To study the rich and the sources of power in society is not the kind of activity which comes easily to social workers attempting to understand the human condition. Traditionally, they have been concerned with the poor and the consequences of poverty and physical handicap. They have thus tended to take, and perhaps were compelled to take, a limited view of what constituted poverty. It was a view circumscribed by the immediate, the obvious and the material; a conception of need shaped by the urgencies of life daily confronting those they were seeking to help. In so far as they looked at relativities and inequalities in society, which they seldom did, they restricted their studies to the day-to-day differences in levels of expenditure on the more obvious or more blatant necessities of life. Daily subsistence was both the yardstick and the objective.

Far-reaching changes affecting the structure and functions of social institutions; general improvements in material standards of living; and the growth of knowledge about the causes and consequences of social ills in the modern community are now forcing on us the task of redefining poverty. Subsistence is no longer thought to be a scientifically meaningful or politically constructive notion (Lynes, 1962). We are thus having to place the concept of poverty in the context of social change and interpret it in relation to the growth of more complex and specialised institutions of power, authority and privilege. We cannot, in other words, delineate the new frontiers of poverty unless we take account of the changing agents and characteristics of inequality. How then is poverty to be measured and on what criteria, secular, social and psychological?

Each generation has to undertake anew this task of reinterpretation if it wishes to uphold its claim to share in the constant renewal of civilised values. Yet the present generation, it must be conceded, has been somewhat tardy in accepting this obligation. It has been too content to use the tools which were forged in the past for measuring poverty and inequality.

These tools are now too blunt, insensitive and inadequate. They do not go deep enough. These also are the lessons thrown up by study of the primary sources of knowledge about the distribution of incomes. They yield a surface view of society which is increasingly at variance with other facts and with the evidence of one’s eyes.