Most sociologists, some economists and a few politicians fret about the consequences on society of the increasing number of families caught in the poverty trap. The poverty trap is a spiralling mechanism which forces people to remain poor. 

The dismantling of the welfare state in many European countries has had mixed results. However, new economic realities are emerging that should get public policymakers thinking afresh on how to promote social mobility and bridge the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots in society. Poverty has always existed and will continue to exist. The challenge we face today is the underpinning of social values with practical strategies that give everyone a fair chance of moving up the social ladder.

Poverty affects different sectors of our society including the elderly, the disabled, single parents, the uneducated, and families with mental health problems. The worst victims of poverty are children who are brought up in distressed families that face constant threats from inadequate healthcare, poor education and substandard housing. 

Any one of these and the many other poverty trap triggers deprive people of the freedom to make healthy choices. They produce a lifetime of deprivation, struggle and hopelessness. Conservative politicians of the right and even of the left believe that reducing social benefits is the best way to address the growing problem of the working poor. The US Republican Senator Paul Ryan once said: “We do not want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives”.

Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman argues that empirical evidence suggests welfare-state programmes enhance social mobility, thanks to little things like children of the poor having adequate nutrition and medical care. He hits at Ryan’s interest in reducing benefits to the poor saying: “The whole poverty trapline is a falsehood wrapped in a fallacy: the alleged facts about incentive effects are mostly wrong, and in any case the entire premise that work effort equals social mobility is wrong”.

Politicians know that education is the key to social mobility. So when a free education system fails, a large proportion of young people by not equipping them with the skills they need to find adequately paid employment a structural failure in the strategy to address poverty is inevitable. Sadly, many efforts to help the poor are well-meaning but this is little more than a “hospice” approach. Our placing in the lowest ranks of student achievement tables in the last few decades is a wart that disfigures our commitment to fairness in our society. 

Poverty induced by housing costs is increasing despite efforts to subsidise lower income families. The Joseph Rowntree Foundations of the UK argues that low rents, such as social housing rents, make an important contribution to reducing the degree of ‘housing cost induced poverty’. Social housing should be targeted on people with low incomes as it is the most ‘pro-poor’ and redistributive major aspect to the entire welfare state.

Public policymakers have to strike the right balance when planning social housing availability. The Rowntree Foundation rightly comments that: “For any given set of low-paid job opportunities, housing stock and rents, there will be a trade-off between using housing benefits to prevent poverty, material deprivation and housing deprivation on the one hand and avoiding the ‘poverty trap’ on the other”.

There are no silver bullets to end a complex, multifaceted, and persistent problem of poverty. If we believe that as a nation we are committed to the principle that everyone should have a fair chance in life, we need to dismantle the poverty trap triggers. Our main challenges relate to the areas of education and housing. Failures in housing, health, and education policies aimed at supporting the poor call for a long-term commitment from politicians, business leaders, educators, and charities to understand the underlying causes of poverty and why it has been so difficult to resolve. 

Once we identify the real causes of poverty, we can start reforming our social assistance schemes. However, making conditions harsh for the unemployed poor and also the working poor will only perpetuate the problem of poverty especially in families with young children. 

Krugman rightly argues that when social assistance programmes are absent or inadequate, the poor find themselves in a trap they often cannot escape, not because they lack the incentive, but because they lack the resources. 

johncassarwhite@yahoo.com