Given the treatment anyone who questions the prevailing view on the extent and causes of poverty gets from some contributors, I can only admire Nicki for putting forward her personal experience on this e-list. 

Paul

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nicki Senior" <[log in to unmask]>
To: "Paul Ashton" <[log in to unmask]>, [log in to unmask]
Sent: Saturday, 30 March, 2013 7:36:26 PM
Subject: RE: Recent letter in  Guardian

Just for the record. I was periodically a single mum to three children, on benefits living on a council estate with no family support. I was 'un-educated' and relied on the welfare system. Like the netmums example my children always received three meals a day, as did I. My children always had a warm house and appropriate clothes. Most of the time I could keep a small car on the road. I did however live amongst some families whose children were a feature in my kitchen because their own parents could not feed them and who would take any clothes my children no longer needed. I won't risk the wrath of the list by saying where their money was going but it certainly wasn't on products for their children. 

I personally can relate to what the netmums contributor was saying. 

I also, as part of my PhD interviewed several lone mothers and there was a huge difference in the conditions within which these families lived even though they received the same financial assistance. Some mothers would recount how there wasn't enough money to cover the essentials whilst others could run a car and save for a holiday. Some had decided to sacrifice some of their weekly allowance to allow them to rent privately rather than in council housing. It all came down to their perspective on what was important. I can also recall several conversations where my respondents also questioned the way others lived even though they were in similar circumstances. 

To dismiss examples like the one given, and my own, as outliers I feel is naive. I lived amongst many women (and men) who whilst accepting that they were financially restricted also provided the core essentials to their families. 

As it happens I find myself now subject to more financial hardship and worry than I ever did as an uneducated, single mother on benefits. 
Regards, 
A deluded outlier 


-----Original Message-----
From: Social-Policy is run by SPA for all social policy specialists [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Paul Ashton
Sent: 30 March 2013 18:58
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Recent letter in Guardian

Oh, John; what a disappointment! I thought you were going to come back with something profound and meaningful. Instead you persist in misunderstanding almost everything that I've uttered to you or have written, mistake what I'm about and thus flail around with irrelevant academic theories.  Never mind, I'm sure there will be other opportunities for you to try and wind me up or, better still, to 'get' the fact that there are genuine views about the extent and causes of poverty other than those held by "the UK's leading experts on social policy and the welfare state".  

Regards,
Paul

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Veit-Wilson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Saturday, 30 March, 2013 5:30:04 PM
Subject: Re: Recent letter in  Guardian


This thread seems now to be devoted to tryng to persuade Paul that he is wrong in his interpretation of poverty and the adequacy of low incomes. Many list members may feel that it is futile to try to convince an individual who throughout the thirty or more years he and I have been exchanging views seems not to have changed his conviction that abstract theoretical microeconomics of the rational choice kind is best for explaining human behaviour. Paul -- I have to speak for him on this topic since he has never wanted to engage with any discussion of his personal or social values on such matters as poverty -- writes as if the asocial economistic discourse contains a sufficient paradigm to explain human behaviour at the individual level, and I've never been persuaded that he grasps the point about larger society and its values which social scientists have understood since Durkheim's time. We could have some discussion around this notion but I'll try not to.
 It is at best a marginal and more likely inappropriate use of the list and our time. However, I do want to thank Tracy for reporting her highly relevant research and Martin for illustrating another example of what Tracy's empirical work reports. Then I'm going to persist in trying to respond to Paul personally, and at this point many list members may want to switch off or press the delete button. The point is simply that as his last response suggested I do not believe that counter examples based on empirical evidence will persuade Paul. The problem of comprehension lies far deeper than that. 

For everyone else still reading this who understands what I'm trying to say, I'm sorry for tedious repetition but I believe very strongly that the time is long overdue to respond properly to individualised anecdotalism and abstracted asocial theory as the rationalised basis of policy, each and every time one encounters it, in the same terms, again and again. We in many branches of social science have too long and confidently believed that the empirical evidence will speak for itself. It doesn't, as Paul's emails, Toby Young etc and government policy repeatedly show us. Even if you think Paul and I just wind each other up, what he confronts us with is an issue far more important than our feelings and patience, and that's why I go on about it. If I sound patronising [yes, I know I do], I'm sorry but as this is the only medium available I can't use the discursive Socratic or Habermasian face to face methods, desirable as they may be. Others should suggest 
 better ways of approaching the problem of persuasion. 

