Economic Welfare and Family Responsibility

Abstract

STATISTICAL inquiry into the circumstances of working class households has resulted in numerical answers to certain important questions; the answers are useful in checking current opinions as to the results of the industrial system on people's lives, but there are other questions of almost equal importance which are left in doubt. In days when some wage adjustments are being made by the aid of index numbers of retail prices and when endowment is freely debated, it becomes necessary to attempt a more thorough exploration of what may be called family The following pages amplify information which has appeared elsewhere and stress certain neglected features of economics. Poverty has been regarded hitherto as an attribute which will be found in a proportion of families: the basis of the Poverty Line calculation is noted as conventional rather than absolute and the work of classifying a sample population is fairly simple when such a convention has been set up. This view is the result of the urgency of questions first raised as to the extent of poverty, and while sufficient for that purpose, it lacks balance as a complete description of the sample examined. In fact, poverty is a short range at the bottom of a scale of economic well being, and in a complete view, should no more be used alone, than its opposite, the range which includes all people living above some arbitrary standard. Family welfare should indeed be understood as a variable which can be traced over the whole population or over important sub-classes of the population. An attempt is made to bring this conception to the front in later sections of this paper; the poverty line being taken as datum level, the scale of economic welfare is extended upwards from it. An effect of this method is that the scale can claim no higher degree of accuracy