Poverty and the Underclass

Poverty is one of the most important and contested topics in the sociology of stratification. Despite being one of the world's richest countries, the UK has persistent and significant levels of poverty affecting millions of adults and children. But poverty is not simply a statistical fact to be measured — how we define it shapes how much of it we see, how we explain it shapes whom we blame, and whether we believe in an "underclass" shapes the entire politics of welfare. The central debates of this lesson are therefore as much about values and theory as about evidence: should poverty be defined absolutely or relatively? Is it caused by the behaviour of the poor or by the structure of society? And is there a distinct "underclass" with its own culture, or is this an ideological label that blames the victims? The AQA specification requires you to understand how poverty is defined and measured, evaluate competing explanations, and assess the controversial concept of the underclass.

Key Definition: Poverty is a condition in which individuals or groups lack the resources necessary to participate in the activities, customs and diet commonly approved by their society (adapting Townsend's definition). The debate over whether poverty should be defined in absolute or relative terms is central to this topic — and is itself a debate about politics and theory, not just measurement.

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Spec Mapping (AQA 7192 — Paper 2, Section B: Stratification and Differentiation)

This lesson addresses the specification requirements on:

• The nature, extent and definition of poverty — absolute (Rowntree) versus relative (Townsend) conceptions, the deprivation index, consensual measures and social exclusion.
• Different explanations of poverty — individualistic/cultural (Lewis's culture of poverty; Murray's underclass; the New Right) versus structural (Marxist, Weberian, social-democratic).
• The concept and existence of an underclass — Murray's New Right behavioural underclass versus structural and Weberian readings, and the empirical critique.
• It applies the foundational theories from the opening lesson (functionalism, Marxism, Weber) directly to the question of why some people are poor in an affluent society, and connects forward to the welfare-state debate.

This material supports both the 10-mark "analyse two…" question and the 20-mark "evaluate…" essay on Paper 2.

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Synoptic Links

• Theory: The culture-of-poverty and underclass debates pit New Right and functionalist consensus assumptions against Marxist and Weberian structural analysis — a direct application of the perspectives from Lesson 1.
• Methods: Townsend's deprivation index and Mack and Lansley's consensual method are superb methods case studies, raising issues of operationalisation (how do you turn "poverty" into a measurable variable?), expert versus public definitions, and the validity of survey thresholds.
• The Welfare State (next lesson): Murray's thesis that benefits create dependency is the bridge to the welfare-dependency debate; explanations of poverty drive welfare policy.
• Families and Households: Lone parenthood is central to Murray's argument; structural explanations connect poverty to family form without blaming it.
• Globalisation: Deindustrialisation and the global relocation of low-skilled work help explain the structural collapse of employment in former industrial areas.

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Defining and Measuring Poverty

How poverty is defined is not a neutral technical choice — it determines how much poverty we "find" and which solutions appear necessary.

Absolute Poverty

Absolute poverty refers to a condition in which individuals lack the basic necessities for physical survival — food, water, shelter and warmth. It is measured against a fixed standard (such as an international subsistence threshold) that does not change over time or between societies.

The classic pioneer of this approach was Seebohm Rowntree, whose studies of York from the late nineteenth century onwards defined a "primary poverty" line based on the minimum income needed for physical efficiency — the cost of a basket of food, rent and basic necessities. Rowntree's work was groundbreaking because it produced systematic, quantitative evidence that poverty was widespread and tied to wages and the life cycle (childhood, child-rearing and old age) rather than to idleness.

Arguments for this definition:

• It provides a clear, objective and comparable measure.
• It focuses attention on the most severe, life-threatening deprivation.
• It allows progress to be tracked over time, and remains essential for analysing the Global South (a link to the globalisation lesson).

Arguments against:

• It sets the bar too low for an affluent society — a person who can physically survive but cannot participate in the ordinary life of their society is still poor in any meaningful social sense.
• It ignores the social dimension of poverty. As living standards rise, the goods needed to participate in society change; an absolute standard fixed decades ago becomes meaningless.

