8 | CONCLUSION: POVERTY AS IDEOLOGY IN AN AGE OF NEOLIBERALISM
The first central argument of this book is that the very conception of poverty is inherently ideological. It involves normative judgements that pertain to an exercise of social identification within a vision of what should constitute a just social order. The fact that social identification is usually tied to actual policy and social provisioning means that it also falls into the moral realm of political economy and is conditioned by the power relations that permeate it. This point applies to all social statistics, to the extent that they are contingent on their social and institutional origins. However, poverty statistics are especially ideological given the central role that the idea of poverty has come to play within contemporary ideologies about capitalist development.
The depoliticization of poverty, both within the concepts and measures themselves, and in terms of how they are employed within various development agendas, serves to veil this inherent ideological nature. Moreover, attempts to move away from money-metric lines do not resolve depoliticisation but arguably compound it by adding additional layers of arbitrary complexity and obscurity. The performance of consensus in various global development agendas, in particular the MDGs and SDGs, has also stifled political debate and thereby lent the upper hand to the institutionally and politically more powerful voices within these narrative and policy struggles.
In particular, the project of generating global poverty statistics has been marshalled in various ways to legitimise the recent and especially virulent phase of capitalism variously referred to as ‘neoliberalism’ or more euphemistically as ‘globalisation’. Neoliberalism itself refers to the political project of laissez-faire capitalism, as discussed at the end of the Introduction. However, it has been mixed in with increasing strains of conservative impulse that are almost Victorian in nature, in that they focus on disciplining the behaviour of poor people through segregated (and poor) systems of provisioning, often in a punitive manner (on this last point, see Rodger 2012). While this interventionist and segregationist impulse is not particularly liberal, it somehow fits comfortably with what Kiely (2018) clearly exposes as the ways in which the neoliberal project has been reliant on state power and considerable degrees of state intervention (also see the excellent exposition by Peck 2010). The reason for this is that the neoliberal project has been fundamentally oriented towards the protection of private property rights (and their free creation and use, including financial assets). It thereby also contains a conservative impulse, particularly with respect to protecting the prevailing class order, as opposed to classical liberalism, which was much more revolutionary in seeking to undo the old aristocratic order.1
The use of segregated systems to condition the behaviour of poor people also fits with what is considered in Foucauldian terms a form of neoliberal governmentality. This refers to technologies of power for governing populations through discourses and norms of self-regulation or self-discipline, with the aim to make oneself entrepreneurial and fit for engaging in markets. Much of the poverty studies scholarship has been wittingly or unwittingly coopted into the development of such technologies.
The neoliberal period in question witnessed large parts of the Global South being subjected to recurrent deep crises and structural adjustment programmes for well over two decades, until boom-time conditions from about the mid-2000s onwards allowed for some respite, albeit within a transformed setting of fully transnationalised capital and rampant financialisation. It is this new order that the reigning ideology seeks to legitimate with poverty narratives. Poverty data have been used in often dubious ways to reinforce dominant narratives of this recent past as one of tentatively progressive emancipation, and thus the policies that came with it as one of cautious success. The fact that large numbers of people around the world do not feel that this is the case arguably feeds into political reactions against this narrative. However, recent trends suggest that rising right-wing populist movements have been more successful at capturing this sentiment than the Left (with some exceptions). This has the effect of reinforcing the conservative impulse which, as noted above, is ironically aligned with the neoliberal project, even though many claim that it represents the death of neoliberalism based on a misunderstanding of the reactionary element within this ideology.
The other big story of this period has also been the dramatic rise of China, which presents a different ideological narrative. Indeed, poverty statistics are marshalled in China in support of statist developmentalism, as I have analysed in depth elsewhere with respect to minorities in Western China (e.g., Fischer 2005, 2014a). There is some debate about whether China should be considered neoliberal, although this is mostly with respect to the Foucauldian idea of creating neoliberal subjectivities, as mentioned above. It has not had much influence in the more political economy scholarship on actual economic policy, in which China is not considered neoliberal in the conventional sense. Nonetheless, the story of China has been weaved into the dominant narrative on poverty with a large degree of creative license by emphasising its liberalisation from a closed Maoist economy. This narrative generally avoids the legacy and ongoing strong degrees of state control and state-led developmentalism that explain a large part of the poverty-reduction experience in the country, especially but not only on the human development side (although, ironically, state control is brought up when the country is criticised for currency or trade manipulation, as I have discussed in Fischer 2010c, 2012d, 2018b).
