Households and Poverty Dynamics

Abstract

The concepts of poverty and polarisation both address the problems experienced by individuals living in a society in which there are radically different standards of living; and in the complex definitional debates that accompany the discussion of these problems it is often easy to overlook the fact that it is individual people who are victims of deprivation and exclusion. Individual people experience poverty. However by and large individual people do not live all their lives as individuals — and even as individuals they do not remain in the same circumstances throughout their lives.