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The article profiles the life and charity activities of Charles Booth, a Liverpool based businessman, altruist and a social scientist. His contributions to the study of poverty in London from 1897 to 1903 with his team, and their interviews with clergy, ministers and various other sections in society are detailed. The article also analyzes the interconnections between the state and churches in relation the charity programs undertaken during the period.

In 1899, one of Charles Booth's investigators, George Arkell, visited Deptford to revise the classifications provided on Booth's Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889. Arkell was more shocked and offended by Baildon Street than any other street he visited in Deptford. He was scathing in his comments and assessment of the street, and decided that it should remain coloured black, meaning 'Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal'—an assessment that Booth agreed with. This article takes issue with Booth's assessment of Baildon Street and, in particular, with George Arkell's comments and the picture he painted of the lives and living conditions of those who resided there. The article shows that Baildon Street was not a chaotic place of social transience, nor was it a place systemically rife with prostitution, crime, violence, and child neglect. It also reveals the surprising ideas and factors that influenced Arkell in his investigative work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines why Charles Booth undertake his survey of life and labor in London, England. Mary Booth has written a memoir about her husband Charles which was published in 1918, where she attributed Charles' interest in poverty to what the Fabians were fond of referring to as the zeitgeist of the 1880s, the spirit of new age that have abandoned laissez-faire dogmas and look upon collectivism in a favorable sense. Among the contributing factors mentioned by Mary were the work of Ruskin and Octavia Hill, the experience of the Charity Organisation Society, Toynbee Hall and the Barnetts. But H. M. Hyndman did not assert that Charles began his work solely to counteract the socialists' claims, but the clear implication was that the Social Democratic Federation were primarily responsible. Hyndman discussed in is book The Record of an Adventurous Life, a more specific explanation of the beginning of Charles' work. Hyndman's story if a good one and has been retold by a number of writers. It is taught that Hyndman's story is untrue but the had an important indirect influence on Charles. To know more about Charles' work, the Social Democratic Federation journals, Justice and the Pall Mall Gazette have featured interesting information about Charles and his works.

The article examines the relations between continuity and innovation in the social thought of the 1880's as it relates to poverty in England. It evaluates 1880's as a watershed in the history of English social theory by examining the two publications entitled "Life and Labour of the People of London," by Charles Booth and "Final Report" of the Select Committee of the House of Lords of the Sweating System in 1980. Under the study, the relationship of Booth's view about society and nature of social progress in 1880's and 1890's was analyzed.

How prevalent was marriage for children who were removed from their birth community by the poor law authorities? This article investigates whether children who experienced intervention from the Islington poor law authorities during the late nineteenth century were deterred from marrying and having children as adults. To answer these questions two samples of children were assembled and traced through various records. The first sample consisted of children who were sent to foster homes in rural communities and the second consisted of siblings of the first group who were not boarded out. Although the sample sizes were relatively small due to the extensive archival research needed to answer these questions, the analysis suggests there is a possibility that relocation had an impact on marital formation and childbearing but did not necessarily sever a child's connection to their birth community. Children who were boarded out were less likely to marry, or have children, compared to those who stayed in Islington. However, they often retained strong connections to their birth community and/or biological family members. This article also explores instances of irregular family arrangements including illegitimate births, possible cohabitation, marital separation and one instance of a potentially bigamous marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between finance and the real economy is one of the central issues not only in the world today, but over the long sweep of history since the earliest era of the market economy. Examination of this issue unavoidably involves analysis of class structure, whether at the national or global level. Analysis of the relationship between finance and the real economy has a long history in China. In the seventh century BC Guan Zi (?-645 BC) recognised the essential role of the market, as well as the necessity to regulate it effectively in order to benefit the mass of the population: 'Markets are the distribution centres for commodities from across the whole world. Tens of thousands of people exchange their products and do business there. If the function of the market can be brought correctly into full play, everyone will benefit from exchange in the market ... However, the market alone cannot be allowed to decide the abundance or deficiency of commodities. There is a right way to realise this (wei zhi you dao). That is called the "handling the market" (wu shi shi).' For Guan Zi, finding the 'right way' for the government to 'handle the market' was analogous to finding the 'right way' in Daoist philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-examines the slum writings of the late Victorian and Edwardian period, focusing on fictional treatments of the East End. It argues that whilst considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the Imperial overtones of some of this literature, this glosses over the significant interplay between local knowledge and supposition of the area itself for these writers and their readers. This article focuses on how slum writers used a range of literary devices and styles to present themselves as expert guides to an area that their readers were increasingly familiar with, and how this complex duality between the ‘known’ and the ‘discoverable’ influenced wider perceptions of the poor in East London. Slum writing blended the real and the fictional as the locations and inhabitants of the East End were examined through the prism of the social investigator, and shed more light on attempts to understand shifting cityscapes within easy reach than attitudes to distant colonial others. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a large number of web sites which offer on-line maps showing the whereabouts of world poverty. Among the many map sites offered are "Global Environmental Prospects," povertymap.net, "Where Are the Poor? Experiences with the Development and Use of Poverty," the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and a historical map "Maps descriptive of London Poverty." The article points in the direction of large number of African maps, including Malawi, Kenya, Mozambique and Uganda. The United States is represented map on the Bureau of the Census site.

