Relative Poverty Re-examined: social science and socialism

Andrew Dunn’s ‘Relative Poverty Re-examined’ provides the most deeply researched and scathing critique of mainstream / left-wing academic writing on poverty ever published. 

Dunn investigates socialist Peter Townsend’s supposed invention of ‘relative poverty’ amid the 1960s ‘rediscovery of poverty’, tracing the concept’s true origin to the nineteenth century writing of Wilhelm Schulz and Karl Marx. New analyses of data from the last century’s two biggest UK poverty research projects are presented. Dunn asserts that a major project that grew out of ITV series ‘Breadline Britain’ was wrong to conclude that poverty doubled from 1983 to 2012 and demonstrates that it fell by half.