Poverty & Social Exclusion Dr David Gordon Professor of Social Justice School for Policy Studies

1. Poverty & Social Exclusion Dr David Gordon Professor of Social Justice School for Policy Studies University of Bristol Social Inclusion Forum National Economic & Social Development Conference Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin, 15th November 2007

2. All cultures have a concept of Poverty • “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

3. Between the bays of Carraroe JM Synge Guardian 14/6/1905 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”

4. 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

5. Age at death by age group, 1990-1995 Source: The State of the World Population 1998

6. Make Poverty History: Click Video

7. Only the good die young? – what kills children Cause of death for children under five Bars show estimated confidence interval

8. 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.

9. Definitions of Poverty Poverty can be defined as; Command over insufficient resources over time The result of poverty is deprivation

10. 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.

11. UNICEF Child Poverty League of Rich Countries Percent of children living below 50% of median national income Source: UNICEF (2005)

12. Definition of poverty

13. 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)

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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

17. Reasons why people do not participate in socially necessary activities Source: PSE 1999, Multiple responses allowed

18. Measuring Multidimensional Exclusion: B-SEM Model

20. The Causes of Poverty

21. Structural 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

22. Low Wages and Child Poverty Source: UNICEF (2000)

23. Social Expenditure on Families and Child Poverty Source: UNICEF (2005)

24. The Solutions to Poverty

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

27. Poverty: The Solution? “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)