The second central argument of this book is more specifically in relation to this orthodoxy. The emphasis of absolute measures in current global development agendas – including so-called multidimensional measures – is both the product of a policy bias towards targeting in social provisioning and, in turn, instils biases towards targeting in a reinforcing manner, as against more universalistic or cross-class solidaristic forms of provisioning. This is partly because many of these measures have been designed as supports for targeting. However, a more subtle reason is that absolute conceptions and measures are poorly suited to reflecting the value of more universalistic forms of provisioning. They also encourage (and are encouraged by) a policy priority of expediency over equality, in terms addressing the poorest first rather than addressing the institutional implications brought into play by such expediency, which tends to encourage segregation at the expense of cross-class solidarities.
These biases might in certain cases appear inconsequential, or expeditious under circumstances of constrained resources and limited capacity, or even logical and equitable. For all these reasons, criticisms of targeting have usually been brushed aside, even despite serious doubts about the efficacy of targeting even from within the ranks of the establishment. But the biases need to be taken seriously because they plant the seeds for possibilities that are much more perverse, given the tendency for targeting to encourage or entrench segregation, as discussed further below.
Indeed, within the current political climate around the world, the risk is that the conservative ideological impulse mentioned above becomes increasingly punitive with its use of targeting devices, many ironically developed by previous ‘New Left’ governments. There are already signs of this, perhaps most evocatively represented, as in all things, by the Trump administration. By replacing current measures of poverty in the US with ‘consumption’ measures, i.e., those commonly used in cash transfer programmes in developing countries as discussed in Chapter 3, the administration has recently claimed that no more than 250,000 people are living in extreme poverty in the US, versus an estimate cited in a UN report of 18.5 million, or US census estimates from 2016 of 41 million people living in poverty (not extreme poverty). The move to effectively eliminate the official statistical representation of poverty in the US is part of efforts by Republicans in Congress to add work requirements for recipients of food stamps, Medicaid and housing subsidies, and to make cuts to social assistance more generally (Stein and Jan 2018). In the UK, there is a similar trend to make the Universal Credit, which unified six different benefit schemes into one single monthly payment, increasingly punitive and also a means to effectively cut welfare benefits (e.g., see JPIT 2018; Merrick 2018; NAO 2018). The very fact that ‘universal credit’ resembles the idea of universal basic income demonstrates the insidious ease by which policy ideas from the social-democratic left can be subverted by the Right (although, of course, it must be remembered that Friedrich Hayek was one of the early supporters of the idea of universal basic income). It is in this sense that the biases within poverty conceptions and measures, which might at times appear innocuous, can quickly turn into slippery slopes when political climates change. We therefore need to take their implicit biases seriously.
The third argument running throughout this book is that absolute poverty measures are poorly suited to reflect dynamic reproductions of poverty within modern processes of structural transformation for several reasons related to the fundamentally relative nature of modern poverty. The result is that such absolute measures have a secular tendency to underestimate the reproduction of poverty over time. This unfitness for purpose is partly related to the inherent arbitrariness of choice that is involved in measuring poverty, as discussed in Chapters 2 to 5, which is an inherent intractable dilemma that must be openly recognised rather than presuming it can be overcome through technical sophistication.
However, even more fundamental is that our current conventions of conceiving and measuring absolute poverty, including multidimensional measures, such as those officially adopted by the MDGs and then the SDGs, are still largely rooted in conceptions of minimal subsistence sufficiency, even despite the inclusion of some inequality indicators in the SDGs. While this remains relevant in certain contexts, especially with reference to contemporary famines (with the caveat that evaluations of hunger are also relative and arbitrary), it is increasingly less relevant in many others. Rather, the profiles of essential social needs have generally changed – often quite radically – within the transformations typically associated with modern capitalist development, demographic transition and other related transformations, alongside rises in associated baseline norms such as literacy and schooling levels, or life expectancy and health profiles. This is not necessarily the same as an upwards shift in subjective preferences, such as when people start to expect more as they become more affluent. Rather, it is a question of the minimum requirements for functioning in modern societies and economies, short of which the options are generally exclusion or exploitation (or both).
One result, for instance, is the persistence of hunger despite rising incomes and falling income poverty, among other manifestations of dissonance that have been recurring subjects of debate in recent decades. Rather than blaming the poor for bad consumption choices, the more straightforward explanation for this dissonance is that the poverty lines are simply not keeping up with the transformations of social need, whereby non-food needs increasingly gain precedence over food needs. Food consumption is therefore repressed, because it is the one need that can be repressed, versus others that are more inflexible, such as transport to be able to work to be able to buy food, etc. This is particularly the case when livelihoods become fully monetised and commodified, as they generally are in urban settings. As a result, insufficient food consumption can happen in contexts that are far from subsistence and where incomes could technically allow for sufficient food consumption, abstracting from other needs. Poverty lines that are rooted on a conception of food need are therefore prone to underestimate these transformations over time.
