What is poverty?

What is poverty?

Poverty is a lack of sufficient material and cultural resources to sustain a healthy existence. Most discussions distinguish between absolute or primary poverty and relative or secondary poverty. Absolute poverty refers to a lack of the basic requirement to sustain physical life; the subsistence poverty of not having sufficient food and adequate shelter.

Booth and Rowntree were amongst the first researchers to demonstrate the widespread influence of absolute poverty in the UK. Relative poverty is used to demonstrate the inadequacy of definitions of absolute poverty by referring to the cultural needs of individuals and families within the context of the rest of the society.

It is a relativistic definition which relates poverty but only to physical needs only to the norms and expectations of society.

The study of poverty is central to any examination of social inequality, including an analysis of who was poor and the reasons for the poverty. In the UK, there is no set poverty line although some commentators use eligibility for, and claiming of, social security benefits as a measure of the extent of poverty. Using this criterion, 17% of the British population, or about 9 million people, or officially poor in 1986. However, this excludes all the people who are not eligible for social security support, those who did not claim support, those who are just above this arbitrary line, and those who fell into the poverty trap.

Categories of poor people in industrialised societies usually include the unemployed, people in low paid or part-time employment, the sick and disabled, older people, members of large families single-parent families. Were the poor have been blamed for their poverty, which is seen as a consequence of some form of personal inadequacy such as fecklessness or idleness, most studies explain the existence of poverty in terms of the social and economic structures of industrial societies.

Poverty studies have been criticised for not recognising that poverty may result in the income of a man, although well above the poverty line, is not equitably shared between all members of the family; plus the burden of poverty forced to click on them.

Just as poverty is seen to be an indicator of class and gender relations industrial society, so poverty has been seen as an indicator of unequal economic relations between different countries; the poverty of the Third World countries being directly related to the accumulation of wealth in developed countries.