Suchergebnisse

Policies directed at alleviating poverty rest on a set of assumptions regarding the demographic composition of the poor & the psychological dispositions of poor individuals. Evidence from a representative sample of 5,165 low-income individuals who participated in the 1969-1978 Panel Study of Income Dynamics shows that poverty is widespread but not usually persistent, & that the characteristics of the persistently poor do not conform to the conventional wisdom. The economic status of the poor does not appear to have been caused by psychological dispositions. Intergenerational data from the same study show generally weak links between poverty or welfare status of parents & that of their children. Public policies for dealing with poverty can be properly devised without attempting to resocialize poor people & without undue concern that poverty programs will generate dependency among the majority of those they help. 1 Table. Modified HA

The article continues the examination of the slippery concept of poverty and in particular the precise definition of "relative deprivation". Townsend's attempts to bring up to date the measurement of poverty are subject to renewed critical analysis. Attempts to construct a deprivation index are regarded sceptically and the statistical measurement of poverty and of deprivation are shown to be unsatisfactory and unconvincing.

The projects of the social policy section of the Specal Collaborative Programme on "Status Passages and Risks in Life Course" deal with the boundaries between gainful employment and social security systems. They focus on precarious transitions in the individual life-course at the interface of state and market.This paper sets out the theoretical framework and presents some results of a pilot study and of a descriptive analysis of the random sampIe of case records of welfare claimants on which the project "welfare careers" draws.

The present government's policy for publicly funded science, which centres on selectivity and centralization, could damage Britain's capacity to innovate. The policy follows from a desire by government to control the scientific community and from the advice of some scientists and science policy experts. This paper details the contradictions in the government's thinking on industrial and scientific questions, and challenges the central, and usually unexamined, assumptions which are used to justify existing policy for science.