Relative Poverty

Relative poverty is defined in relation to the prevailing living standards of the rest of society. A person is relatively poor if their resources fall significantly below the average for their society. The most widely used measure is the 60% of median income threshold — a household with income (typically measured after housing costs) below 60% of the national median is counted as being in relative poverty.

Townsend (1979) was the most influential advocate of the relative definition. In his landmark study Poverty in the United Kingdom, he surveyed thousands of households and developed a deprivation index of items representing normal participation in society — such as having a cooked meal most days, going on holiday once a year and being able to entertain friends at home. Townsend argued that below a certain income level, deprivation rose sharply, marking a poverty threshold below which people were effectively excluded from the ordinary life of their society. His central insight was that poverty is relational and social, not merely a matter of physical subsistence.

Evaluation of the relative approach:

• Strength: It captures the socially excluding nature of poverty in a rich society and recognises that needs are socially defined.
• Criticism: Critics (including some on the New Right) argue that relative poverty is really a measure of inequality rather than poverty — on a strict relative measure, poverty could only be abolished by abolishing inequality, and a general rise in living standards would leave the "poverty rate" unchanged. Townsend was also criticised for the expert selection of his index items: who decides what counts as a "necessity"?

Mack and Lansley (1985) — Consensual Poverty

Joanna Mack and Stewart Lansley developed the consensual method precisely to answer the criticism of expert-led definitions. Instead of experts deciding what constitutes a necessity, they asked a representative sample of the public. Items that a majority of respondents agreed were necessities formed the index, and anyone lacking several of these necessities because they could not afford them (distinguishing genuine deprivation from choice) was defined as poor.

Their approach was carried forward in the major Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE) surveys, which found:

• A substantial minority of the UK population lacked multiple items the public regarded as necessities.
• Items widely agreed to be necessities included heating, a damp-free home, two meals a day, fresh fruit and vegetables, a warm waterproof coat and being able to afford a small gift for a child's birthday.
• Items not generally regarded as necessities tended to be more clearly discretionary consumer goods.

The consensual method is valued because it grounds the poverty line in democratic public opinion rather than expert judgement, while retaining a relative, participatory conception of poverty.

Comparing Definitions of Poverty

Definition	Basis	Key advocate	Strength	Weakness
Absolute	Fixed subsistence standard	Rowntree	Clear, comparable, tracks severe deprivation	Too low for an affluent society; ignores social participation
Relative	Below a proportion of average income	Townsend	Captures social exclusion; needs are socially defined	Conflates poverty with inequality; expert-chosen items
Consensual	Public agreement on necessities	Mack and Lansley	Democratic; avoids expert bias	Public opinion shifts; thresholds still contestable

The Extent of Poverty in the UK

A large minority of the UK population lives in relative poverty after housing costs, including a substantial proportion of children and a significant number of pensioners. Two features of the contemporary picture are especially important sociologically:

• Child poverty remains high, with damaging consequences for educational attainment and life chances (a synoptic link to the education topic).
• In-work poverty has risen markedly: working households now make up the majority of those in poverty, overturning the assumption that paid work is a guaranteed route out of poverty (discussed below).

(Treat precise figures qualitatively in the exam unless you are certain of the current statistic; examiners reward understanding of the pattern and its causes over a memorised number.)

Who Is at Risk of Poverty?

Poverty is not randomly distributed; it falls disproportionately on particular groups, which is itself a powerful argument for structural rather than purely behavioural explanations:

• Children, especially in larger families and lone-parent households.
• Lone parents (overwhelmingly women), connecting poverty directly to gender and to the welfare debate.
• Disabled people and households containing a disabled member, who face both lower earnings and higher living costs.
• Some ethnic-minority groups, reflecting the ethnic penalty in the labour market (a link to the ethnic-inequality lesson).
• Pensioners reliant on the state pension, especially older women (a link to the age-inequality lesson).

The clustering of poverty around caring responsibilities, disability and discrimination — rather than around "idleness" — undermines the behavioural account and supports the view that poverty is produced by the labour market, the benefit system and the unequal distribution of risk.

