Let’s make money by regurgitating stuff about the poor

[...]The poor, that huge, passive reservoir of research fodder, society’s lab mice, cannot escape them. Can only gaze with indifferent eyes at the toiling ants, at their dumb questions, their patronising warmth and their endless boxes to be ticked. All in order to be told what people in their circumstances have known for time immemorial: that they don’t do so well in life as the rich, nor live so long.

Huge numbers of people now work in the field of poverty. There are approximately 100,000 social workers in England, Scotland and Wales. The national UK voluntary sector has a paid workforce of 608,000. God knows how many the NHS, universities and local authorities cumulatively employ in various soft jobs in the same area, but enough for us safely to conclude that the equivalent of a small country’s GDP is spent monitoring and analysing the nation’s deprived.

One of the ironies of much current academic research of poverty is not just its intellectual flabbiness but also its elitism. Last February there was a big UK conference called Transcending Poverties, an event notable for its distinguished speakers. For six serious hours they rehearsed the same dilemmas, agonised over the same inevitabilities. Yet not one single new idea or insight was forthcoming from the day in Glasgow; nor was even one speaker drawn from the ranks of those spoken about: proof, in a sense, that we have stopped listening to the poor because there are now so many articulate advocates paid to speak for them. Read more