9.1 Description and critique

In the study of poverty, it is necessary to distinguish between poverty measuring methods (PMM) and aggregate poverty measures (APM). Amartya Sen distinguishes between identification (who is poor and who is not) and aggregation, which makes it possible to obtain poverty indicators at the social level (how wide and deep social poverty is). To this I add an intermediate level, which can be called the poverty intensity measurement (PIM). PIM takes place at the same level at which identification is performed (individual/HH) and tells us how poor the poor are.

As Nolan and Whelan (1996, p 1) point out, the ‘value of sophisticated synthetical (or aggregated) measures is associated with the adoption, first of all, of a satisfactory approach to the identification of the poor, which has been relatively neglected’. Or, in even clearer terms, there is no point in calculating highly sophisticated aggregate measures of poverty if the method to identify the poor is flawed.

We have already addressed PMM in detail. It is now time to introduce the reader to the most widely used APM, including what I call the individual/HH PIM. In this chapter I seek to provide a personal vision of the usual measures, aiming at some degree of originality. At the end I present a new APM that incorporates social inequality in two variants: between poor and non-poor, and through the Gini coefficient (G) of the entire WB distribution.

I will begin by clarifying the problem of the observation unit. Conceptually, this comprises individuals who experience the deprivations related to poverty. Moreover, assuming that the degree of solidarity between the members of a HH and a family is limited, we must accept that there may be poor people in non-poor HH and non-poor people in poor HH. However, observing the distribution and use of resources within HH is almost impossible, so that for all practical purposes the HH – understood as the group of people who live under the same roof and share, at least, food expenses – becomes the usual unit of observation and identification of poverty.

7.1 Description and critique of combined methods included in the typology

IPMM, original variant (OV-IPMM)

Two separate explorations carried out by Beccaria and Minujin (1987) and Kaztman (1989) enquiring whether the UBN-OV and PL-NFB methods identified the same HH as poor, and obtaining negative answers, became a model for the simultaneous application of both methods. The result was a contingency table (matrix) in which HH and population were classified in four categories: poor on both; non-poor on both; poor only by UBN; and poor only by PL. To this, Boltvinik (1990a) added a poverty criterion and identified a new method: OV-IPMM, which was adopted and broadly applied by UNDP’s Regional Project to Overcome Poverty in Latin America (RLA/86/004). The method has a number of interesting features, one of which is that in certain circumstances it allows the distinction between a recently impoverished population (strongly associated with the poor only by PL in countries going through a recession or economic crisis) and a more structural type of poverty (poor on both methods). OV-IPMM also allows analysts to identify poverty of publicly provided goods. The newly adopted poverty criterion, derived from the notion of the complementary nature of both original methods (PL and UBN) and the conception of WBS explained in Chapter 1, is that only those identified by the union of both sets are poor, which means, in turn, that only HH identified as non-poor by both methods are non-poor. Nevertheless, this method has various limitations. First, it identifies only food P, as it incorporates the NFB variant in the Y dimension; second, the incidence of UBN P is not independent from the number of indicators; third, it cannot calculate the HH poverty gap IJ nor, in consequence, any other APM, except for the incidence or proportion of poor people in the population; fourth, it does not consider two WBS: FT and knowledge/abilities; and lastly, the poverty criterion is difficult to uphold: a millionaire HH not sending its child to school, for example, is considered poor.

Poverty has been a factor in history almost since time immemorial. It is only since the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century that the idea of mass material well-being has become possible. Political Economy began around that time in Britain, France and Italy. In England at the time, the relief of the poor was supervised by the Church in every parish. Those who could not work – the elderly, the disabled, women with children – were called paupers. They received relief from rates collected by the Church from the local better-off households. The category ‘poor’ was applied to daily workers, mainly working on the land, who received a wage which traditionally was enough to feed the worker, his wife and their children.

It was when inflation of wheat (corn) prices occurred in the decade following the French Revolution that rates were collected for the working poor as well. At this stage Thomas Malthus conceived the idea that population grew at a geometric rate but food output only at arithmetic rate, hence there was a danger of overpopulation. His real purpose was to say that the working poor should not receive payments in addition to their wage since they would only breed more children and the money (paid in rates by the rich) would be wasted. David Ricardo, the most influential economist of his time and for centuries later, confirmed Malthus’s view.

