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Julio Boltvinik, El Colegio de México
Julio Boltvinik is a Professor at El Colegio de México, who has as spent more than 25 years studying and fighting poverty. He was elected to the Mexican legislature and helped to draft the General Law on Social Development which requires multidimensional measures of poverty. Between 1988 and 1991 he was Technical Coordinator/Director of the Regional Project for Overcoming Poverty in Latin America, UNDP. Since 1995, he has written a weekly column in La Jornada on ‘Moral Economy’. He received the National Journalism Award ciudadanizado in 2001 and the award for best doctoral thesis in Social Anthropology in 2006.
Julio has authored and co-authored many books on indicators of social progress and poverty and income distribution in Mexico and the world.
Speech
Townsend’s Contributions & Limitations: What Should Be Done Now?
Peter Townsend’s monumental intellectual contributions deserve that we assume, as he did all through his life, a critical stand. It is in this spirit that the following remarks are made in regards to Townsend’s work. Townsend was, in my opinion, the greatest poverty researcher that has ever existed.
Peter Townsend fought, academically and politically, during his long and incredibly productive professional life, for overcoming poverty. But he also fought against minimalism in the identification of poverty and, thus, against its corollary: the alleged eradication of poverty in Great Britain in the fifties and sixties. He severely criticized Rowntree’s poverty criterion of mere physical efficiency. But he also rejected his budget method of arriving at a poverty line, perhaps unaware that the budget approach can be also used with non-minimalist criteria and not based on an absolute concept of poverty, which was very unfortunate. Much later, in his debate with Amartya Sen on the absolute/relative concepts of poverty, he stated —rightly in my opinion—that the absolute approach to poverty leads to the underestimation of the importance of non-food needs and entails the risky implication that the meagre benefits given to the poor are more than enough to satisfy their (absolute) needs.
In the present, with Peter’s painful absence, we have to ask ourselves if we are following his path or negating it. Especially we have to ask if the group with whom he worked in the last 15-20 years, which is carrying out very important poverty research, integrated by Gordon, Levitas, Pantazis and others, is also against minimalism. We have to acknowledge that we live in a world dominated by an ultra-minimalist fashion, leaded by the World Bank. Its dollar per person per day poverty line reflects the cynicism which characterizes the present stage of capitalism. This stage was inaugurated in the eighties (with Thatcher and Reagan) and we can call it the cynical stage of capitalism. In1 acute contrast with previous stages, cynical capitalism has ceased to offer any human hope to the masses of the world: at most they can expect to attain animal survival, which is what one dollar per person per day means.
It is my opinion, which I have expressed in written form since many years ago, that the intersection criterion of poverty for combined poverty measurement methods, which this group of followers of Townsend is using, goes against Peter’s fight against minimalism. This is so because it is a criterion requiring that, to be classified as poor, a person/household has to be ‘truly poor’: i.e. below the poverty line and directly deprived as well. This criterion, whose pioneers were Nolan & Whelan, seeks to minimise the inclusion error (classifying as poor someone who is not), but this inevitably maximises the exclusion error (classifying as not poor someone who is poor). This can be seen by the fact that the mirror criterion for being classified as non-poor is the union of the two sets: household X will be considered non-poor, despite having an income below the poverty line, if it declares that it did not have a holiday last year because it doesn’t want to go for holidays. Or take household Y which is variously deprived but is not considered poor because its income is exactly equal to 50% of average household income, despite the fact that it has to incur in huge health related expenditures which are not (fully) covered by the National Health Service (NHS).
Townsend’s greatest achievement was the development of the concept of relative poverty: persons which, as a consequence of their insufficient resources, are excluded from participation in accustomed patterns of living, can be said to be in (relative) poverty. In Adam Smith’s terms, if they cannot have leather shoes, they will feel ashamed to be in public without them, and will retreat from social participation. As Townsend stated it, the necessities of life are not fixed; they are continuously modified and increased as societies change.
