POVERTY – THE ROWNTREE PROJECT REVISITED

Modern scientific poverty measurement goes back just over a century to the work of Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree and his original study in York. His method was, as are many good inventions, simple. To live acceptably in a market economy, a family must be able to purchase what are necessities. If you estimate the price of necessities, you have the income a family needs to be above poverty. That’s the idea we now call ‘the poverty line’. If you then record the incomes (or in Rowntree’s case wages) of the families in the society you are studying, you can count up those whose incomes are below the level of necessity. That’s the idea we now call ‘the head count’ method. The proportion of the population who live on incomes below the level of necessity is a measure of the extent of poverty in that population. These ideas Rowntree put to use in his study in York and he was able to show, as he had expected, that large segments of the working population lived on wages below the level of necessity.1 Rowntree’s method has survived as the predominant way of poverty measurement to this day. We continue to draw poverty lines and to count those below it. There are some variations in how poverty lines are estimated.2 In official poverty statistics in the Unite