon; so now there are four books available.  OpenAir, the Robert Gordon University’s Open Access Repository, has added several more refereed articles.

The list has more than fifty items now.  It’s only a selection of my work – if you want my best stuff, you’ll still have to buy it – but I can see that the page is starting to get unwieldy.  I may need to reorganise it.

India’s right to food

It’s more than thirty years that Amartya Sen made the fundamental argument in Poverty and Famines (1981) that the problem of hunger is not about shortage of food, but people’s right to get to the food that was there. The Right to Food campaign in India seems to have won the argument.   A bill currently under consideration accepts the principle of a right to food, and aims to deliver it by subsidies of basic grains.

There are doubts, of course, about India’s capacity to deliver the right effectively.  And, as reported last month, a third of the world’s poorest people are in India.

Stealing to survive?

Although crime rates in general have been falling, there has been a surge in shoplifting locally. The Dundee Courier reports: ‘Police Scotland’s Fife Division has reported a 37% rise in theft by shoplifting from shops across the region compared to last year. Officers believe many people are stealing just to survive.’

The link is difficult to prove, of course; a study would need to link convictions with benefit status. In the early 1970s, the ‘four week rule’ imposed sanctions indefinitely for people who failed to get straight back to work in areas deemed to be of high employment. In Scrounging on the welfare (1974) Molly Meacher found that about a third of the people who had benefit stopped had been convicted of their first criminal offence shortly afterwards. Now that we have lengthy, fixed term sanctions in place, there have to be concerns that something similar may be happening.

The poorest parts of the world

Many people working on poverty issues are sceptical of the measures used by the World Bank, based on poverty lines of $1.25 or $2 a day.  While the figures can’t be taken at face value, it’s doubtful that income at that level can be ‘measured’, very low incomes do tell us two things: that lots of people are poor, and that as there is almost no money they are probably not part of a formal economy either.

A short statistical report from the World Bank, The state of the poor, flags up some interesting issues. The first is that extreme poverty by their measure is falling in most parts of the world, with the clear exception of Sub Saharan Africa, Second, while a third of the poorest people are in Sub Saharan Africa, and a third more are in one country – not China, which has 13% of the poorest people, but India.  (I missed the World Bank report when it came out, but the Times of India didn’t.)   The Millennium Development Goals aimed to cut extreme poverty by half, and that has been done; the next goal is to go for half again by 2030, and these places are where the main focus will fall.

The Effects of Taxes and Benefits on Household Income

The ONS statistical release on the distributive impact of tax and benefits has attracted some attention, including concern that the tax system is not particularly redistributive.   I’ve used the figures in this series several times in the past, for example in my 1988 book Principles of Social Welfare and an essay on income and wealth published in 2001. The series has always been controversial, as much for what it doesn’t include as what it does. Having said that, it has shown a remarkably consistent pattern over time. In 1986, the final income of the bottom fifth of households was 28% of the final income of the top fifth. in 1996, it was 26%. In the figures for 2011, released yesterday, it was just below 28%. There has not been much change in the distributive impact, then.

This doesn’t reveal, however, the most striking change. In 1986, many households on lower incomes were pensioners, and others were single people. The average number of people in a household in the lowest fifth was 1.9, and in the highest fifth it was 3.3. In 2011, rather more of the households on the lowest incomes were families with children. The average number of people in a household in the lowest fifth was 2.7, and the average number of people in the households in the highest fifth was 2.4. So the relative share of an individual in the bottom fifth has fallen from 49% of the final income received by the top fifth in 1986 to under 26% now.