In every era the plight of the poor – those excluded from mainstream society – takes on a new form. From the landless of the pre-industrial era to the jobless of the last 200 years, the poor are a mirror image of the ‘not poor’.
Therefore the meaningful definition of poverty is not some objective statistical correlation with average earnings but a social, and therefore relative, construct. Poverty, at least in Britain, is no longer a material threat. You are poor not just because of low income but because the lack of income means that you are unable to participate in society on the basis of its norms and values.
So to understand the plight of today’s poor we must first understand the values and norms of those who are not poor. To do this we must reflect on the transformation taking place in society that is moving us from a world where our identity and sense of purpose is defined by work, to a world where our social standing and sense of self is dictated by what we consume.
The creation of New Labour was in large part a reaction to this shift in emphasis from producers to consumers. The way we dress ourselves, our children and our homes, what holidays we take and what car we drive, what we eat and drink and where we do it are now just some of the many key symbols of modern self-expression. In particular, how we differentiate what we consume in relation to others is the means by which our ‘freedom’ is demonstrated and developed. Success in society is increasingly defined by an ability to make the right consumer choices and go on making them as we jostle for relative advantage with those around us in an impossible game of catch-up.
If society is increasingly defined by successful consumption then the poor are defined as failed consumers – those who have neither the resource nor, it is assumed, the wit to compete fairly and properly in a world dominated by consumption. The new poor are excluded from the consumption-based norms of society and therefore suffer the shame, guilt and envy of their failure. But unlike the poor of any previous era, the new poor face further indignities and humiliation.
First, the new poor share the same cultural space as their successful counterparts. They watch the same TV, read the same papers and are exposed to the same advertising billboards. They cannot escape their poverty and therefore their own sense of failure. Second, they are alone in their poverty. The poor of the past could share their misery within a communal class that was likewise denied the means to be ‘normal’. Today, though, there is no shared solidarity amongst the poor – only individualised misery.
Third, the new poor have no social purpose. In the past the poor acted as a reserve army of unemployed who through the welfare state could be recommodified when the market needed them to become employable again. Society therefore saw the value in investment in them.
Today’s poor have no such value and see investment in them diminishing – not least because the welfare state is anathema to a consumer society that elevates choice to a meta-value. Welfarism merely assigns goods to people but today value is only determined through the act of choosing.
In such a world the attitude of the ‘not poor’ to the ‘poor’ is much less determined by compassion and a sense of responsibility and much more by pity, fear and revulsion. The new poor are just a worry and nuisance in large part because one reaction to their exclusion is for them to cheat their way to social normality. Our prisons are therefore full of failed consumers – those who play by their own rules to join the game.
This is a grim assessment of modern inequality, one that requires a deep-rooted approach to any potential solution. The government has done much, through the minimum wage and the tax credit system, to redistribute income from rich to poor. But lasting solutions require not just more resources for the poor so that they too can consume. If successful consumption is always and only about relative advantage then, by definition, the poor will never be allowed to catch up. The long-term answer lies in questioning the basis of the consumer society as the only route to human fulfilment – and therefore means posing a more compelling alternative to the norms and values of our world.
Markets allow choice, encourage innovation and drive growth. But there is now a growing body of evidence to suggest that the consumption treadmill only buys temporary fulfilment through relative advantage. As soon as the neighbours catch up, the advantage is lost. Acting only as individuals we see no alternative but simply to repeat the process of trying to buy relative advantage, in so doing working harder and suffering a reduced quality of life.
The combined effect of the market on individual decisions is to encourage consumption but not increase the stock of human happiness. It is estimated that some three million Britons (who could afford to) have ‘downsized’ to rebalance income and quality of life. Adam Smith was wrong – the guiding hand of the market is failing us.
The logical conclusion of this post-material agenda is to redistribute wealth to where it makes most marginal difference, in other words to rebalance resources between the rich and poor. This could be achieved in part by the introduction of a progressive consumption tax.
Fundamentally, though, we need a reassessment of the ‘good life’: one that puts time, family and friends before the endless consumption of goods and paid-for experiences. The left must make the case that human fulfilment can only be collectively derived as citizens who can democratically influence the world in which they live and not through individualised and increasingly empty acts of consumption. The only answer to the problem of the new poor is an egalitarian citizenship that enshrines greater political, social and economic equality.