The "Deserving" and "Undeserving" Poor

A recurring theme in the politics of poverty is the distinction between the "deserving" poor (those seen as poor through no fault of their own — children, the sick, the elderly) and the "undeserving" poor (those blamed for their own poverty — the "work-shy," the "scrounger"). This moral distinction has deep historical roots in the Victorian Poor Law and remains powerful in media and political discourse. Sociologically, it matters because:

• It is ideological: by dividing the poor into the deserving and undeserving, it directs hostility downward (at "scroungers") rather than at the structures that produce poverty — a Marxist point about dividing the working class.
• It legitimises conditional, stigmatising welfare (sanctions, means-testing), connecting directly to Murray's underclass thesis and the welfare-state lesson.
• It is reproduced through media folk-devils — the "benefits cheat" — even though benefit fraud is statistically minor compared with the scale of in-work poverty and unclaimed entitlements.

Exam Tip: The deserving/undeserving distinction is a superb way to show evaluation: it exposes how cultural explanations of poverty do ideological work, which is exactly the analytical move that lifts an essay into the top band.

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Individualistic and Cultural Explanations of Poverty

Individualistic and cultural explanations locate the causes of poverty in the behaviour, attitudes and values of the poor themselves rather than in the structure of society.

The Culture of Poverty: Oscar Lewis (1966)

Oscar Lewis, an anthropologist, studied poor communities in Mexico and Puerto Rico and argued that they had developed a distinct culture of poverty — a set of values, norms and behaviours transmitted from generation to generation. This culture, he claimed, included:

• Fatalism and a sense of helplessness or resignation.
• A present-time orientation — a focus on immediate gratification rather than long-term planning and deferred gratification.
• Low participation in mainstream institutions such as education, trade unions and political parties.
• Family and relationship instability.

Lewis argued that once established, the culture of poverty became self-perpetuating: children socialised into these values found it extremely difficult to escape poverty even if opportunities arose, because the culture had disabled the very dispositions needed to take advantage of them.

Evaluation:

• The concept has been widely criticised as victim-blaming — it attributes poverty to the supposed deficiencies of the poor rather than to the structural inequality that surrounds them.
• Valentine (1968) offered the decisive rebuttal, arguing that the behaviours Lewis described were rational situational adaptations to material deprivation, not autonomous cultural values. People in poverty focus on the present because they lack the resources to plan for an uncertain future — the "culture" is an effect of poverty, not its cause.
• Empirical research has repeatedly found that poor people share mainstream values — they aspire to employment, education and stable families — but face material barriers to achieving them.

The Cycle of Deprivation: Keith Joseph (1972)

Sir Keith Joseph, a Conservative minister, advanced a British version of the cultural thesis, arguing that poverty was transmitted across generations through inadequate parenting. Poor families, he claimed, failed to instil the discipline, ambition and social skills children needed, creating a self-renewing cycle of deprivation.

Evaluation:

• The major research programme commissioned to test Joseph's thesis found little evidence for a self-perpetuating cultural cycle. Where disadvantage persisted across generations, it was driven primarily by structural factors — poor housing, low-quality local schools and the absence of employment — not by cultural transmission.
• The thesis is politically charged because it implies poverty can be tackled by changing the behaviour of the poor rather than by redistributing resources or creating jobs.

Charles Murray and the Underclass (1989)

The most influential cultural-behavioural account is Charles Murray's thesis of an underclass. Writing about both the US and the UK, Murray argued — from a New Right standpoint — that a distinct underclass had emerged, defined not by low income but by deviant behaviour and values:

• High rates of lone parenthood, which Murray attributed to welfare benefits that made fathers economically unnecessary.
• Crime and antisocial behaviour, especially among young men detached from work and family.
• Voluntary worklessness — a refusal to take available low-paid work.

Murray's causal claim was that the welfare state had created perverse incentives: generous, unconditional benefits made it rational for some to live on welfare rather than work, and removed the economic penalties for forming families outside marriage. The result, he argued, was a culture of welfare dependency in which work, marriage and self-reliance were devalued and passed on to the next generation.