This article attempts to increase awareness and understanding of an adult’s perceived necessities in South Korea (hereafter, Korea) and addresses the need to adopt a consensual approach to current measurement methods in Korea. The research utilized an online survey of Korean adults aged between 20 and 69 years, across the nation of Korea. The results are used to draw up a list of indicators considered to be necessary for life in Korea such that, if people cannot afford several of the items on the list, it might be considered that they are living in relative poverty. As well as examining public perceptions across different social groups within Korea, public attitudes on the necessities of life from neighbouring countries such as Japan and Taiwan are compared to see whether there is a consensus on the basic necessities of life across East Asia. The implications for an East Asian poverty framework are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon literature from economics, and the human capital and equity fields in order to present a theoretical framework for a new multidimensional measure of poverty for Australia. Poverty is about having low living standards; but its measurement has traditionally focused only on an individual's income or on other dimensions of living standards that are not appropriate for contemporary Australian society, such as calorie intake. There are two additional capabilities individuals require for adequate living standards: health and education. Each of these is required for basic functioning within modern society, but have traditionally been ignored by measures of poverty. This paper argues that health is a basic capability people need for a fulfilling life, allowing individuals to participate in activities essential in modern society, and that education can also be seen in this light. As such it is vital that health and education be included in measures of poverty. In order to move Australian poverty measurement forward and build upon the work of the past, poverty measurement must move its focus away from only looking at low income, and take a holistic focus on the living standards of individuals by incorporating assessments of health and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the theoretical underpinnings of different types of income poverty measures—absolute, relative, and a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) "quasi-relative" one—and empirically assesses them by tracking their performance over time and across demographic groups. Part of the assessment involves comparing these measures to subjective notions of poverty and nonincome hardship indicators. Overall, each of the income poverty measures is informative and should be viewed as a complementary source of information about people's economic well-being. The author's view, however, is that the quasi-relative poverty measure recommended by the NAS panel is the single most informative measure because of its theoretical attributes and its empirical performance thus far, although clearly more research on its empirical performance over time is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geography of urban deprivation is both real and 'imagined'. The combination leads to biased and often quite polarized views of cities, their dynamics and their future. Unfortunately the tendency is to depict poverty and deprivation as ugly, as an 'improper' part of urban life which should be eradicated and replaced by 'proper' middle-class physical constructions and social structures. But research which avoids the 'imagining' shows that this is an unacceptable view of the the inner city where in fact people, despite their poverty, set up a wide array of social, cultural and economic networks of real meaning, which enable them to enter the labour market, to develop mutual support and to participate in cultural activities of all kinds, just like anybody else. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of poverty lines suggests that they are determined jointly with poverty policy in the same political game. If the definition of poverty is endogenous, however, why do altruistic voters allow poverty to persist indefinitely, as seems to be the case in real life? A simple redistribution model shows that the persistence of poverty imposes fairly strong restrictions on the nature of voter altruism. Specifically, a voter's compassion for the poor must rise as the defined severity of the poverty problem worsens. Given such preferences, political actors face incentives to define poverty as a severe problem and then to use redistribution to reduce it significantly. There is no direct incentive to eliminate poverty, however; indeed, voters may prefer a state in which policy always attacks poverty vigorously and yet never defeats it. It follows that social policy should not be judged by its success in eliminating poverty, which may be directly counter to voter interests and therefore practically impossible. Rather, we should ask whether poverty policy provides enough help to people whom voters currently consider to be poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns the emergence of a specifically 'economic' way of governing poverty at the start of this century, an event which is to be accounted for, though by no means exhaustively, by the discovery of 'unemployment'. The latter will make it possible to relate the nineteenth-century `problem of the unemployed' to an object domain that is primarily economic, rather than cultural or moral. A new object of regulation will emerge from this economic problematization of the 'social question': the labour market. The paper pays particular attention to the national labour exchange system, the political technology that will visibilize the labour market in new ways. Together with unemployment insurance, it will suggest new ways of governing poverty and a new course for social policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way to trace the development of attitudes toward me poor over the last century and a half of industrialization is to examine contemporary reference sources, which not only reflect scholarly attitudes of the time, but may also influence popular beliefs to a certain degree. The Encyclopedia Britannica has been chosen in this survey to follow the treatment of the concept of poverty, and eleven different editions between 1810 and 1975 have been consulted for articles on the poor and on related concepts. The role of the encyclopedia as a home reference source has clearly been an important one in the British-American tradition of self-education, and no encyclopedia has had greater longevity or more authority in the popular mind than Britannica. This article also includes the fairly new idea that in the modern, "controlled" economy, there might be in fact a "long-term trend toward increased unemployment," especially in "mature economies" like the U.S. and Great Britain. This represents the first suggestion in the encyclopedia that some degree of unemployment might have to be tolerated in Western economies even in times of relative prosperity.

The article examines to what extent mass unemployment increases risks of poverty in Denmark. A study of the influence of welfare policies on the relationship between unemployment and poverty must incorporate contemporary research on unemployment. welfare policies and poverty. Unemployment research has examined those mechanisms which cause the concentration of unemployment in specific groups and strata, that is the relationship between unemployment and marginalization. Poverty research has examined the relationship between marginalization and poverty. Welfare policy research can furnish evidence on how the welfare state affects the total relationship: unemployment-marginalization-poverty. The project will rely heavily on international poverty research in relation to both the empirical study and to theory development. By marginalization the project denotes a labor market selection where specific groups in the labor force are expelled from the labor market and systematically disfavored when trying to attain reemployment. By poverty the project denotes a social situation of accumulated bad living conditions in terms of a personal command of social, physical and psychical resources. The existence of poverty in the Danish society, the so-called new poverty, must primarily be explained by developments in the labor market and in welfare policies. The crisis of employment has sharpened the mechanisms of selection and stratification operating in the labor power that is least able to adapt to the demands of market competition is marginalized. Since the early 1970s a growing section of the unemployed experience prolonged spells of unemployment figures in Denmark and in Great Britain doubled and the number of long-term unemployed grew simultaneously. The rise in unemployment in Denmark in 1983-1984 was not just a consequence of a growing number of people experiencing unemployment but was also caused by a growth in average unemployment duration.

The term slum is a loose definition of the environs and behavior of the poor. Isolated from the remainder of society, slum residents are presumed to live a deviant life either by preference or cultural predisposition, or as a consequence of their deprivation. This synthesis of spatial isolation and social deviance was an inextricable element of changes in attitudes to poverty in the early nineteenth century, and has been remarkably persistent. The concept of the ‘Victorian Slum’ has been questioned in relation to modern cities, but the concern also appears to lack validity in Victorian cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on poverty in the welfare state. According to the sociological school, poverty, like other problems of man in society, should be interpreted in social and not purely individual terms. Poverty is not just a question of the bare necessities of life, such as food, shelter, and clothing, but more generally of being able to cope in the kind of society where one happens to live. A more recent example is the official concept of poverty used in public statistics in the U.S., which has often been referred to as an absolute concept. This is very misleading. It is true that the U.S. poverty index is estimated on the basis of the cost of food which is held to be necessary for families of different compositions. But the decision about what foods are regarded as necessary is made with reference to American nutritional habits. Somewhat different poverty lines are defined for different regions because of assumed differences in economic and social circumstances. The U.S. poverty index does not set the poverty line at a very generous level. Nor is it adjusted from one year to another except for inflation. But this has nothing to do with the theoretical question of absolute or relative concepts. The theoretical problem of poverty research does not lie so much on the conceptual level, as in the problem of measurement. Having decided that poverty is relative, one is not much the wiser about how to actually measure it.