Relative Poverty Re-examined: social science and socialism - Andrew Dunn

AndrewDunn’s ‘Relative Poverty Re-examined’ provides the most deeply researched andscathing critique of mainstream / left-wing academic writing on poverty everpublished. Dunninvestigates socialist Peter Townsend’s supposed invention of ‘relativepoverty’ amid the 1960s ‘rediscovery of poverty’, tracing the concept’s trueorigin to the nineteenth century writing of Wilhelm Schulz and Karl Marx. New analysesof data from the last century’s two biggest UK poverty research projects arepresented. Dunn asserts that a major project that grew out of ITV series‘Breadline Britain’ was wrong to conclude that poverty doubled from 1983 to2012 and demonstrates that it fell by half.