In other words, the conventional standards that are currently used for these absolute measures are so minimally defined that they essentially become obsolete over time through the course of the structural transformations that are associated with development, especially but not only urbanisation. Falling poverty rates might therefore, to a lesser or greater extent, actually be a reflection of the fact the standard measures are increasingly falling behind the evolution of the compelling social needs of poor people. This is particularly problematic when these standards are used to determine the thresholds to ‘graduate’ poor people from support and assistance. Indeed, a similar point might be made with respect to the thresholds that are used to distinguish low- and middle-income countries, that they are too low and, hence, give a false appearance of so-called graduation to lower-middle-income-country status (as discussed in Chapter 2).
Deconstructing for social justice
This deconstruction of prevailing poverty approaches is needed for instilling humility and a healthy dose of scepticism towards any false sense of authority that these approaches might be used to convey. The reality is that we probably do not know, at least not precisely, how poverty is evolving within the volatile and rapidly changing context of contemporary capitalism. The pretence of precision bears a strong propensity for hubris. This realisation is so important in a subject such as poverty because of the power relations involved between the researcher and the researched, in terms of the implications and influence that the former can have on the lives of the latter without any means of contestation, or even without any awareness or comprehension. And the consequences of hubris can be dire for poor people.
This is not to argue against the measurement project, which remains imperative for supporting modern forms of social provisioning and public policy. Indeed, the statistical project needs to remain focused on building up capacity in conventional social-scientific measures that provide valuable and pertinent information for policy-making and social provisioning in a timely manner. This capacity is already weak in so many contexts, even before the addition of extra requirements transposed from every passing fad by successive global development agendas. The statistical agencies of most poor countries submit to these fads, partly out of deference and the ideational influences of so-called ‘epistemic communities’, but also partly because they remain dependent on donors, both financially and for the human resources required in such technical matters. Yet the direction of many of these transposed or imposed statistical projects is not necessarily the most useful for supporting such government capacities. This is in part because they remain more obsessed with the evaluative aim of building internationally comparative data and indices rather than with the mundane and less-marketable practices associated with conventional but still essential national social statistical collection for governing.
At a more pernicious level, the constant waves of new fads emitting from the centres of knowledge production also reinforce relations of institutional dependency on these centres, as national statistical staff need to be trained in the ways of the latest techniques. Or where there is a lack of capacity or comprehension, they must outsource it to a consultancy or income-earning unit of a university or organisation to do it for them, usually located in the Global North. In this manner, such statistical projects reproduce the dependency associated with the dissemination of technological progress from centres to peripheries, as classically theorised by Latin American structuralist development economists, except, in this case, the progress is often of questionable value or relevance and comes with implicit political and policy agendas. The consumption of such statistical projects emanating from the centre is often driven by things other than need.
Poverty obviously needs to be studied and monitored, although without fetishising the results. The various approaches for doing so remain as rough means to evaluate the evolution of social needs, with the understanding that this can be an erratically moving target, particularly in the contemporary era of rapid and volatile change. Moreover, the aim should be to make such evaluations as available and accessible as possible so that they can become objects of public engagement, scrutiny, contestation, debate and deliberation over their meaning, content and application in policy and social provisioning.
Indeed, this point is shared with Amartya Sen’s insistence that functionings should be determined through local-level democratic deliberations, albeit with the qualification that his vision is quite idealised, in an abstract deductive liberal-theoretical sense, especially in the current context of rising right-wing authoritarian populism. Rather, according to a more political economy view, we need to understand such engagement as a field of contest and often conflictive struggle among vying powers, interests and social mobilisations, each supported by various social sources of power (as per Mann 1986, 1993). The outcomes of this contest are not necessarily neatly sorted out through some sort of democratic bargaining equilibrium, as postulated by liberal political theory, but rather as a series of consequences, many of them unintended, driven forward by the constant disequilibria of unresolved and ongoing social and power struggles. Poverty studies is not immune to this, but rather serves as its ideological cannon fodder, in part because poverty is implicated in the narratives of these political economy struggles and is crucially conditioned by the struggles as well.
Poverty measurement in this perspective needs to be understood fundamentally as part of a political project of building state capacity in social provisioning and policy-making, as well as of strengthening processes of accountability with citizens on these matters. This engagement is, in the end, the most important result. After all, in the history of social emancipation, transformative social change has rarely happened through instrumentalised monitoring devices, but instead through active popular mobilisation and engagement, often in the absence of any good data. Mkandawire (2005) has similarly noted, as discussed in Chapter 7, that the past policies in late-developing countries that have been the most successful in reducing poverty generally did not have poverty reduction as a specific or explicit focus, in contrast to state-building or forging strong cross-class support for intensive development endeavours, among other broader objectives.