Political Economy became hostile to any idea of relieving poverty as inimical to the laws of the market. It took a century of democratic struggle to broaden the franchise as well as the First World War to bring about a universal franchise. It was then that the idea of income redistribution from the rich to the poor was introduced in Political Economy by Arthur Cecil Pigou (I have discussed this in my Poverty of Political Economy, Harper and Collins, 2023).

It took another world war to establish the idea that relief of poverty was the task of the government. This was especially so because democracy had spread across the world. International agencies were set up and began to make comparisons between nations. We became conscious of advanced versus emerging economies.

In Section 1.1, I present a HH typology and a reproduction scheme (production and circulation) for each type of HH. The reproduction schemes intertwine the three main institutional sectors: households, enterprises, and government. Based on these schemes, Section 1.2 develops the concept of WBS and its role in the critique of partial poverty measurement methods and thus in the development of my own method. Defined WBS are compared with the resource lists of several authors. Section 1.3 introduces the concepts of needs (N) and poverty (P).

1.1 Households’ reproduction schemes and articulation with enterprises and government

As a core part of social organisation, HH carry out the tasks of biological and social reproduction. Keeping current members alive in adequate conditions to perform their social roles, as well as breeding and raising new generations, are the essential social functions of HH. These functions complement those of enterprises (specialised units in the production and marketing of commodities) and the state apparatus, whose main functions can be defined as arbitrating among other social agents and providing public goods and collective services.

Although many HH constitute not only consumption units but also production units, this fact deviates from the ideal model of capitalism, in which all production/marketing is carried out by enterprises, while HH are the sole sphere of consumption. In this model, enterprises establish only two types of relationships with HH: buying their labour force (LF) and selling commodities for consumption. Under conditions of near full employment, the urban reality in the central countries was approaching this ideal model at the end of the 1970s. However, there has been since then a strong trend of enterprise decentralisation, by which many tasks previously performed by salaried personnel in medium-sized and large enterprises are now carried out by independent people or small businesses, regaining the importance of independent individual work and family businesses in urban areas, while in rural areas family businesses never ceased to be important. In peripheral countries, that ideal model has always been far from being achieved, and this has been accentuated by economic stagnation. A significant part of current world’s poverty is associated with non-salaried forms of production.

Introduction

Cities are an expression of stories. From the monumental through to the mundane, the materiality of cities embody stories on the part of town planners, architects, urban designers, advertisers, citizens and others. While such stories are often a source of protection in the form of heritage overlays, the shifting form of the built environment underscores the changing nature of stories within the contemporary city. This can be seen from global cities through to more vernacular regional centres. This chapter follows one such regional Australian city that has been undergoing a rapid aesthetic transformation – the Victorian city of Ballarat. A storied place in the context of Australia’s 19th-century colonial history, it was the epicentre of Australia’s gold rush in the 1850s, and the site of the richly celebrated Eureka rebellion in 1854. Known to many as the birthplace of Australian democracy, these events remain enshrined in the town’s material culture. The past endures in other ways as well. Catholicism dates back to the early days of mining when the first mass was conducted on diggings, and over the intervening years a number of Catholic parishes, schools and orphanages were established (McPhillips, 2017, p 138; Wilson and Golding, 2018, pp 864–5).

More recently, Ballarat has been transformed by the appearance of bright, colourful ribbons that have come to dominate the visuality of the town. Appearing at first spontaneously in 2015, in the years since they have become a movement that tells a new story; one of institutional child sexual abuse throughout the Catholic Diocese of Ballarat. Known as Loud Fence, the meanings these ribbons articulate onto publicly visible (if not public) spaces is the subject of this chapter. What public memories are made through the placement of ribbons? How are issues of responsibility and complicity invoked through such a practice? How are these meanings recalibrated according to the actors who place them? These questions animate my engagement with institutional fences as sites of visual storytelling.

Retrieving the historical contrast between open and closed wind energy structures

Our present perception of wind energy technology is dominated by the version of wind turbines that we find in ‘wind farms’ (‘wind parks’), which is associated with landscape degradation and local resistance. Locals don’t want these turbines installed in their back yard, we don’t ever see them posing happily in front of them. Even their most ardent supporters, who promote them as an unavoidable necessity in the face of the global environmental crisis, agree that there is nothing aesthetically appealing about these wind turbines. They just charge the local opponents of these wind turbines with suffering from the ‘not in my back yard’ syndrome. The reference to such a syndrome is by itself an acknowledgement of the negative aesthetic impact of these wind turbines. The ‘energy landscapes’ produced by the installation of wind farm turbines are certainly not attractive. In fact, if the criterion for the evaluation of the merits of wind energy turbines is their impact on the landscape, wind farm turbines score no better than fossil fuel energy generation plants (Pasqualetti and Stremke, 2018).

