INTRODUCTION

The poor... are like the shadows in a painting: they provide the necessary contrast.

Philippe Hecquet (1740), quoted in Roche (1987, p. 64)

Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.

Arthur Young (1771), quoted in Furniss (1920, p. 118)

May we not outgrow the belief that poverty is necessary?

Marshall (1890, p. 2)

Our dream is a world free of poverty.

(Motto of the World Bank since 1990).

It is widely accepted today that eliminating poverty is a legitimate goal of public action, for which governments (in both rich and poor countries) typically take some responsi­bility. The policy responses include both direct interventions, often put under the head­ing of “social policies,” and various economy-wide policies—overall policies for economic development that have bearing on the extent of poverty. (I will use the term “antipoverty policy” to embrace both sets of policies.) There are essentially three pre­mises to the idea of such policies:

• Premise 1: Poverty is a social bad.^[395]

• Premise 2: Poverty can be eliminated.

• Premise 3: Public policies can help do that.

This chapter tries to understand how these three premises came to be broadly accepted and what forms of public action emerged.

Both the differences and the similarities between today’s thinking and that of the past are of interest. There are some policy debates that live on and some common themes, such as the role of incentives. However, one is also struck by the differences. Indeed, widespread (though certainly not universal) acceptance of the three premises above appears to be relatively new. Before the late eighteenth century, the dominant school of economic thought saw poverty as a social good, essential for economic development. It may well have been granted that, other things being equal, a society with less poverty is to be preferred, but other things were not seen to be equal.

This chapter documents this transition in thinking about poverty and policy. Of course, the interrelationship between thinking and action is complex, and what emerges in the policy arena depends on many things, including technology, public awareness, and political economy. Nonetheless, there is a story to be told about how scholarly and popular thinking has evolved. This helps us understand prevailing views on the distributive role of the state and the specific policies adopted. The change in think­ing also teaches us that the progress in knowledge both reinforces and reflects progress in development.

A natural starting point is Fleischacker’s (2004) excellent Short History of Distributive Justice. Fleischacker defines distributive justice as a situation in which “property is distrib­uted throughout the society so that everyone is supplied with a certain level of material means.”^[396] He argues that in premodern thought, poverty relief was largely motivated by beneficence—a matter of the donor’s personal choice, not a right for poor people, and so quite distinct fromjustice, which emanates from the secular world oflaws and taxes. Most religions see voluntary efforts to help poor people as a virtue.^[397] However, such charitable relief is not distributive justice in Fleischacker’s eyes.

The chapter offers an overview of how philosophical and economic thinking on pov­erty and antipoverty policy has evolved and the types of policies that emerged. The dis­cussion will give less emphasis than Fleischacker on whether poor people were believed to have the legal right to assistance. States can and do ascribe legal rights, but sometimes with little more than symbolic value, given that the administrative capabilities for enforcement are weak, and especially so in poor countries. Instead, the focus here will be on whether (demonstrably or plausibly) public policy helped families permanently escape poverty or merely offered a transient (though potentially important) short-term palliative to protect people from negative shocks. In short, the acid test for a good anti­poverty policy will be whether it is aimed at both promotion and protection (applying a use­ful distinction made by Dreze and Sen, 1989). This idea of antipoverty policy turns out to be quite recent, with origins in the late nineteenth century, but only emerging with con­fidence in the late twentieth century.

The chapter begins with a simple characterization of personal wealth dynamics, which will help motivate the chapter’s interpretation of past thinking about this class of policies. The bulk of the chapter falls into two parts. The first, comprising Sections 22.3—22.6, traces out the history of thought from mercantilist views on the inevitability of poverty through two main stages of “poverty enlightenment,” out of which poverty came to be seen as a social bad (Premise 1). The second part focuses on policies, from economy-wide policies to direct interventions. Sections 22.7 and 22.8 turn to an important aspect of Premise 2, namely, the country’s overall development strategy and in particular whether poverty can be eliminated through economic growth and the role played by initial distribution. Section 22.9 focuses on present-day thinking on specific direct interventions (Premise 3). Section 22.10 concludes the chapter.

22.2.