So, Paul, even after your anecdote the same epistemological and methodological problems remain. You appear to believe the cause of poverty is primarily located in individual behaviour. You believe people who have low incomes should manage their money better and then they would not be poor [whatever you understand by that term]. That is to look at individuals alone without grasping the wider picture within which those individuals [and you, too] live. You and I both know it is commonplace in certain kinds of theoretical economics to ignore messy social reality but I'm not sure you grasp that this casual dismissal of reality then fails to explain much of what goes on in real societies. That has been widely understood since early in the 20th century, though still not by some practitioners of branches of economics who stick to their micro and macroanalyses and prescriptions, abstracted individual rational choices and the rest. They do of course offer a 
 superficially plausible rationale for political choices taken for ideological reasons [which is why the Thatcherites lionised Patrick Minford], but it does not correspond to real human life in real societies, messy and uncertain as it is. 

Social scientists ever since Emile Durkheim's study of suicide have known that when one examines whole populations one has to take the collective social context of values and social norms and pressures into account and not just the anecdotal articulated rationale for the individual acts. What we have known since poverty research was started on a systematic and not just anecdotal basis [Rowntree 1901] is that all aspects of the setting of society's standards of what is minimally acceptable and conventional to the management of household budgets at different levels of income are inherently and inevitably located in how people in that society normally live and expect others like them to live. Be very clear, this includes all their values, their quirks, the pressures on them, their odd choices which may not correspond with yours, and so on. Can you accept that? 

Our job as social scientists is to discover [not prescribe] what on average and overall that reveals about society's standards and values. It shows ever since and including Rowntree's work that our society believes people should have a bit extra to allow them to make their own choices in their own ways and still meet minimum decency standards. We know nothing about the wider context of the Netmums mother's life or her choices, nor do we need to since we have the national data [PSE and MIS] which shows that on those income levels the average family in the UK cannot manage in the precise way which she and you might prescribe and still at the same time maintain the national norms of decent inclusive living which society says they should and which generally in the world as a whole are treated as being human rights. It doesn't matter how many anecdotes IDS or you or Toby Young [or I] produce, we have the testable evidence of what people in this society 
 believe about minimum decency standards, and that is a stronger and more morally justifiable basis for action than the ignorance and prejudices being used to justify the cruel oppression now being inflicted on poor people. Please, no more anecdotes as substitutes for evidence! Either offer some credible Popperian social science refutation of the empirical evidence which shows that current low incomes are on average too low for decency and inclusion as identified by the UK population, or admit you accept the facts about the inadequacy of low incomes and poverty as they stand. 

Paul, your adherence to individualised behavioural microeconomics as the basis for explaining social phenomena like poverty is like medicine was before public health or epidemiology were developed. Medical science knows much more now about the broader social contexts of how illness is conceptualised and caused, and we know much more about how the poverty of deprivation and exclusion is understood and caused. I'm puzzled why you think a premodern version of economics should be sufficient to explain social phenomena like social and moral values which don't even come within its purview. That's why I referred to epistemology. It really matters, just like it does in medicine if you want to avoid the quacks [not everyone does; they may have different belief systems, but most people prefer the natural science model for their own treatment]. So no more quack social policy prescriptions! 

Paul, as for your provocative comments on 'generous state benefits', I'll leave a response to those social scientists, some economists included, who study the production and distribution of national resources and the ways in which they are channelled unequally to different sections of the population and how that is justified and rationalised. The knowledge that the UK government gives more generous benefits under a variety of labels to higher than to lower income people has been commented on for at least a century [didn't Tawney refer to it?] and anyway was mapped in detail by Richard Titmuss and by many others since then. I'm surprised that, on this list at least, you thought claiming JSA was generous would be a sufficient answer to my challenge to come clean about your ideas of national fairness. But then that takes us back to the key point. It doesn't matter what you or I think, what matters is the evidence that the society in which we live does not 
 think this is a fair and adequate-for-inclusion income level. This is not a matter of which political party you or I support, it's about basic human values such as freedom, equality and solidarity, and understanding that human behaviour can't be understood only at the individual level. I'm sure I'm not the only list member who'd find it helpful to learn where you stand on such epistemological matters and your position on social science evidence as opposed to anecdote as the basis for government policy. But perhaps we could continue this discussion in private emails if you really want to return to and prolong it. I don't. 

And also for those of you who sat right through the show, I'll just quote Tom Lehrer -- 

My tragic tale I won't prolong,
And if you do not enjoy the song,
You've yourselves to blame if it's too long, You should never have let me begin. 

Let? Provoke is more like it! And apologies if I've offended anyone other than the supporters of this government's cruel and unnecessary social policies. 

John VW. 

------------------------------------------------------------
From Professor John Veit-Wilson
Newcastle University GPS -- Sociology
Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, England. 
Telephone: +44[0]191-222 7498
email [log in to unmask]
www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/j.veit-wilson/