The poverty of poverty studies
The problem with much of current poverty studies is that it distracts from these broader political economy causal dynamics. Despite the hyperbolic declaration of revolutions within the plethora of poverty approaches and measures in our frenetic age of seeking impact and innovation, an overwhelming emphasis of absolute conceptions of poverty persists, whether income or multidimensional, as was exclusively the case in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and as remains at the core of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Besides providing a metre that can give some sense of the minimum standards of subsistence and needs that people can be squeezed down to, they are not particularly useful for understanding the broader context that conditions the reproduction of modern poverty. Indeed, even with respect to minimum standards, they are also not very useful given that these change across people, contexts and time.
Contemporary poverty studies have, in this sense, not resolved and to a large extent do not even address the classical debates regarding the creation and division of wealth within and across societies, nor how this is related to social and economic structural transformations associated with modern capitalist development. The elicitation of ‘theories of change’ that has become popular among certain scholars and the policy and donor communities falls far short of the mark. It also states the obvious given that social sciences have always been centrally concerned about why things happen and change. Moreover, in its common usage, a ‘theory of change’ is usually used to evoke an individualist ontology of poverty, without considering the poor within their broader social and structural conditions. This insulates the study of poverty from the more uncomfortable questions about whether modern poverty in developing countries is fundamentally due to a lack of integration of poor people into local, national and global socio-economic systems, or whether it is due to the manner by which they have already been integrated.
Hence, our fundamental understanding of the causes of poverty has arguably advanced so little given that so much of poverty research – including that generated under the rubric of the capability approach – has focused on describing poverty rather than on the causal processes that create poverty. These contentions are, of course, disputed given that mainstream approaches to poverty research claim to have made great advances in our understanding of poverty and broadly accept the frames within which poverty has been conceptualised, as led by the World Bank. If critical, scholars in this literature are mostly critical of aspects of methodology, such as with respect to the level of the poverty line, but not with respect to deeper issues regarding political and ideological biases implicit in the operationalisation of poverty studies. (As mentioned in the Introduction, Angus Deaton is one exception in this respect, along with a few other dissenting voices.)
In the void of this broader consideration of causal dynamics, various policy agendas that have a huge bearing on these dynamics are nonetheless pursued. As noted previously, various critical authors have occasionally made this point, that poverty statistics have been used to legitimise the reigning neoliberal order, such as Wade (2004), Kiely (2007) or Pogge (2010). However, moving forward, the problematic aspects of these agendas are actually becoming more pervasive and diffuse than simply a particular form of capitalist ideology. This can be referred to as the return of segregationism.2
Indeed, there is an important social democratic tradition in poverty studies that is explicitly or implicitly critical of neoliberalism, as represented by the work of Amartya Sen. However, whether or not someone ascribes implicitly or explicitly to a neoliberal policy position, the focus on poverty and within this on measuring the poor, through whatever measures, contains within it a tension between identification and segregation, as discussed in Chapter 7. If unchecked, in particular because of de-politicisation, this tension can provide momentum to a much more pervasive intellectual and policy proclivity to single out and segregate the poor from the rest of society as the objects of public (state or non-state) charity. Such tendencies might not necessarily or specifically conform to a neoliberal logic, to the extent that they might advocate for an increased role of the state in providing social welfare to the poor. The question then is whether such public poverty interventions play a role in supporting broader neoliberal processes in society, as argued, for instance, by Lavinas (2013, 2017) or Saad-Filho (2015). (Also, see my discussion of this in Fischer 2010a, 2012, 2014b.) However, even if not clearly neoliberal, the tendencies nonetheless tend to reinforce the more conservative impulses mentioned earlier, which emphasise efficiency and constraint in the use of public resources over concerns of equity and equality.
Accordingly, we have been observing the normalisation of a segregationist approach to social provisioning and welfare systems parallel to the rise of the poverty agenda, and the two have been mutually reinforcing, in both statist and neoliberal regimes. Stratification and segregation have of course been inherent to social provisioning systems since time immemorial, as is a common insight in the field of social policy. Nonetheless, the legitimacy of segregation was on the defensive for several postwar decades and the goal of universalism was at least the target of most countries, even if only achieved by a few. However, more recently there has been a reassertion of segregationism, except within entirely transformed contemporary contexts.
Recent trends have also lent legitimacy to segregation as accepted best practice, to be institutionally strengthened rather than evolved out of over time. For instance, the neoliberal reforms and structural adjustments of the 1980s and 1990s in Latin America exacerbated informality in the economy and served to undermine any embryonic or nascent efforts that could have provided the basis for a universalisation of social security, as in the classic welfare states of Europe. However, this stylised observation is then often used as a reason for the impossibility of universalising social security in such contexts, even though the very retreat from such long-term objectives was arguably a crucial contributing factor for the exacerbation of informality in the first place.
