Work, Poverty and Welfare Flashcards
What is absolute poverty?
When a person lacks the minimum requirements to survive such as food or water
- United nations says anyone under $1.25 a day is in absolute poverty
What are the advantages of the definition of absolute poverty?
- National and international comparisons made easier due to necessities being relatively easily identified
What are the weaknesses of the definition of absolute poverty?
- Hard to objectively measure subsistent needs. This can be seen through Rowntrees study, drew up a budget for essential nutrition but was criticised for relying on opinions of people who drew up list. He also wasted nothing showing middle class cooking skills rather than resources available to the poor
- Ignores reality of people’s lives, doesn’t take into account social, psychological and cultural habits which influence people’s decision.
- No clear subsistence minimum, a builder may need more calories than a cleaner and minimums will be different in hot or cold countries
- People need more than just survival in life such as entertainment and socialising in order to live
What is relative poverty?
- Townsend says that relative poverty is when people are socially excluded because they cannot afford things others can such as education, work and access to services etc.
- Minimum standards are related to the society the person is living in
- Social exclusion can cause problems such as bad health, poor housing, poor services etc. which can all contribute to eachother leading to a spiral of decline
What are some examples of poverty apart from low income?
- Homelessness, 2014, 52,000 people named unintentionally homeless
- Poverty in healthcare, fewer doctors acting in inner city areas where most poor live and those that live there are overworked spending less time with patients because poor are more likely to have bad health.
- Poverty at school, concentration of social problems such as drugs, vandalism and lack of parental support causing high teacher turnover and parents are unable to buy extra resources.
- Poverty at work, neglect of working conditions and long shifts to make up for low pay. Lack of entitlement to paid holidays, insecure employment, no work security, sick pay or pension schemes
- Environmental poverty, pollution, overcrowding, access to essential services.
- Personal factors, poor health office for national statistics found millions of people were to die 9 years earlier due to being poor. Depression, can cause domestic violence and family breakdowns and low self esteem.
What are the strengths of the definition of relative poverty?
- Recognises poverty is a social construct based on how other people are living in society
- Recognises definition of poverty can change in societies and over time
- Recognises social, cultural and environmental factors of poveryt
What are the weaknesses of the definition of relative poverty?
- Measures social inequality rather than poverty. There will always be people who cannot afford things most people want and have no matter how rich a society becomes
- Riddled with value judgements such as Townsend deprivation index
- 60% of median income means some people will always be poor no matter how rich a society becomes
What is subjective poverty?
- When people believe whether they are poor or not.
- This means people will judge themselves based on the group they identify with such as a rich executive not being able to afford a luxury lifestyle or someone in social housing who has more than those in the same living space not considering themselves subjectively poor
What are the contemporary definitions of poverty?
- The poverty line, people living on or under 60% of median income of a country
- Minimum income standard, 2014, single people needed £16,300 to participate in society and have essential needs and couples with 2 children needed to earn £20,300 each . Decent standard of living calculated through surveys of the public
How poor is the UK?
- 2012-13, 21% of population living below the official poverty line including 3.6 million children.
- 33% of households lack 3 necessities of life such as clothing or heating. 5.5 million people go without essential clothing and 18 million live in inadequate housing. 1 in 3 cannot heat their homes and 12 million are socially excluded
What is the culture of poverty
(cultural explanations of poverty)
Culture of poverty, Oscar Lewis did research in Mexico, Puerto Rico and New York in the 1950’s and suggests reasons for them being poor such as.
- Didn’t take opportunities to escape poverty when they arrive
- Fatalism, believe nothing can be done to change their situation
- Reluctant to work
- Don’t plan for the future
- Marginalised and don’t accept themselves as part of society
Children grow up under this culture and continue this culture producing the same outcome.
What do the new right (Marsland) say the explanation for poverty is?
(cultural explanation of poverty)
David Marsland says that poverty arises from generosity of the welfare state
- Handouts have created a dependancy culture where people abandon their jobs to live on handouts because they are lazy
- Universal welfare benefits take money away from investment and therefore the production of wealth
- Universal welfare should be removed and applied to people who actually need them through means testing where people have to prove their income in order to receive selective benefits
What do the new right (Murray) say the explanation for poverty is?
(cultural explanation of poverty)
- The poor form an antisocial UNDERCLASS perpetuating their poverty forming a yob culture causing illegitimacy, lone parenthood, family instability, drug abuse, crime etc.
- Women have children they cannot afford but are supported by benefits reproducing yob culture
- Increasing of the welfare state has reinforced the underclass and the solution is cut benefits to encourage work and marriage
What are the criticisms of cultural explanations of poverty?
- No clear evidence children inherit parent’s attitudes. Rutter and Madge found that half of all disadvantages arise in each generations. Blanden and Gibbons found that children are likely to be as poor as their parents. It is emphasised parents attitudes are one amongst many factors such as material deprivation
- Little evidence of dependency culture, Shildrick found 0.5% of households had 2 generations that never worked and there was no evidence for fraudulent working while claiming benefits
- Victim blaming, it is not cultural factors that cause poverty but economic ones
- Based on myths of the welfare state, Baumberg, Bell and Gaffney say welfare state is based on misinformation that demonises the poor.
