ABSTRACT
Urban poverty and health inequalities are primarily the product of dysfunctional intergroup relations where some groups take too much and leave other groups with not enough. Elite greed and increased poverty have been linked since antiquity. The failure of societies to respond to growing inequality by regulating the parasitic behaviour of elites increases poverty. The cause of poverty is often attributed to the immoral behaviour of lower socio-economic status groups. This chapter considers the rise of charity responses from the 1700s, and subsequent efforts to institutionalize more egalitarian responses. It then turns to the development of welfare states, and the more recent retrenchment of welfare in favour of privatized service provisions. The chapter discusses the current resurrection of 'penal welfare' as a reflection of old fashioned classist thinking and punitive approaches to poverty from the early 1800s.