Hence, there is now an accepted conventional wisdom in the ironically austere times of high inequality and fabulous financialisation that large informal sectors cannot be integrated into existing social security systems and/or that the latter cannot be universalised. Social protection for the informal is then turned into an issue of charity or unilateral redistributive transfers, as is suggested by the now-accepted terminology of ‘non-contributory’ social protection. In effect, the term is factually inaccurate because the poor generally do contribute to state revenues, except not through direct income taxes or social security contributions but through indirect contributions such as value-added taxes, through which much of such ‘non-contributory’ social protection is actually funded. The non-contribution in this sense is only relevant with respect to specific formal institutions of social security, but not with respect to resource transfers to and from poor people in the overall economy. Nonetheless, these narratives subtly reinforce perceptions that poverty relief or social protection are essentially charity, or at best social assistance. This is in contrast to the perceived deservingness of social security contributors, rentiers or those who make profits, and hence an increasingly smug protectionism from them towards the encroachment of poor people into their benefits. However, the dual pressures to both reform (i.e., retrench) social security systems as well as refine the targeting of social protection for the poorest (e.g., see IMF 2017) reinforces the tendency in most parts of the world for a very large uncovered and unsecured middle, typically the middle 60 percent of the population.
There are still plenty of debates to be had within the accepted frame of charity (or ‘non-contributory’ benefits). Is poverty relief in fact good policy for growth, versus focusing on employment or productive interventions? Should it be widely or narrowly targeted? Does it induce dependency, or should it be wielded with conditionalities and behavioural nudges? However, the point is that in accepting the frame of these debates, one has already succumbed to a segregationist logic, rather than seeking frames that enhance an understanding of the poor as integrated, integral and interdependent with the rest of society, alongside visions of systems that would come to reflect this overtime.
Such segregationist tendencies cannot be simply explained as part of a neoliberal logic. Indeed, as we ponder the possibilities of post-neoliberal futures within contexts of entrenched high inequality and increasingly reactionary politics, these tendencies may turn out to be far more endemic and long-lasting than neoliberal forms of governance. The appeal is that such segregationist tendencies appear progressive and so-called ‘pro-poor’, to the extent that the justification for isolating the poor is to better concentrate resources and interventions on them and to filter out the undeserving and the needless.
The political consequences of shifting modalities of targeting
Moreover, the subtle but powerful shift towards top-down technocratically controlled targeting systems as the accepted best practices of contemporary poverty-reduction policy is another instance of how depoliticising tendencies of contemporary poverty studies is, in fact, fundamentally political at the level of actual practice. This is not necessarily an issue about targeting or conditionality per se, which receives most of the focus in debates about social protection and social policy more generally (although both practices are fundamentally political as well). Rather, it is about the institutional modalities through which targeting is practiced and their political consequences, which have been hugely neglected by scholarship.
A key point is the severing of practices of rights-claiming and contestation by beneficiaries from processes of beneficiary selection. This occurs in the shift from classic models of beneficiary-initiated claims-making, wherein even means-testing is initiated by beneficiaries themselves, towards the concentration and control of identification and selection procedures by certain sectors of the state, often quite centralised and distanced from the beneficiaries. In the latter, beneficiary selection comes to be determined through surveys and censuses that beneficiaries have little understanding about (especially in the case of proxy means-testing). While this does appear to have an effect in taming disputes (and most cash transfer programmes do implement dispute mechanisms), this is precisely a logical consequence of the short-circuiting of contestation and other politicised forms of engagement by the poor, by decentring or obscuring channels of accountability across different state agencies and, in some cases, para-state and non-state entities.
Notably, such modalities have been facilitated by the ease of econometric technologies and their avid uptake in poverty studies, and they are often favoured because they place less pressure on limited local administrative resources, both human and financial. They are also often advocated in the name of empowerment. However, empowerment is mostly evoked with reference to the policy interventions that result from poverty identification. For instance, cash transfers are said to enhance the intra-household bargaining power of targeted women by giving them more money to bargain with. Empowerment is not assessed in terms of how these interventions actually strengthen (or weaken) political systems of representation and accountability.
