More Lessons from the UK—A Note to CAP
The recent reply from John Halpin at the Center for American Progress reveals that (as we feared) CAP leaders may have a fundamental misunderstanding of the UK goal to end child poverty. Halpin says effectively: if it’s good enough for the UK it should be good enough for us.
Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown have committed the United Kingdom to a goal of ending child poverty by 2020 and halving it by 2010. They recognize how important it is to have a quantifiable end point in order to assess progress. They also talk about the need to address social exclusion. Since the United Kingdom finds no compelling reason to choose one approach over the other, why should American progressives?
There are a number of problems with this simplistic conclusion. I’ll review two of them.
First, poverty in the UK means something different than it does here and accordingly is measured using more than one formula—both absolute and relative measures of income, and also by a material deprivation measure. The deprivation measure was added to ensure that families do not fall too far behind the rest in meeting material needs, such as heating their home, replacing or repairing electrical goods and appliances, like a refrigerator, and paying for children’s school trips. These measures are intended to and do support the official national plan for social inclusion.
The UK measure is nothing like the measure in the US. In the US we do not measure whether people are keeping up with the rest so as to be able to participate fully in our democracy and society. Unfortunately, we use a measure of deprivation, asking how many have so little income they cannot afford to buy enough food (based on household budgets as they existed in the 1950s!). Putting a set of policy proposals that go much further than alleviating hunger under the poverty umbrella doesn't make sense here the way it does in the UK, becuase the word itself signifies something much narrower in our country.
An editorial in the Guardian—a respected national newspaper in the UK—about the recent increase in poverty rates there illustrates and defends the choice of a relative poverty measure. Reviewing the commentary, it is easy to see that the UK concept of poverty is fundamentally different from that in the US. The target is in fact misnamed based on the US understanding of poverty, and could easily be called an inequality or inclusion target. Noting the difficulty of meeting a moving target defined by relative income, the editors defend the target on the basis that “all the research shows that it is how one’s income compares to the average that drive’s ones health, happiness, and opportunity.”
Halpin is right when he notes the sentiments of the task force members; statements from the task force members suggest at least some of them really might want to use a measure of social inclusion, not a measure of low-income causing deprivation and hunger.
The UK measures also reflect a different public understanding about the meaning of poverty as well.
And this leads to Halpin’s other misunderstanding—we object to the use of the “reduce poverty” goal largely because it won’t work in the US. The dominant understanding of the causes of poverty (individual behavior and moral lapses that cannot be addressed by government policy) get in the way of public support for the very list of policy proposals published by the CAP Task Force.
Of course progressives (including me) support The List of proposals—there almost no need to publish it.
What we needed from a leading progressive think tank was a thoughtful assessment of how to build public support for The List of policy proposals. That’s what is missing.
I don’t know whether “social inclusion” is exactly the right public message. (I’ve been struggling with this question since Katrina.) But it is the right idea and framework for the policy goals we all support.
What a loss that the CAP task force didn’t spend the last year dedicating its resources to finding the best way to build public support for The List.
Full disclosure: I was the first Director of the CAP Poverty Task Force for about a month. I quit the job because it became quite clear to me that the Task Force would spend a year on The List, instead of focusing on the research to develop the right goal.