There were, however, in the past versions of wind energy technology that people were looking forward to be in a picture with. Going through the album of pictures that T. Lindsay Baker collected in American Windmills: An Album of Historic Photographs leaves no doubt about it (Baker, 2012). The owners of the kind of wind energy technology that we find in this album, together with a crowd formed by their relatives and friends, posed happily in front of it on all important occasions: from a baptism ceremony that was taking place at a water tank filled through the use of a wind pump to a wedding ceremony that was bringing together a comparable crowd, which also posed in front of the wind pump and the farm house that it was right next to (or just behind of). As we see in the picture that Baker chose for the cover of his book, people could not simply pose in front of this wind energy technology; they could actually pose in it (and on it). We will here refer to this past farm wind energy technology as ‘open’, while we will argue that the wind farm energy technology of present day is ‘closed’.

The agroecology of Genuino Clandestino

Starting from the end of the 1960s the so called ‘Green Revolution’ significantly transformed the ways through which agriculture has been developed on a global scale (Shiva, 2008; Altieri and Toledo, 2011; Rosset and Altieri, 2017; Altieri, 2018). The central role of mechanization, the adoption of new technologies, the selection of high yielding varieties of cereals and the extensive use of chemical fertilizers and agrochemicals are the main features of current ‘industrial’ agriculture. These technologies of food production have wide-ranging eco-social implications on biodiversity and climate change, and they entail a relationship of strong dependency between farmers and the world’s largest chemical producers. Agroecology (Altieri, 2018) appears as one of the main alternatives for overcoming the shortcomings and damages that the ‘Green Revolution’ has caused. Agroecology is a response to the question of how to transform and repair our food system and rural life, starting from the ecological practices of peasants and farmers, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, indigenous cultivation methods, urban food producers and so on. In this sense, food sovereignty movements and agroecological farming are creating alternative politics of matter (Papadopoulos, 2018) and by seeking different material circulations and channels of involvement, they enact different possibilities of humansoil-food relations.

Permaculture, organic, bio-dynamic, regenerative agriculture, alternative food distribution: these are some of the names given to practices by which movements of ecological agri-food transition are converging today in emphasizing a need to attend to the health of the soil and the broader ecologies in which we grow food (Altieri, 2018). Food sovereignty campaigns entail the simultaneous responsibility of participants to be food growers and consumers, which means being involved in the processes of food production and distribution by inventing alternatives to the large supply chains that currently dominate the existing agri-food system. However, food sovereignty is something more than the consumers and growers’ right to choose what to consume and what to grow and how. Agroecology and food sovereignty are, first of all, about creating alternative ways to deal with the ecological interactions and interdependencies involved in the processes of farming: the collective enterprise of creating an alternative lifeworld within the interactive dynamics that inhabit the soil and its inhabitants.

Introduction: a metaphysical catastrophe

And suddenly the world began to quake. The ground trembled. Soils liquified under the smooth covers of asphalt. Modern infrastructures were bent, dented, upended. Buildings moved to the rhythm of their crumbling dance. Those inside ran out, when they could. Others succumbed to the collapse. The rumbling noise filled the air. Amidst the turmoil, hundreds of metres of coastline fell off a cosmic cliff, dropping vertically by over half a metre. The Earth itself trembled, shaken, literally knocked off its axis. Days have been shorter ever since. The Pacific Ocean shrivelled a little. And Japan, whose northeastern region of Tohoku was closest to the epicentre, was moved 13 feet closer to North America. With a magnitude of 9,1 Mw, it was the biggest earthquake to have struck the archipelago, and only the fourth most powerful in the history of seismology. And yet it only took six minutes. Six. The planetary blink of an eye, making it present that most things happen in the break, through the cracks, with the tides of time, through the resonance of events: ‘point of view on a point of view, displacements of perspective, differentiation of difference’ (Deleuze, 2004: 200). For indeed, the earthquake that struck northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011 turned out to be but a prelude, a foreshock of its own, a call to another kind of intensity whose response washed it all away. This was what seismologists call an underwater megathrust earthquake – a name that could belong just as well to geology as to poetry – and the 39-metre tsunami that it summoned flooded the entire area, ravaging it all in a 200-square mile range. The dark wave truly devoured everything: almost 20,000 people died, countless other critters saw their lives brought to a sudden end, and over 45,000 buildings were destroyed. Among those who survived, 4.4 million households were left without electricity, over 340,000 people were displaced, and suffered from food, water, shelter, medicine, and fuel shortages for a long period of time afterwards, even when considerable material efforts were deployed to restore infrastructures in the wake.