From a political economy perspective, these current ‘best-practice’ modes are in fact fundamentally disempowering. They circumvent and short-circuit processes of citizen-led claims-making on the state, thereby undermining the state as a locus of accountability for the poor, as similarly argued by Chandhoke (2003) with respect to the agendas of pluralising the state. For instance, with the accepted best practices of cash transfer policies, the poor themselves generally have no idea how they are being selected or monitored. They often have no means to contest the process or the outcomes, or, if they do, it is towards the end of the process of selection, as part of the verification of results already generated, in community contexts such as in village committees in which the poor enter as already the weakest player within local power relations. If and when poverty relief arrives, from the perspective of the ‘recipients’ or ‘beneficiaries’, it generally arrives with an appearance of a random act of benevolence (as it does to those not selected), rather than as the outcome of a process of asserting entitlement rights.
This is in contrast to the more classical notions and practices of claiming entitlements, whether through means testing or not. However imperfect, these reinforce a process of active rights-claiming by the recipients themselves (or beneficiaries, or citizens). They also serve to reinforce the state as the principle locus of accountability (again, see Chandhoke 2003). These processes are often denigrated as messy and inefficient, while the technocratic processes of selecting beneficiaries despite their incomprehension is celebrated as clean and non-distortionary interventions into the communities of poor people. The latter assessment nonetheless often comes with a dose of naiveté as to the nature of local power relations, and also often ignores many of the large implicit costs for poor people involved in the process, as well as the shift of administrative resources towards monitoring and evaluation, which also becomes the weakest links in such systems. The irony is that such solutions to the messiness of local political economies end out reinforcing the charity view of such forms of social protection, in which the major objective is to devise the best ways of ‘us’ giving to ‘them’. The double irony is that the proponents of such modalities of targeted charity have been almost entirely from non-poor elites and transnational technocrats. They have rarely, if ever, been from popular social movements themselves, or from among the poor and working classes, which generally demand dignity and respect alongside a fairer share of the pie.
Returning to the third central argument of the book, to a certain extent the gradual decline in global measures of absolute income poverty, if accurate, can be understood through the massive productivity increases in contemporary agriculture and manufacturing, to the extent that real food prices are at close to an all-time low in historical terms, even despite the recent spike in food prices. Combined with increasingly integrated international markets, it is understandable how the condition of poverty has gradually changed over the last century from one of food insufficiency to one in which calorie sufficiency is relatively easier to secure (although not necessarily nutrition sufficiency), while other compelling social needs take over in precedence (or else cause repressed food expenditure). Insofar as absolute poverty measures are generally designed to reflect food insufficiency, the long-term secular decline in absolute poverty rates is reflective of this transformation in the condition of modern poverty.
However, in the face of such global productive capacity, it is surprising that so much of the world’s population still subsists under or just above such minimally defined poverty lines. Part of this is undoubtedly related to agrarian conditions in much of the Global South, where peasant farmers struggle to get by on the low food prices received for their output on shrinking per-person plots of land (if they produce a surplus), relative to rising prices in the range of other social needs (such as in health care and schooling, or else in inputs to production). But much is not related to agrarian conditions. For instance, when we speak of Bangladeshi women factory workers being ‘pulled out of poverty’ by working for the equivalent of 38 dollars a month producing clothing for Western brands (as was generally cited at the time of the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013), we are referring to this notion of minimally defined absolute poverty. These workers and their families subsist only slightly above this absolute despite being integrated into value chains that generate enormous value at the retail end. In this sense, such workers are still living under the predicament posited by classical economists such as Malthus, Ricardo and Marx, who assumed that workers’ wages would always be squeezed down to a level of subsistence, that is, subsistence minimally defined by the price of food.
In order to move beyond such narrow conceptions of ‘achievement’, as enshrined in the MDGs and the SDGs, we need to think about poverty and vulnerability with a broader and more relative understanding of evolving social needs, particularly in contexts of social and economic transformation. Such considerations in many cases lie beyond the space of absolute poverty, whether conceived in income or multidimensional terms, given that development transitions can often exacerbate vulnerability and compelling social needs throughout social hierarchies, thereby having very powerful effects on various dynamics of social stratification, grievance or conflict, which are relevant for understanding poverty even if they do not necessarily result in poverty. This more relative approach to understanding poverty and vulnerability within development transformations also helps to shed light on the vital role of redistribution in past and present development as a key mediating factor in cultivating resilience and positive synergies between evolving social needs and human and economic development.
For instance, poverty reduction brought about by targeted cash transfer schemes mostly comes about through lifting the lower tail-end of an income distribution without necessarily effecting the distribution above this tail-end (particularly if the transfers are not funded through progressive forms of taxation). Hence, while producing a reduction in poverty rates and inequality, they can nonetheless leave the broader structure of inequality untouched, or even reinforce it by the manner in which the cash transfers and related policies are institutionally organised. This is important because much of the social dynamics related to inequality, such as stratification, subordination or exclusion, occur above this tail-end or above the thresholds usually used for poverty evaluation (absolute or relative, income or multidimensional).3 Compulsions that discipline labour can also operate in more affluent conditions, particularly given that social needs evolve relative to context and social status. Hence these social dynamics are not necessarily reflected by conventional poverty or even inequality measures, and they are not considered by policies that target the bottom end of the income distribution. A wider conception of such social needs is therefore needed.
