Paradigms of Poverty: A Rehabilitation of B.S. Rowntree

Abstract

Rowntree is widely regarded as having originated in 1901 the ‘scientific’ definition of poverty as the minimum income level required for physical subsistence. He is quoted as defining ‘secondary poverty’ above this income level as mismanagement. Critics of this approach confuse Rowntree's use of concepts with his discussion of causes, and they overlook Rowntree's own explanation that his concept of poverty was relativistic life-style, and that his distinction between primary and secondary poverty was a heuristic device to convince individualists that the life-style of the poor was at least in part caused by low income and not by improvidence. Townsend's major life work in defining and measuring poverty as relative deprivation is usually presented as overthrowing Rowntree's paradigm. The paper shows that Rowntree's early views and methods have been widely misunderstood by later authors, and it argues that the evidence necessitates a reconsideration of Rowntree's position, which would show Townsend's achievement as a paradigmatic shift not from absolutist to relativistic models of poverty but from relativistic models based on standards prescribed by expert observers to relativistic models based on standards derived from the whole population by social surveys.