APPENDIX B
SCIENCE OR
POLITICS IN
POVERTY PROBLEM
DEFINITION AND
RESPONSE: THE
POLICY FORMULATION
CHALLENGE
1. The UK Government has repeatedly stated
that it cannot try to find a scientifically reliable basis for
income poverty measures or governmental minimum income standards
because "the experts do not agree". That is because
the experts have not been asked to pool their expertise in the
solution of a common problem. Instead, governments have consulted
them each individually as experts in their own fields and then
non-scientific officials try to synthesise their advice in politically-expedient
ways, as the DWP's reports show. If the Government adopted the
Select Committee's previous recommendation to sponsor research
to enable expert judgement on triangulation to take place, it
might find the reliable scientific agreement it seeks. The Select
Committee should repeat this advice. We must also hope that the
DWP's newly appointed panel of expert advisers will be able to
act collectively to find agreement on the measures to adopt.
2. The Select Committee is itself expert
in the political objectives of policy research and implementation
and will well understand how these differ from those of science.
The audiences for political solutions to problems are quite different
from those for scientific problems, and they want different kinds
of answers. The DWP rightly says that the choice of poverty measure
must be publicly credible, but which public does it have in mind?
The media are the most salient publics for most political purposes,
together with the sections of the electorate to be retained or
attracted. It is the media who are the prime customers for the
headline measures of child poverty which the DWP wants, but the
simplicity of a headline is incompatible with the complex findings
of science, hedged around by reservations and qualifications as
they are. We constantly see this in the media presentation of
natural science findings and it is even more true in the fields
of social science.
3. Poverty is conceptualised by the whole
of society as a lack of welfare by its common standards. The rich
can say "I would be poor if . . ." and the poor can
reply that they are poor by that definition. Those who know most
about what poverty means in their daily lives—people on
low incomes—are unlikely to find credible the Government's
adoption of an assumed income measure which implies that if they
have incomes above that level but are still poor as society sees
it, their deprivations must be their own fault ("blaming
the victim") and not the fault of the Government which has
failed to ensure that they have adequate incomes. This is the
likely outcome of the adoption of an arbitrary statistical assumption
about income inequality as the official measure of income adequacy,
or indeed any measure which has not been tested by thorough research
which provides reliable evidence of what the population as a whole
take it to mean.
4. There are many current examples of the
difference between the requirements of government scientific advice
and of government policy making in the public eye and this is
one of them. There are inherent conflicts in both aims and methods
which bedevil this debate. When the Select Committee deliberates
over "what is evidence?" it must distinguish their approaches.
The issue is not idealistic differences but practical constraints
of aims and methods. The problems include disciplinary differences
in problem identification, conflicts of expert advice, and incompatibility
with political objectives.
5. Social scientists are being asked to offer
advice on how to measure the social phenomenon of poverty. Some
are experts on the variety of styles of living in society, including
those which are socially defined as unacceptable. Some are expert
in measuring the distribution of resources of many kinds, but
without necessarily being experts in what resources or how much
of them are needed to avoid certain styles of life. Some are experts
in the inputs (such as nutrition and socialisation) and the outcomes
(such as education and health) which may themselves be taken as
causes, conditions or consequences of the dynamics of poverty
and which are publicly seen as social ills or evils. Other branches
of scientific expertise are of course also involved.
6. What should be common to them is a commitment
to scientific method: the use of their disciplines' expert knowledge
and skills to study and produce findings which are recognised
as having integrity in terms of the paradigms and assumptions
of their scientific discipline and branch of expertise. Unfortunately,
each discipline may have the competence to study only some part
of the whole problem[299]
as the politicians have identified it, even though some of its
practitioners have to incorporate assumptions from other fields
in order to carry out their own work.
7. In the field of poverty studies, the
chief example of this conflict is between (a) those social scientists
who study the social realities of deprivations etc and from them
arrive at the hard formulations of the definition of poverty and
the measures relevant to that definition, and (b) those social
scientists who make an assumption that poverty is what they say
it is, and then formulate their definition and measures on the
basis of their prior prescription. Either society defines poverty,
and the income poverty line then is a statistical derivative of
social definitions, or the statistician assumes that a certain
percentage of average incomes is to be taken as a proxy for this,
whether the evidence shows that it is reliable or not. There is
no bridge between the two approaches: they are in conflict in
terms of the source of authority for their claims that poverty
is one thing or another. One judges on the basis of evidence,
the other on the basis of formal theoretical systems.
8. We can joke about Humpty Dumpty insisting
that words mean what he wants them to mean, whether or not that
is the customary shared meaning in common usage, and about the
shipwrecked economist who solves the problem of how to open a
tin of food by assuming that he has a tin opener. But the problem
of child poverty and its consequences is far too serious for jokes.
Poverty does not mean what politicians and officials want it to
mean; it means what the society in which it occurs customarily
takes it to mean. Similarly, poverty does not occur at the percentage
of the income distribution which the statistician takes as the
formal assumption for the purpose of the national HBAI statistics;
it is found where incomes are too low to prevent it according
to the definition of poverty which society holds. Making formal
assumptions is simply irrelevant to finding out what poverty is
and who is in it. Thus measuring the inequality of incomes by
statistical methods is socially valuable, but telling us that
the poverty line is at 60% of median household incomes is a mere
formal assumption which has no social value at all.
9. The role of social statisticians is absolutely
indispensable in the calculations which translate the findings
of the social research into how a society defines and identifies
poverty and deprivation into the data with which comparisons of
all kinds can be made and policies formulated. But the only way
of discovering what society as a whole understands by the meaning
of poverty is to carry out social research on the whole population
and that is the expertise of applied forms of the disciplines
of sociology and psychology. Why not economics? Because economics
(as a discipline—I am not referring to the admirable abilities
of some of the people who practice it) has not got the conceptual
tools to articulate and analyse human values, meanings and motives,
and in their absence the evaluative concept of poverty ("this
is an unacceptable level of welfare") cannot be understood.
10. The interdisciplinary research of using
both qualitative sociological and quantitative statistical methods
to discover at what percentage of average incomes people in UK
society do not experience what UK society defines as poverty has
not yet been done by government, but it could and should be.[300]
This data would then form a significant part of the collection
of evidence about the relation between resources and deprivations
(including ill-health and other adverse life experiences) which
the government's experts should triangulate to work towards setting
governmental minimum income standards for the UK.
11. Many of the submissions which the Select
Committee receives will support the Government continuing to collect
and publish the income inequality statistics. But in some cases
this is not because their authors believe that HBAI is the ideal
method of measuring poverty, but because these statistics should
be published in their own right, and until there are evidence
based poverty measures, the inequality statistics are the only
substitute available.
12. The Select Committee will greatly help the
debate by distinguishing clearly and explicitly between scientific
and political approaches to the measurement and policy questions.
Professor John Veit Wilson
15 September 2003
299 As in the story of the committee of blind men
describing an elephant by each feeling one part of it, a trunk,
a leg, an ear and so on. Pity the poor officials who, being unfamiliar
with an elephant, have to draw it from such partial descriptions,
where the political requirement is an animal stronger than a horse. Back
300
And if it is not done by government researchers, then government
should fund independent research institutes to carry it out. Back
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