Indeed, as discussed in Chapter 5 on social exclusion, this is a dilemma of social inclusion approaches that treat inclusion as the alter ego of exclusion and, in turn, deals with the identification of social exclusion as more or less the same as relative or capability poverty, or else as horizontal (i.e., group-based) inequality. Beyond the important insight that the problems of poverty are more often the result of exploitative inclusion rather than exclusion per se, care must also be taken because inequality measures can mask important exclusionary processes occurring among middle social strata that might be related to inequality even if not reflected by inequality statistics. These can be very politically contentious and can undermine the effectiveness of poverty-reduction strategies predicated on upward mobility (as is the case, for instance, with strategies justified in terms of human capital). It is more important to focus primarily on social processes of stratification and subordination and to use poverty and inequality data as one partial insight into these broader questions of social integration (or segregation).
In this respect, we need to think more broadly about poverty and vulnerability in at least three ways, each of which requires embedding our understanding of poverty and vulnerability within notions of structural transformation. The first is with regard to a more sophisticated understanding of evolving social needs. These include: changing educational needs for employment when the social norm is increasingly based on a floor of full primary enrolment, thereby raising the minimal threshold for socially acceptable schooling qualifications; changing health care needs in a context of rising costs, aging populations or new diseases; or the needs of housing and transport, especially in a context of urbanisation. Remaining within the space of money-metric measures, the thresholds that would allow for a sufficient level of income to meet such needs and that would also offer a substantive sense of inclusion into decent employment (without exploitation or bondage) are generally much higher than those that are currently used in the lower bounds of PPP dollar-or-whatever-a-day poverty measures. (It is not quite clear what the upper bounds refers to, besides convenient cut-off points.) The trends might also be divergent, particularly in a globalising context with generally rising inequality over the last several decades.
Second, it is important to understand that movements out of absolute poverty – and development transitions such as urbanisation more generally – can in many cases exacerbate vulnerability rather than alleviate it, which raises the crucial issue of employment security in a context of labour transitions and the importance of matching such labour transitions with the development of modern social security systems. In other words, movements out of poverty generally involve a streamlining of incomes, such as transitions from diversified, low-productivity but stable and resilient rural livelihoods, to streamlined incomes based on one or two wages, salaries or other sources of income.4 Indeed, such streamlining is an implication of rising productivity, which generally occurs through specialisation as one of its components, as discussed in Chapter 6. While streamlining generally offers higher returns for labour, it also places employees in a more precarious, all-or-nothing condition, which in turn heightens the imperative for employment security in such contexts, or social security measures such as unemployment insurance. Rather than exacerbating these conditions of insecurity through flexible labour market policies, public policy needs to first focus on creating the conditions that enhance people’s ability to transition with relatively secure degrees of autonomy, thereby facilitating their own livelihood strategies in response to socio-economic structural change, as discussed in Chapter 3 in terms of ‘subsistence capacity.’ This perspective highlights the increasing importance of more universalistic forms of social security and social provisioning as counterparts to the transition of populations out of agriculture and rural subsistence conditions, not simply in preparation for negative economic events, but also for dealing with the increasing structural vulnerabilities that are associated with the disembedding of labour within capitalism.
The dark side of these transitions is that, when they take place through a forced commodification of labour, the resultant insecurity of employment might not even be associated with improved incomes, all considered. This has often occurred in capitalist processes of development whereby labour is forced to become dependent on wage employment through the appropriation or even destruction of their land assets and/or other sources of subsistence. It is often assumed on the basis of classical experiences of capitalist transition that such processes of labour commodification will eventually lead to rising incomes and productive accumulation in the long term, even if the dislocations in the short term can be very disruptive to peoples’ livelihoods.
However, we need to be very careful with our evaluation of the value of lost subsistence and of the contingent conditions that allowed for rising wages in the classical cases. As argued by Celso Furtado (1983 [1978]), these contingent conditions included strong working-class mobilisations that were integrated into the broadening social base of nation-states that were, in turn, at the apex of macroeconomic coordination of national economies at the time. These conditions might not apply in contemporary developing countries today, particularly given the increasingly complex coordination of international economic activities that has passed, to a large extent, from nation-states to large private transnational corporations. While this should not be cause for deterministic pessimism, it is also a warning against naïve complacency regarding any natural tendency for wages to rise with productivity, or for a gradual broadening of national social security systems as developing countries become wealthier, as in the classical cases. Rather, intentional and sustained political resolve is required to guarantee such outcomes. Indeed, Furtado himself believed in the role of political activism as ‘the necessary condition for the manifestation of creativity in the institutional sphere, in other words, for the creation of new social forms capable of reducing the tensions generated by accumulation’ (Furtado 1983, p. 9). Pre-empting the capability approach, he argued from his own structuralist logic that development ‘is no more than this: to enlarge the space within which human potentialities can be realised’ (ibid., p. 8).
