Poverty

Consider two fictional people:

• • Edna lives in a housing association flat. Her only income is means-tested Pension Credit as her husband, who is now dead, worked in the building industry and never paid National Insurance Contributions. She is now 70; she belongs to pottery and singing classes at the local adult education centre; her children – all of them in low-paid employment, and sometimes unemployed – come to see her once a week; and she tells her grandchildren about family hop-picking holidays spent living in wooden sheds and working from dawn to dusk in the fields. She will tell you how her mother helped to start the local co-op, and how she now has rheumatism but still enjoys visiting her old school at the end of the road: though it is now very different from the way it was when she left it at 14 to work in a shop.

• • And there is Paul, 35, who works in the design industry. He is single; he can just about keep up with the mortgage payments; and he earns £35,000 a year, but is not sure how long his job will last. He has a first-class degree and a master's degree, but his field is being taken over by younger people who can cope with the software better than he can. He is depressed, he never has any money, and he has started to drink too much.

Which of these two people is poor? Which of them is in poverty? The housing association tenant on Pension Credit who left school at 14? Or the owner-occupier who earns an above-average salary and has two degrees.

Might we be better off without the word ‘poverty’? Different authors use it in different and often undefined ways; sometimes it means ‘income poverty, and sometimes it means something broader; such definitions of income poverty as ‘sixty per cent of median household income’ can lead to misleading conclusions (if median income falls, and more households have incomes above the median, then it can look as if income poverty has fallen when it hasn’t); debates about the meaning of ‘poverty’, and whether it should be understood as relative poverty or absolute poverty, can distract attention from particular instances of poverty, such as child malnutrition during school holidays;