Poverty as a Social Issue: Townsend and Murray

Defining Poverty

Poverty is not simply a matter of having less money than others. Sociologists distinguish between different definitions of poverty, and these definitional choices have significant consequences for how many people are counted as poor and what solutions are proposed. Two key distinctions are between absolute poverty and relative poverty. These definitions reflect competing sociological perspectives on what poverty actually means and how it should be measured.

Key Fact

Townsend (1979) argued that relative deprivation is the most meaningful measure of poverty because it accounts for social participation, not just physical survival. Murray (1984) focused on the “underclass” — a cultural explanation of poverty rooted in the New Right tradition. These two perspectives offer fundamentally different diagnoses and prescriptions.

Absolute and Relative Poverty

Absolute poverty refers to a condition in which an individual lacks the bare minimum needed to survive physically — adequate food, shelter and clothing. It is usually defined by a fixed threshold that does not change as society becomes wealthier. While absolute poverty in this extreme sense is rare in the contemporary UK due to the welfare state, it remains a serious issue globally and has been associated with homelessness, destitution and periods of welfare cuts in the UK context.

Relative poverty, by contrast, is defined in relation to the living standards prevailing in a given society at a particular time. A household living in relative poverty may have enough food to survive but lacks the resources to participate in social and cultural activities considered normal by the majority. Common UK thresholds measure relative poverty as income below 60% of median household income. This is the definition used by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in its annual reports on poverty in the UK, which consistently show that millions of households fall below this threshold. Relative poverty is sensitive to inequality — if society becomes wealthier overall but the gap between rich and poor widens, relative poverty can increase even if living standards improve for the poor in absolute terms.

Townsend: Relative Deprivation

Peter Townsend’s major study Poverty in the United Kingdom (1979) is one of the most influential sociological investigations of poverty. Townsend argued that previous measures of poverty were inadequate because they used arbitrary government thresholds or crude income comparisons that failed to capture the lived experience of deprivation.

Townsend’s preferred measure was relative deprivation. He devised a deprivation index that scored households on a wide range of variables — not just income but diet, fuel, clothing, housing conditions, health, education and social activities. Using this index on a sample of over 2,000 households and 6,000 individuals, Townsend concluded that over 22% of the UK population was living in poverty in 1968–69. This was far higher than the approximately 6% counted using the government’s own poverty standard. Townsend’s method captured the extent to which poverty excluded people from the social life of their community — being unable to afford a child’s birthday party or a meal with friends, for example, were counted as dimensions of deprivation alongside material lack.

Charles Murray, writing from a New Right perspective, offered a very different account of poverty. In Losing Ground (1984), Murray argued that the growth of welfare benefits in the United States had created a growing underclass. Government welfare policies had, in Murray’s view, undermined self-sufficiency by making it rational for individuals — especially single parents and young unemployed people — to depend on benefits rather than seek paid work.

Murray visited Britain in the late 1980s and argued that the UK was developing a similar underclass, characterised by rising rates of lone parenthood, rising crime, and an apparent unwillingness among some young people to seek employment. Murray identified what he called a dependency culture — a set of values and habits that normalised benefit receipt and undermined the traditional values of work, family and self-reliance.

Murray’s argument has attracted severe criticism. Critics point out that his evidence base was poor, and that research consistently shows most people on benefits hold conventional values and aspire to employment. Townsend’s structural approach suggests that poverty results from material deprivation and social exclusion — external conditions that shape behaviour — not from a cultural pathology of the poor themselves. Feminist critics note that Murray’s focus on lone-parent families (predominantly headed by women) implicitly blames women for poverty, ignoring the structural causes of female poverty including the gender pay gap and domestic responsibilities.

A common misconception is to treat “poverty” as a single concept. The spec requires students to distinguish between absolute and relative poverty precisely because they lead to very different conclusions about how serious poverty is and what should be done about it. Absolute poverty focuses on physical survival; relative poverty focuses on social participation. Townsend explicitly argued that relative deprivation is the more sociologically meaningful concept because poverty is always experienced within a social and cultural context, not in biological isolation. Students should be careful not to conflate the two in a 2-mark Define answer.

Government Responses, Globalisation and Perspectives

Governments have attempted to alleviate poverty through the welfare state — a comprehensive system of benefits and public services introduced in the UK after World War II. The welfare state represents a commitment to providing a safety net for those unable to support themselves. However, debates continue about the effectiveness of benefit provision, the extent to which it creates dependency (Murray’s New Right concern) versus protecting people from the worst effects of structural inequality (Townsend and Marxist perspectives).

Globalisation has affected poverty patterns in the UK by increasing labour market insecurity. The movement of manufacturing jobs to lower-wage economies has reduced the availability of stable manual employment. At the same time, globalisation has increased wealth at the top end, potentially widening the gap between the richest and poorest and increasing relative poverty even as absolute living standards improve for many. Marxists argue this reflects the fundamental dynamic of capitalism — the tendency to concentrate wealth in the hands of the bourgeoisie while insecurity grows among the proletariat.