What are myths of the welfare state?
There are Generations of work less families - 0.3% of households with 2 or more generations where neither generation has worked
Benefits are too generous - Taking minimum wages would leave people 30% better off than receiving benefits
Fraud raises benefits bill - 2011/12, 0.7% pf benefit bill overpaid due to fraud compared to £70 billion lost through tax evasion
Benefit claimants claim for years without taking jobs - less than 10% of claimants claim for longer than a year and less than half for more than 13 weeks.
Most welfare spending goes to the unemployed - Over half goes to pensioners
Spending on families with hordes of children - Families with more than 5 children claim 1% of unemployed benefits
What are material constraints?
(material explanations for poverty)
Material or situational constraints keep people poor such as illness, disability, not culture
- Hopelessness undermines opportunities to play for the future
What is the cycles of deprivation?
(material explanations for poverty)
- Coates and Silburn
- Study in Nottingham
- People are trapped by their poverty despite their attitudes
- A child born into poverty may experience bad health, taking more days off school resulting in worse results and therefore a low skilled job and poverty.
- The cost of being poor is more than not being poor for example poor people have to finance meaning interest
What is the social democrat version of the underclass?
(material explanations for poverty)
- Charles Murray, bottom social class filled with disadvantaged groups who are socially excluded
- Field and Townsend say this is filled with elderly, lone parents, low paid, disabled etc.
- Also can include illegal migrants who are exploited by dodgy employers who will threaten to report them
- This creates a poverty trap where available work pays less than benefits which demotivates people to work. 2011 if people worked 10 hours a week they’d lose 70% of income
- Ways to prevent this, raise wages, lower taxes or even lowering benefits
- Marxist, Milliband says poor are not a separate underclass but the lowest part of the working class who are all disadvantaged
What is the structural explanation for poverty?
(structural explanation for poverty)
- Inequalities caused by capitalism such as the distribution of wealth, income and power create an unequal class structure
Functionalist - The poor are poor because capitalism requires people to be poor
Marxist - The poor are poor because they are exploited by the rich
Weberian - The poor are poor because they lack skills and power
Poverty remains because the poor don’t have he power to change their positions, the funding to form powerful groups and place pressure on the rich
What are the different types of wealth?
- Marketable wealth, assets that can be bought and sold for financial gain such as a car, shares or land
- Non-marketable wealth, wealth that can’t be sold such as wages or a pension
- Productive property, wealth that provides unearned income such as shares, factories or land
- Consumption property, consumer goods for the owner such as clothes, food or the home that you own
What are the different types of income?
- Disposable income, the money someone has left after paying taxes
- Discretionary income, what is left after taxes which can be used for food, travel costs and energy bills etc.
- Earned income, Income received for paid employment such as wages
- Unearned income, received from productive property such as lands, dividends
How is wealth distributed and a consequence of that?
- Unequally distributed causing mass relative poverty and social divisions with the working class having less chance of attaining high incomes or inheriting it
What are some statistics that show the inequality of the distribution of wealth
- 2023, richest 50 families in UK held welth of 50% of the population (33.5 million people)
- If this growth rate continues the richest 200 will have more than the entire UK’s GDP
- UK home to around 5% of global millionaires but has a wealth gini coefficient of 0,351 despite being the 6th richest nation in the world
What are the different types of rich people?
- Aristocracy, own land such as the Duke of Westminster who owns £8.5 billion in land
- Owners of industry and commerce, rich through business such as Richard Branson estimated wealth of 3.6 billion
- Star of entertainment, use entertaining skills to gain wealth such as David Beckham and Victoria Beckham worth 210 million
- Around 1/3 of wealth of wealth in the UK is inherited through these people showing inaccessibility of wealth without winning the lottery of birth
What are some methods that attempt to redistribute wealth?
- Inheritance tax, to reduce the transference of wealth from one generation to the next before or after death
- Capital gains tax, reduces profit from income or shares, payable whenever they’re sold
- Income tax, payable on earned and unearned income. The more you earn the more you (should) pay.
- Social welfare benefits, the poor’s necessities are subsidised. ,
Why have the attempts to redistribute wealth failed?
Equality trust found the poorest 1-% of households pay 8% more in income thn the richest 10%
- Tax relief, some things can be accounted as business expenses such as school fees or private pensions which means less tax to be paid
- Tax avoidance schemes, legal loopholes in the tax system such as storing wealth in the company of another person
- Failure to claim, due to stigma and the difficult process
What are some statistics that display the extent of poverty in the UK?
- 2023, 14% of people in absolute low income before housing costs and 18% after
- 11% of people live in food insecure households in 2023 with 17% being children
- 2023, 1,9 million (13% of children) children in low income households and material deprivation, showing an increase of 300,000 in a year
- 2023, people from Bangladeshi or Pakistani households are more likely to be in poverty than white people
- 2023, 44% of social renters and 35% of private renters in low income households compared to only 14% of home owners and 10% of mortgage owners
What are the ethnicity trends of poverty?