In my view, Townsend was unable to adequately operationalise his relative conception of poverty, as updating the poverty threshold according to the increase in household average income is a second best solution, and he was aware of this fact, that is why he proposed it by saying first: “lacking other criterion, the best assumption would be...” In the present crisis, as average household income decreases, the poverty line will decrease in the same proportion, so that poverty might diminish as a consequence of the crisis, showing the inconsistencies of the procedure. Its inconsistency derives from the fact that there is a gap in the argument: income increase (or decrease) is not a sufficiently good indicator of change in the accustomed patterns of life. Marx (in the famous Introduction of 1857 to the Grundrisse) argued that production produces not only the object for the need, but also the need for the object, that it is the production of new commodities which creates the need for them. The human need to communicate with other human beings who are far away, was once solved by mail and telegraph, was later substituted by telephone, and now my mobile phones and e-mail. These changes cannot be reduced to an increase in income. In fact, social income might have been stagnant in many societies while at the same time the way this communication need is satisfied was transformed by these innovations. The increase of income is not the best way of reflecting these changes in accustomed patterns of living.
How can one operationalise the relative concept of poverty? In my opinion, one should rescue Rowntree’s methodology, not his poverty criterion. This is currently done in Great Britain by Jonathan Bradshaw and the group with which he works. The best approach in my opinion, the only one that puts the feet on the ground and looks carefully at the details, is the budget approach. Under the influence of Townsend and of Mack and Lansley, Bradshaw and the group with which he works, has revitalised the budget approach. What is required is a generalised budget approach which adds to the family budget the social public budget, and which bases the selection of goods and services, their qualities and quantities, on a manifold research process which includes consulting the population, so that one arrives at a combination of socially perceived and socially prevalent necessities. The process should include research in every area of need (dress, leisure time, communications, housing, etc) of the accustomed patterns of living in order to identify changes in them.
Peter Townsend wanted to develop a scientific approach to the measurement of poverty. There is, nevertheless some ambiguity in Townsend’s writings: on the one hand, he and his followers seem to have adopted a conception of science which excludes value judgements, but on the other hand Townsend states that in the last resort a definition of poverty has to rest on value judgements. In looking for this objective poverty line, Townsend made three decisions in chapter 6 of Poverty in the United Kingdom, which influenced the development of poverty research in Great Britain up to date:
First, he selected— for illustrative purposes only, he said— 12 from the 60 indicators of deprivation he had developed to build an index of deprivation. Perhaps Piachaud would not have raised his criticism if Townsend had calculated the deprivation index using the 60 indicators and thus the history of poverty research in Britain would have been different, for as we know, Piachaud’s criticisms was an intervening influence for the development, by Mack and Lansley, of the concept of enforced lack of socially perceived necessities.
Second, instead of the very broad concept of resources he developed in chapter 5 of the same book (which includes cash income, capital assets, value of employment benefits, value of public social services other than cash, and private income in kind), Townsend used, in chapter 6, only income, which excludes assets and value of public and private services. The research that followed in Britain and Ireland (Mack and Lansley, Nolan and Whelan, Gordon et al, Pantazis et al) forgot about this broad conception of resources and reduced it to income.
Third, the heaviest decision was to try to find a strong association (in the famous graph of chapter 6) between income and the deprivation score. This search implies conceptually that one conceives well-being/deprivation as determined by income only (or to a very large extent) and thus, that one ignores other sources of well-being (like disposable time and those other well-being sources identified by Townsend in chapter 5) assuming they are not well-being sources or that their importance is negligible. Decisions 2 and 3 biased research into a blind alley where only income counts as resource and where deprivation only matters if it is produced by income insufficiency. This derived in the truly poor approach which only looks at the “two sides of the coin”, to use Hallerod’s expression and which, as I said at the beginning, moves towards minimalism.
What should be done, besides strengthening the budget approach and converting it in the basis of the poverty line definition (abandoning the inconsistent X% of average income), is: 1) to rescue Townsend’s broad concept of resources, add to them available time (for enjoying life, for doing what one wants to do in life, for domestic chores, for taking care of others, for educating oneself, for pure leisure); 2) abandon the intersection approach and substitute it by an integrated index for each household which looks both at the income dimension and at the direct dimension where the satisfaction of needs which are dependent on other well-being sources would be included.
Peter Townsend’s work was a constant struggle for broadening poverty research and policy. Broadening our approach is the best way of paying homage to Peter’s memory.
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