The tsunami precipitated ripples of its own.

Land in Our Names (LION) began in 2020 as a young collective with big plans for the year. At the Oxford Real Farming Conference in the UK, in January 2020, we facilitated a workshop with Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm on the topic ‘Farming So White: Land, Ownership, Race and Racism in Britain’ and held the first ever Caucus for Black and People of Colour (BPOC) growers, land workers, environmentalists and food justice organizers at Willowbrook Farm. It was an emotional experience for everyone who attended. We all remarked that we had never been in the countryside in Britain surrounded by People of Colour before. The care, excitement, community and safety that we shared with each other was energizing and made us even more dedicated. We want to speak to BPOC growers, land workers, land and food justice organizers.

Then our plans for the year took a dramatic turn with the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the US, Britain and elsewhere. We have been humbled by the amount of people who have reached out to us asking for our thoughts and feelings. The truth is that we carry each life lost to racism with us always. It is a grief that we must manage every day. This is one of the reasons why we founded Land in Our Names – we want to create an anti-racist and inclusive land and food justice movement that speaks to Black and People of Colour. Racism is a structural and systemic problem that needs reparative justice in order to stop the unnecessary violence that People of Colour experience. That is why we see land reparations as crucial towards building resilient and sustainable anti-racist communities. We want to continue nurturing our fledgling network of BPOC growers, land workers, organizers, educators and enthusiasts with empowering and inspiring events. We want to create resources that look at food and land justice through an intersectional lens. We want to support BPOC growers’ access to land and work.

Introduction

As a vehicle for narratives, songs’ generative potential can assist change and record histories, and can shift with time. Popular protests songs’ lyrics often focus on resisting more dominant narratives and subscribe to the ideal of creating social consciousness and social transformation (Haycock, 2015a, p 425). Protest songs’ transmission of ideas are unstable, as is the national messaging which their narratives seek to interrupt (Hall, 1981, p 329). The stories conveyed are shaped by how songs breach their spatial and temporal locations: where and when they are written, recorded, performed, released and listened to. In the spaces between songwriters’ intention and listeners’ reception, songs’ disseminated narratives are re-made, misheard and can fail in their elicitation (Derrida, 1977). Songs’ meanings and melodious affects also vary with political shifts over time. Being able to replay a song and repeat listens ‘ties repetition to alterity’, its otherness, wherein hearing something new is possible (Derrida, 1977, p 7). This is irrespective of music genre, or how music is being listened to: aurally and/or visually (with or without video clips) and on which medium – record player, digital platform or while riding a bicycle replete with headphones – and whether listening with unwavering focus or wafting in the background or both.

How songs’ stories are engaged with is also shaped by space and place: listening from home, at a concert, in a small venue, alone, with others, in a community, nation state, or a specific geographical setting. Moreover, listening across dynamic, intersecting locations – as they, woman, man, Indigenous, settler, upper or lower socio-economic position, younger, older, and so forth – means that songs’ melodies and/or lyrics can ‘leave an indelible impression’ (Ahmed, 2004, p 14), have unknowable impacts, or leave the listener without a memory of what a song is about. As a young white woman in the 1980s, listening to the Australian ‘political’ pub rock band Midnight Oil (Oils) and driving from ‘the country’ to town with five settler friends to attend their thronging rock concert at the football oval together with a predominantly male drinking and dancing crowd, it was the opportunity to ‘go dancing’, not the stories their songs told, that I was drawn to. Neither before, during nor after the concert did any of ‘us’ young working-class workers discuss hearing a central theme in some of their songs: the colonial settlers’ harms for Indigenous people.

The opening lines of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt’s (1958) sweeping ‘reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears’ (5) describe the Sputnik launch in 1957.

These lines also name the principal sentiment against which the alternative viewpoint that follows is offered. Like Arendt, I am unsettled by the dream of escape captured in this scene and countless others played out in the subsequent enthusiasms of sci fi writers, space aficionados, and billionaires – a dream that seems only to have grown as our sense of planetary fragility has intensified.