Third, we need to think of vulnerability as a vertically occurring condition experienced throughout social hierarchies at all levels, not merely in the space of poverty or with reference to falling into poverty. This is especially important in a context of rising human development, such as rising schooling levels and rising aspirations for social mobility in a context of urbanisation. New nexuses of vulnerability can be revealed or exacerbated in such contexts further up in a social hierarchy, well above the spaces identified by absolute approaches to poverty, whether income or multidimensional. They might not even be detected by standard inequality measures insofar as they occur in the middle of a social hierarchy. For instance, university graduates, from families that can afford such education, might face exclusionary pressures (such as through racial, cultural, linguistic or gender axes of discrimination) within the types of employment suited to their educational status, such as state-sector or formal corporate professional jobs, rather than in lower strata of employment that would be filled by poorer and/or less-schooled workers. Exclusions in this sense place downward pressures on elite and/or upwardly mobile people within their respective positions in labour hierarchies and, as a consequence, can also create obstacles to the upward mobility of those below them. These processes can be very contentious socially and politically, even though not reflected as increasing poverty or inequality per se. As argued in Fischer (2008a, 2009a, 2011a, 2014a), exclusion and vulnerability in this sense need to be understood and evaluated relative to comparable cohorts of people, with similar levels of education and aspiring to enter similar sectors of employment.
This insight is important because vulnerabilities that do not necessarily lead to poverty still have very powerful effects on various social dynamics of social stratification or conflict, among other political economy implications. Indeed, vulnerabilities experienced at the upper end of a social hierarchy are especially potent given that they occur among politically active and powerful classes. Absolute and even relative indicators of poverty often tell us little about these broader processes because they focus our attention towards the bottom of a social hierarchy, which might be normatively justified but analytically partial. Moreover, refocusing our attention towards a more holistic understanding of vulnerability counteracts the tendency to blame poor people for a variety of perverse social dynamics (such as riots, crime, interethnic conflict, civil war, etc.) that emerge across social hierarchies in response to intensifying insecurities, whether due to inequality or other causes. While poverty might play a role in many of these social dynamics, it is important – indeed, it is an ethical responsibility – to also remind ourselves that middle classes and elites are also usually implicated, often in ways that surprise our presumptions, such as when the aggrieved ‘poor’ turn out to be middle-class activists. Hence, we need social theory to address how middle classes and elites themselves might face various forms of vulnerability that undermine their own perceptions of social need, thereby fuelling politically powerful grievances.
Re-politicising social justice within global development agendas
In sum, the challenge of global development agendas does not lie in the measurement of poverty, however conceived. It certainly should not lie in making poor people work harder, even though this is often implied in many agendas, instead of addressing how their work is valued. Rather, the challenge lies in seriously re-engaging with development debates about how to create genuinely redistributive structures and institutions at national and global levels. These are political challenges given that they cannot be resolved through technocratic solutions, but require choices to be made about the types of societies we wish to inhabit and how we wish to treat each other within and across these societies. Human rights principles might provide some generic ethical guidelines for these choices, although the devil is invariably in the detail of implementation, which is also where the political takes precedence. These choices are being made in any case under the depoliticising guise of various development and other agendas.
In order to avoid the tendency for cooptation into orthodox policy agendas, global development agendas need to be re-politicised through explicit engagement with substantive policy issues. Implicit policy biases and choices need to be made explicit as part of the calculus of public contestation and deliberation, ideally within the domestic sphere of developing countries themselves as a means to strengthen principles of national self-determination and local processes of accountability. Such re-politicisation needs to be backed up by a genuine revival, in research and in practice, of universalistic social policies as viable options for dealing simultaneously with poverty and inequality, if only because real political contestation and deliberation is very difficult to cultivate within a context of starkly unequal, segregated and fragmented societies. If we are to truly embrace an inclusive agenda, it must be more than merely reducing absolute poverty regardless of broader considerations of social integration. Rather, it needs to be based on equitable and even egalitarian sharing without double standards. In failing to assert this, we risk letting others – in particular, an increasingly emboldened, enriched and self-referential transnationalised elite – decide in their own interests and through a veil of depoliticised moral imperatives how we are to best live together.