ABSTRACT
We have now to study the result of industrial and occupational factors on the standard of life of the population. The nature of the problems of describing the poverty and welfare of a population is now well known. That the term “economic welfare”— especially when associated with the word “poverty” — may to some people have an ethical content doubtfully valid and impossible to measure need not deter us, for institutionalist economists, like Hamilton,1 and their critics like Benham2 agree as to the need of “standards of appraisal” or “objective indicia” whereby progress and prosperity can be measured. The construction of arbitrary standards of poverty and “overcrowding” whereby the achievements of the economic process can be assessed, so far at least as the working-class population is concerned, is therefore an essential part of the investigation. We require some knowledge of the general shape of the curve of income distribution, and of the relation between income and needs in the many possible types of families. It is indeed the bewildering variety of family types which causes much of the labour of the investigation. As Professor Bowley has pointed out, even if all the possible variants of age, sex, and earning capacity are grouped into but nine classes, there are still over 350 categories of family type, each needing as many different amounts of income to sustain them in health and efficiency. The conventional family of man, wife, and three children still used even for official purposes3 is found in but 6 per cent of a representative sample of Southampton’s working-class
families. The difficulty of the work lies not so much in the lack of the volume of information, as its insufficiency at critical points. Failing analysis of the wealth of material in the possession of the public authorities dealing with taxes, labour regulation, and the eleemosynary social services, we have to rely upon information voluntarily given. The methods of obtaining it are well established, and only the adjustments necessary for their application to the peculiarities of local circumstance need any detailed description. Three principal sources of information were drawn upon: (i) an assessment of the income of the heads of all families with school children; (2) a representative, or random sample of the town’s households, limited to the lower ranges of incomes, i.e. the working-class families; and (3) a detailed examination of various special groups also in the lower range of income, in receipt of voluntary or public assistance, where the problem of insufficiency of income might arise. It is not easy to conduct these diverse enquiries so that each should yield its maximum in correcting, supplementing, and confirming the impressions given by the others. As far as the limitations of the various groups of data would allow, the definitions, rules, and procedure were made uniform, but there was a point beyond which the nature of the information would not permit of this being done. It was also desirable that all the branches of the investigation should take place simultaneously, in order to prevent any injury being done to the comparability of the data by any changes in basic conditions. All of them together, however, presented so formidable a task in collection and tabulation that the resources available were not equal to it. In the circumstances the risk of changing conditions of trade, employment and wages had to be run, a risk which unfortunately materialized. As it turned out, there was some troublesome work in placing some of the results on a comparative basis. Even so, the value of the three kinds of enquiries in their relation to one another was considerable. The first enabled us to define more clearly “working class,” or “poor streets,” and contributed to the ease of arrang-
ing and checking the random sample. The details of the special groups gave indications of certain difficulties in relation to family means for which provision had to be made in the random sample.
