Rowntree's Arguments With The Meaning Of Poverty

There are many theorist arguments with the meaning of poverty. By that, this essay focuses upon one study on poverty conducted by Seebohm Rowntree. Making reference on the key strengths and weaknesses. This will address Rowntree background knowledge on poverty and his study on York. In examining his study I will be making reference to primary and secondary poverty and what poverty means and how it is defined.

Definitions of poverty have conventionally been alienated into two subcategories, the two being absolute poverty or relative poverty. By examining these two subdivisions it will mark what poverty means and how scientists convey them as poverty. Both classifications are purely founded on the past experiences of poverty. In our era today
His study on poverty was a starting point due to Charles Booth’s method of investigating poverty, which enthused Rowntree who declared:
“Booth’s Life and Labour made a profound impression upon me . . . but I though to myself, ‘Well, one knows there is a great deal of poverty in the East End of London but I wonder whether there is in provincial cities?” (Holamn, 1987, p. 4). Therefore he conduced a study in York, in the year 1899 which he surveyed and published in Poverty: A Study of Town Life. Rowntree implemented the theory of ‘absolute poverty’, or what he called “merely physical efficiency’, (Rowntree, 2000, p. 133) in 1901, purely based on a minimum weekly income, which was believed to be needed to be able to survive. But what he focused on and started making an initial distinction between was primary and secondary poverty. Primary poverty focused on the families whose overall earnings were “insufficient to obtain the minimum necessaries” (Holman, 1987, p. 5). While Secondary poverty were “sufficient for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency were it not that some portion of it is absorbed by other expenditure, either wasteful or useful”. (Rowntree , 1901, p.