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Rethinking Poverty: What Makes a Good Society?
We live in an age of extreme inequality, when a wealthy minority of the global population lives in historical luxury even as middle-class people fear for the future and twenty percent of the world struggles with chronic poverty. Social policy has failed to find answers to this crisis, and we are beginning to see powerful calls for a new way of thinking about how to escape it. This book argues that we need to start by reframing the whole question, starting not with poverty as a problem to be solved, but with our vision of a good society as a goal to be achieved. That frees us up to consider bold, forward-looking social policies that can have a far-reaching impact. The proposals here are based on a research program carried out by the Webb Memorial Trust that included population surveys of more than twelve thousand people. The way forward, we see, is to increase people’s sense of agency in building the society they want.
184 pages, Paperback
Published September 30, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 13, 2017
Concise yet thorough canter through literature and thinking around the amorphous issue of poverty, complemented by research by the Webb Memorial Trust. It’s a very good attempt to better understand, contextualise and find a new way to address poverty given the failures of top down, technocratic approaches to date.
Having assessed the ‘state of the nation’ from different perspectives, Knight reassuringly highlights the historical and inherently pessimistic narrative that we are always at ‘the end of times’. He layers on the gloom, highlighting the failure of successive policy interventions and the impossibility of disentangling contributory factors, before teeing up an alternative way forward based on ‘security’ and transformative processes, drawing hope from initiatives such as the Living Wage campaign.
A section on participatory research and how young people view poverty in the present highlights how stuck we are in traditional ways of conceptualising and trying to find solutions, which misses the importance of power and relationships in enacting change.
Well referenced, this will certainly appeal to anyone interested in social science. I found the critique of why ‘solutions’ have failed to date more compelling that the way forward, but then I’m probably part of the problem!
With the current widespread feeling of the ‘end of times’ (perhaps with more substance than previously) and the Government’s latest failure to address ‘Social Mobility’, this book may be very well timed to inform a new wave of political thinking.
Having assessed the ‘state of the nation’ from different perspectives, Knight reassuringly highlights the historical and inherently pessimistic narrative that we are always at ‘the end of times’. He layers on the gloom, highlighting the failure of successive policy interventions and the impossibility of disentangling contributory factors, before teeing up an alternative way forward based on ‘security’ and transformative processes, drawing hope from initiatives such as the Living Wage campaign.
A section on participatory research and how young people view poverty in the present highlights how stuck we are in traditional ways of conceptualising and trying to find solutions, which misses the importance of power and relationships in enacting change.
Well referenced, this will certainly appeal to anyone interested in social science. I found the critique of why ‘solutions’ have failed to date more compelling that the way forward, but then I’m probably part of the problem!
With the current widespread feeling of the ‘end of times’ (perhaps with more substance than previously) and the Government’s latest failure to address ‘Social Mobility’, this book may be very well timed to inform a new wave of political thinking.
January 3, 2018
Rethinking poverty by Barry Knight is an excellent and accessible read that should be of interest to everyone. It is part of the Policy Press’s ‘shorts’; these are books providing the latest cutting-edge research findings. Anyone interested in the idea of co-design and co-production will find the approach to participatory research interesting and refreshing. There is also an interesting brief discussion about how the re-framing of stories can influence the way we think and feel about something. In other words how the way we tell each other stories can undermine our confidence in change.
Barry Knight provides a comprehensive overview of poverty, starting in the 19th century before moving on to the importance of thinking about what we want. He demolishes myths such as the poor are to blame and also explains why this approach does not help to shift people’s thinking. He suggests that we need to rephrase our focus and move from a negative to a positive story, one emphasising citizens’ strengths and hopes. A strength of the research was the engagement of citizens which went far beyond a box-ticking exercise. Knight calls for agency and control and the last chapter focuses on transformation, it is about taking the findings of the research forward collectively to develop answers for the future. Whilst not everyone migth agree with his conclusions, his urging that policies and structures have to be co-produced by policy-makers and those affected by policies should not be contentious.
Barry Knight provides a comprehensive overview of poverty, starting in the 19th century before moving on to the importance of thinking about what we want. He demolishes myths such as the poor are to blame and also explains why this approach does not help to shift people’s thinking. He suggests that we need to rephrase our focus and move from a negative to a positive story, one emphasising citizens’ strengths and hopes. A strength of the research was the engagement of citizens which went far beyond a box-ticking exercise. Knight calls for agency and control and the last chapter focuses on transformation, it is about taking the findings of the research forward collectively to develop answers for the future. Whilst not everyone migth agree with his conclusions, his urging that policies and structures have to be co-produced by policy-makers and those affected by policies should not be contentious.
August 31, 2022
Sells itself as a nonpartisan framework for how to think about poverty, but winds up leaning left in most of what is espouses. The best work in the book is the focus it takes on local communities. Ultimately, I found it fairly dry and uninformative in the way it presents its content. Very little was new here, but I had to read it for school.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews