Stratification and Welfare

Abstract

The simplest forms of government intervention to tackle poverty are directed at avoiding hunger and disease. In the advanced industrial countries with which studies of social policy and administration are generally concerned, however, poverty has a special meaning. It is not the poverty of the undeveloped agricultural countries where the majority of the population is engaged in a constant struggle for survival, where malnutrition and disease are widespread, where medical and welfare services are grossly inadequate and where, in any case, economic development may claim a major share of national resources. It is rather a matter of distribution; of poverty which arises through inequality. If wealth were more evenly spread poverty could be eliminated. In the United States in 1969, for instance, 13 per cent of the total population were living below the adequacy level and it would have cost $9 billion to raise them out of poverty,¹ but since the last war the G.N.P. in the United States has increased on average by $16 billion annually (at 1966 prices) — a growth rate of roughly 2 per cent.