Análisis de las 4p’s

Each of these terms has conceptual problems of its own. Concerning absolute poverty, why is it that those who earn less than a dollar per day are said to be in poverty but those who earn a fraction more (yet are probably not materially much better off) are not? And what does absolute poverty actually mean.

Oppenheim suggests that a reasonable definition of absolute poverty is having insufficient income to cover basic biological needs. Those unfortunate

individuals that are unable to meet those needs can be said to be in absolute poverty⁷⁵.

Individuals and organisations through time have adopted absolute definitions of poverty. Most of these have attempted to define a poverty line - a minimum level of income that allows biological survival. The earliest proponent was

Charles Booth in Victorian era London. He tried to establish a consistent

standard of subsistence poverty: sufficient food and shelter to make possible the physically efficient functioning of the body. He found that 30% of the

population of London at that time lived below the poverty line that he had personally devised⁸¹.

A little later than Booth, Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree examined the conditions of the poor in York in a number of studies that he repeated up until 1951⁸². Rowntree’s original study of families in York in 1899⁸³ attempted to identify the minimum weekly income required to cover the costs of fuel, lighting, rent, food, clothing, household and personal items in accordance with the size of the

family. These were the things that he deemed necessary for a healthy life. By the time of his final published report, he had come to the conclusion that poverty as he had defined it at the start of his life was more or less eliminated in Great Britain. By 1955, he could find few people in abject need of income to buy food, pay rent, purchase clothing and so on. Measures such as the

introduction of the Welfare State had alleviated the plight of those living on low wages or without employment.

Rowntree’s definition of poverty sounds very similar to the definition adopted by the United Nations at the Copenhagen summit in the mid-1990s. They declared that poverty is: “a condition characterised by severe deprivation of human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information”⁸⁴. So, while poverty had been eliminated in the context that Rowntree understood it during his public life, it remained a serious problem throughout the world almost 100 years later.

Both Rowntree and Booth were influential in turning the attention of the public authorities to the amelioration of poverty. However, in common with all

absolute definitions, the definitions of Rowntree and Booth are subject to criticism. At the heart of each absolute definition there lies a judgement about what constitutes a minimum standard of living. At some stage an expert will define a poverty line, whereby a person or a household without the resources to meet these subjectively defined criteria is said to be in poverty. A commonly used approach is to estimate the minimum number of calories a person requires in order to survive, and use this as a yardstick for measuring absolute poverty⁸⁵.

Immediately, confusion arises from this method. Various questions of equivalence are raised. The age, sex, area of residence, occupation of the person in question will have a bearing on his or her calorific requirement.

Therefore, some sort of subjective judgement needs to be made to account for an individual’s particular circumstances and, as a result, an absolute measure of poverty can easily become a relative measure: a food intake that may sustain a person in one environment may not do so in another.

The next question is how ‘survival’ should be defined. A human being can

survive for a long time on fewer calories than is required to maintain body mass.

Shortfalls of ingested calories can be offset in the short to medium term by metabolism of body energy stores. Quantifying a minimum daily calorie intake is therefore not straightforward. Moreover, it can be argued that there are other elements beyond those listed by Booth that are necessary for the maintenance of life. These include: health care, transport, education, acceptable clothing and access to information. These elements are also subject to debate about what constitutes a minimum level with the complication that it is even harder to tell what level of each is essential to continued survival. For example, some education is clearly necessary, but at what level of education will a person be equipped with sufficient skills and knowledge to survive in the long term?⁸⁶

Absolute definitions of poverty are associated with other difficulties. What does one do about those who are above a poverty threshold or line but cannot be said to live comfortable lives? The World Bank has a poverty line of those living on U.S. $2 equivalent per day⁸⁷ (and another at $1 per day). What measures should be taken for those who have $2.50 per day? What about those who have relative abundance at some times of the year but have livelihoods in jeopardy because of uncontrollable factors such as the climate?

Relative poverty is a less clear cut concept than absolute poverty. Defintions of relative poverty can be traced back to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations⁸⁸ where he states that the necessities of life include:

“not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without.”

More recently, Peter Townsend echoed Smith’s view that the necessities of life were more than the minimum amount of goods needed to sustain life by

concluding that the necessities of life are those goods that allow individuals to

“play the roles, participate in the relationships, and follow the customary behaviour which is expected of them by virtue of their membership in society”⁸⁹.

These two views of the necessities of life suggest that what is considered economic deprivation or poverty in one society may not be considered so in another or even in the same society but at a different point in time. Being poor in the UK in the 21^st century does not have the same implications as it does to be poor in Ghana or Peru.

In Townsend’s eyes, there is more to being poor than simply not having enough to eat. An impoverished person, according to his definition will be lacking in many areas of human functioning, “all of the major spheres of life” will be affected. By explicitly stating that poverty in modern Britain was not a singular concept, Townsend became the first writer to expound the idea of multiple deprivation. By adopting this sort of definition, Townsend has, according to Bradshaw and Sainsbury⁹⁰, profoundly influenced the landscape of thinking on poverty in the same way that Rowntree and Booth did at the turn of the 20^th Century.

Definitions of relative poverty are not without their own problems as argued by Amartya Sen⁹¹. It is conceivable that if no other standard was applied that a relative definition would ignore the existence of poverty in a country where everyone was starving. At the other end of the spectrum, this definition allows, in theory at least, an individual to have a comfortable way of life yet still be considered poor in comparison to the opulent standards of those around him. As well as these philosophical criticisms, there are practical difficulties with

relative definitions of poverty. What are the normal living standards of a particular society? Who decides what these are? Can they be defined

objectively (i.e. a certain portion of the population has access to this item or service) or should they be subjectively defined (i.e. a certain portion of the population agrees that a certain item is a necessity)?

In summary, the use of an absolute definition of poverty reflects the practical problems of reaching agreement on what constitutes poverty across different societies. In developed countries, the greatest advantage of using an absolute definition is that it allows policy makers to assess if they have succeeded in reducing poverty. Relative poverty thresholds on the other hand present a set of moving goal posts and consequently reduce the chances of success for poverty alleviation programmes.