Abstract
What is poverty? How poverty relates to people’s wellbeing? The concepts of poverty and of wellbeing are highly intertwined; however, there is little research on how specific conceptions of poverty relate to people’s wellbeing. This chapter revises the prevailing traditions in conceptualizing and assessing people’s wellbeing and how they end up being implemented in poverty studies. The chapter argues in favor of a subjective wellbeing approach to understand and assess people’s wellbeing. It is not only to get people out of poverty; it is also to get them into a life-satisfying situation. Poverty studies would benefit from placing greater attention to the essential experiences of being well people do have as well as to their overall assessment of life. A better theory of wellbeing could emerge on the basis of this information; and this would reflect in social programs that do really impact on people’s wellbeing.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, about 2000 years ago in the famous Sermon on the Mount, known as The Beatitudes, it is said: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. The Beatitudes go further to talk about the meek and about those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. (The Bible, Matthew 5: 3–12)
- 2.
Rojas and Jiménez (2008) find that it is not only how much income a person has, but also social comparisons (how a person’s income compares to others) as well as historical comparisons (how a person’s current income compares to past income) do play an important role in people’s own classification as poor. The authors pose the following question: “Do you consider yourself poor?”, which does differ from Ravallion (2012) question because it points out to an assessment of people’s situation rather than to feelings.
- 3.
There is a difference between ordinal and cardinal utility; cardinal utility assumes that people’s utility measures their wellbeing. Ordinal utility is a device used to explain choice, however, it relies on this choice being made on the basis of people’s own interest; thus, wellbeing is implicit in this approach (Broome 1991).
- 4.
Regarding the role of a third person, Collard (2003: 2) states that “Bentham insisted that the measurement of well-being should be firmly based on the concerns and subjective valuations of those directly concerned. Those who wished to superimpose other judgements were dismissed as ‘ipsedixitists’”, Collard concludes his work with the following recommendation: “Beware of the ipsedixitists: don’t allow a few people (even important people) to dictate what is to be included or excluded.” (Collard 2003: 17)
- 5.
As expressed earlier, most economics textbooks use the term ‘utility’ rather than the term ‘wellbeing’.
- 6.
Conservative groups tend to rely more on private and personal initiatives to do good in society; U.S. President George H. Bush used the term ‘a thousand points of light’ in his inaugural address to refer to the many countrywide private initiatives that could do good in society. The term ‘compassionate conservatism’, used by George W. Bush during his presidential campaign, also reflects this view of relying on private initiatives to help people in need, rather than on big State-administered programs.
- 7.
- 8.
It is very likely for some type of question and for some type of scale to predominate. This is also common for many indicators; for example, when assessing the rate of economic growth economists tend to focus on the gross domestic product rather than on the gross national product.
- 9.
This survey was financed by Fundación ImaginaMexico, which is a think-and-do Mexican tank interested in promoting grass-roots and municipal-level actions to promote happiness in Mexico.
- 10.
There was a time where being in wellbeing deprivation was something that happened to people. It was associated to people suffering, being tired and having pain, and having a sense of failure and frustration in life. People were aware of it because wellbeing deprivation was taking place in the realm of people; and the role of the experts was to study it. However, it seems that nowadays poverty studies have become very detached from their original purpose. Now people have to wait for the experts to define the criteria and methodology to measure poverty in order to know whether they are classified as being in poverty or not.
- 11.
As a matter of fact, a well-known program sponsored by the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000/01 and called ‘voices of the poor’ did run a cross-country project of Consultations with the Poor. The program is highly regarded and deserves a lot of compliments due to its participatory methodology and its interest in going beyond and income perspective in order to study other important aspects in people’s lives (Brock 1999; Narayan et al 1999; World Bank 1999). However, the project took for granted a key aspect: it did not discuss the classification of people as poor, and the survey was applied to those already ‘classified as poor’. In consequence, the program should really be called ‘voices of those classified –by experts- as poor’.
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The author would like to express his gratitude to the Josef Popper Nährpflicht foundation for financial support to write this chapter.
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Rojas, M. (2015). Poverty and People’s Wellbeing. In: Glatzer, W., Camfield, L., Møller, V., Rojas, M. (eds) Global Handbook of Quality of Life. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9178-6_14
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