ABSTRACT
From Charles Booth to Peter Townsend, some of Britain's ablest social scientists have devoted the best years of their lives to studying poverty and policies for the poor. The academic quality of their work may explain why their ideas take so long to make any impact on the thinking of ordinary people, and fail to generate any broadly based movement to eliminate poverty. This chapter explains the theoretical distinction between procrustean and Samaritan objectives. It argues that the first, securing equality in provision, must conflict with a third, securing whatever quality of provision best satisfies each individual consumer. This was because, in order to achieve the desired uniformity, the procrustean is bound to favour monopoly. The chapter is concerned with confusions between procrustean and Samaritan objectives among those who constitute what calls itself, and is called, the Poverty Lobby.
