ABSTRACT
To study the rich and the sources of power in society is not the kind of activity which comes easily to social workers attempting to understand the human condition. Traditionally, they have been concerned with the poor and the consequences of poverty and physical handicap. They have thus tended to take—perhaps were compelled to take—a limited view of what constituted poverty. It was a view circumscribed by the immediate, the obvious and the material; a conception of need shaped by the urgencies of life daily confronting those they were seeking to help. In so far as they looked at relativities and inequalities in society—which they seldom did— they restricted their studies to the day-to-day differences in levels of expenditure on the more obvious or more blatant necessities of life. Daily subsistence was both the yardstick and the objective.