- Kenway and Palmer, ethnic minorities more likely to be poor than whites showing Bangladeshis (65%) and Pakistanis (55%) have the highest rates of poverty and Indians (25%) and White British (20%)
What are the reasons for more ethnic minorities being in poverty?
- Low pay, Bangladeshi and Pakistani household usually have only one partner in paid work
- Unemployment tends to be higher in Black Caribbean, Black African, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis
- Family types, Lone parent families increasing amongst Black families and larger families increasing amongst Pakistanis and Bangladeshis
- Racism, ethnic minorities most of the time not able to obtain best paid jobs
- Underachievement in education, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Caribbean boys unable to claim highly qualified jobs
What are the age trends of poverty?
All statistics 2022/23
- London 140,000 children aged four and under live in households in poverty
- 33% of children aged 5-9 are in households in poverty
- Over a third of 10-19 year olds live in household poverty (35% of those aged 10-14 and 37% of those aged 15-19).
- 15% of people aged 30-34 living in a household in poverty, the lowest of any age group
- Pensioners less likely to be in poverty than children now.
What are the reasons for child poverty in the UK?
- Lone Parenthood, single parents means less income
- Lack of work for parents, means less income
- Disability of parents, undermines the ability to work, 1/4 poor children have a disabled parent
- Inadequate benefits,
- Inadequate childcare and flexible working policies, makes it difficult for lone or both parents to be in work at the same time
What are the disability trends for poverty?
All statistics 2022/23
- In the 3 years to 2022/23, 30% of families that included a Disabled person were in poverty compared to 22% of those without a Disabled household member.
- This is an increase of 3% in the last decade
What are the reasons more disabled people in poverty?
- Inability to take paid employment, if all of those wanting work found it 40% would still be reliant on benefits
- Unemployment, disabled people 4x more likely to be unemployed
- Low pay, more likely to be paid less than an able person for the same job meaning a smaller pension too.
- Employer discrimination, some people have a stigmatised view of disabled people meaning they’re not as efficient as an able bodied person leading to discrimination.
- Inadequate welfare benefits, insufficient social security to provide for disabled people and their children
What are the gender trends of poverty?
All statistics 2016/17
- The proportion of single women living in poverty has stalled for three years at 25%, while the figure for poor single men has decreased to 23% (from 26% in 2016/17).
Nearly a quarter (23%) of single female pensioners are poor, the highest figure in 15 years. - 45% of single parents - (90%) are women - live in poverty. Almost half of children living with a single parent (47%) are now in poverty.
What are the explanations of women in poverty?
- Women more likely to be in low paid work and miss out on benefits and are also forced to combine work and childcare
- Women are the majority of homeworkers, based on piecework and are extremely low paid
- Women more likely to be single parents and therefore have more economic responsibility
- Women more likely to sacrifice necessities for child such as food
- Women live longer than men but retire earlier, but due to the factors above are more likely to have a smaller pension and therefore live in poverty.
What are the functionalist explanations of poverty?
Davis and Moore
- Not everyone has specialised skills to make it to the top paid jobs
- There must be a system of unequal rewards to motivate people to gain the skills to do these hard jobs
Davis, Moore and Gans
- Ensure menial jobs are completed
- Creates jobs such as policemen and social workers
- Creates motivation for meritocracy by using poverty as a deterrent
- Keeps certain institutions running such as catering, healthcare etc.
- Allows certain types of governments to grow such as poundland or finance companies
What are the criticisms of the functionalist explanations of poverty?
- The ‘most important’ jobs are labelled due to value judgements, CEO’s can only get rich if their employees work hard meaning they are just as important
- Some people are not rich because they have earned it but because they have inherited it
- People are not only motivated by material but by things such as job satisfaction or giving services to other people
- Saying that being poor is a necessity my create divisions in society.
What are the Weberian explanations of poverty?
- People are where they are because of their market situation
- Some people may have more valuable skills than others or a society may value some more than others
- Those in poverty have a poor market situation caused by lack of skills/qualifications and are marginalised as a result
What is the criticism of Weberian explanations of poverty?
Fails to explain position of people who have inherited their wealth and do not sell their skills on the labour market
What are the marxist explanations of poverty?
- Wealth and income held by ruling class and the working class are forced to be the source of profit in order to survive showing the result of capitalism will always be poverty
- Threat of poverty and unemployment motivates workers to work even if they are exploited
- existence of non-working poor keeps wages down as there will always be someone else to hire
- Poverty is divisive, separates non-poor working class and the poor preventing class consciousness
What is a welfare state?
- A state concerned with the social security of the people within it subsidising the needs of the people such as the elimination of poverty
What benefits does the welfare state provide?
- Variety of welfare benefits such as for thh sick, disabled, injured at work etc. 2012 all rolled up to collectively make universal credit
- 1948, The NHS providing dentists, hospitals, local GPs etc.
- Free and compulsory education up until age 17
- Social workers provided by local authorities and house the homeless, provide child protection and supervise adoption processes.
