Sociological Research

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Measuring the Poverty Level

Valentina S. Sycheva

To cite this article: Valentina S. Sycheva (1997) Measuring the Poverty Level, Sociological
Research, 36:4, 45-59

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/SOR1061-0154360445

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 Sociological Research, vol. 36, no. 4, July-August 1997, pp. 45-59.
0 1997 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061-0154/1997 $9.50 + 0.00.

S. SYCHEVA
VALENTINA
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Measuring the Poverty Level

A History of the Issue

The history of the theoretical study and empirical measurement of

poverty goes back more than two hundred years. It seems to have
escaped no thinker of importance. This is understandable, since pov-
erty is considered the most social of all social problems, the one on
which almost the entire range of sociological concepts and categories
is focused. Thus it is quite obvious that poverty cannot be described
without such concepts as economic status and income, social inequal-
ity and stratification, the distribution of a nation’s wealth and its
population’s living standards, the culture and subculture of the under-
class, lifestyles and deprivation, vital needs and the consumer basket,
the socialization of the poor, and many others.
In foreign sociology poverty and social inequality are among the
most studied areas of scientific research. Our own sociologists began
actively to explore this topic in the nineties. Before then, they had been
forced to keep silent about the existence of poverty under socialism or
to replace it with another, more ideologically convenient concept;
namely, the “less well-off strata.” In either case, within a short period
of time some good empirical material has been accumulated in Russia,

English translation 0 1997 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. Translated from the Russian text
0 1996 by “Nauka” Publishers; the Russian Academy of Sciences; the Depart-
ment of Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology, and Law, Russian Academy of Sci-
ences; the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs; and the author.
“Izmerenie urovnia bednosti: istoriia voprosa,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia,
1996, no. 3 , pp. 14 1-49.
Valentina Sergeevna Sycheva is assistant director of the Institute of Sociology,
Russian Academy of Sciences.
45
 46 SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

and serious attempts have been made to develop a theoretical interpre-

tation of the problem, as evidenced in articles published in Sotsio-
logicheskie issledovaniia. (See, for example, S.N. Bykova and V.P.
Liubin, “Russian and Italian Poverty,” 1993, no. 2; B.N. Kazantsev,
“An ‘Unknown’ Statistic of the Working Class’s Living Standards,”
1993, no. 4; V.S. Sycheva, “The Impoverishment of Russia’s ‘Popular
Masses,’ ” 1994, no. 3; V.S. Sycheva, “Problems of Property Inequality
in Russia,” 1995, no. 5 ; and N.V. Chernina, “Poverty as a Social Phe-
nomenon in Russian Society,” 1994, no. 3 [translated in Sociological
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Research, vol. 34, no. 1 (January-February 1995), pp. 22-34,Ed.l.)

Nonetheless, our sociology has not yet produced an integral, sys-
tematic view of the problem of poverty. One reason for this is obvi-
ously that the study of the problem had been delayed for many years in
our country and the unexpected breakthrough clearly left our investiga-
tors unprepared. The abundance of theories, conceptions, and develop-
ments that has flooded in from the West at times produces disarray and
confusion, especially among those who have been teaching sociology
at universities and colleges. In this article the author attempts to syn-
thesize the accumulated information, define certain mileposts in the
study and measurement of poverty, clarify concepts and definitions,
and outline several original theories and conceptions.

The study of poverty in the nineteenth century

From the eighteenth to the first half of the twentieth century, two
principal approaches dominated the study of poverty abroad. The first
was social Darwinism; the second might best be called the egalitarian
approach. But let us proceed systematically.
Eighteenth-century thinkers considered poverty an inevitable conse-
quence of industrial development (for example, Adam Smith, Thomas
Malthus, and David Ricardo). Smith thought that wages would grow as
national wealth grew; remuneration for labor would be determined by
justice and economic expediency, since all these factors increase indus-
triousness and, accordingly, stimulate population growth. But population
growth is the base on which any nation flourishes and consequently
guarantees a decline in poverty [ 11.
In his Essay on the Principle ofPopulation, Thomas Malthus [1798]
attempted to explain the contradictions in social development in terms
of natural laws. He is the source of the famous law of progression, which
 JULY-AUGUST 1997 47

states: “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.

Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.” This discrepancy
also explains the emergence of a surplus population. But where there is
a surplus population and an insufficient supply of food, poverty inevi-
tably occurs. Accordingly, poverty is not an attribute of how a society
is constructed, but a species attribute, a universal property of the exis-
tence of the human species; people multiply too rapidly. True, the great
thinker noted that we have effective “helpers”: terrible epidemics, hun-
ger, and wars. These mow down the population and eliminate the
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surplus [2].
Malthus thought that poverty reflected an excessive increase in the
population, and that the poor were themselves to blame. Furthermore, a
system of state assistance encourages the proliferation of the poor
strata. The only good thing is that destitution and poverty regulate their
numbers by means of universal hunger and epidemics [3].
In the mid-nineteenth century Herbert Spencer thought that poverty
was a completely natural phenomenon in society. In his book Social
Statics (1850), he noted that poverty and inequality emerge and grow
as social production grows. But production cannot be stopped; conse-
quently it is impossible to eliminate poverty. Moreover, poverty actu-
ally is of a completely different dimension and order: it is not a social
phenomenon but a personal problem; that is, an individual choice and
an individual fate. People are imperfect; some deftly adapt to the ad-
versities of social life, while others are unable to do this [4].
The founder of English sociology did not welcome state interven-
tion in the natural development of society. For him aid to the poor
meant restricting freedom of activity. Moreover, what then is poverty
if not the redistribution of an already limited social pie? One outcome
of this approach was that the state, by raising taxes, shifted the burden
of concern for the poor onto other population strata. “Poverty at others’
expense” is not the best condition for society, and it is certainly not the
way to eliminate poverty. The more people who live on state welfare
benefits, the fewer who live by their own independent labor, and con-
sequently the fewer are the people who produce the goods the majority
need [4, p. 3571.
In Spencer’s methodological arguments we note his disbelief in the
possibility of determining any clear criteria of poverty. Extreme need
(destitution) is only the visible indicator of poverty, the tip of the
iceberg hidden in the ocean of the living standards of a particular
 48 SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

society. On the whole, Spencer assigned poverty a positive role,

regarding it as a force driving individual development. Later American
sociologists acknowledged that Spencer’s ideas had had a critical influ-
ence in the United States, but only in the stage of theoretical general-
izations, and certainly not in the development of empirical methods
[5]. In particular, F[ranklin] Giddings thought that the poor became
social parasites by their own choice [6]. His statements reflect a desire
not so much to resolve the problem as to define its place in society’s value
system. Giddings saw poverty as an ineradicable evil, and at a certain
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stage a social good, an inevitable accompaniment of social progress.

The French scholar [Pierre-]J[oseph] Proudhon also thought that
poverty was a social good. Real prospects for overcoming destitution
would open up only with an increase in the productivity of labor. He
identified two types of poverty: relative and absolute. The second ex-
emplifies the type of distributive relations in society. Proudhon de-
fended the principle of equal distribution of the social pie. Unequal
distribution leads directly to destitution. Relative poverty is the result
of an expansion of production and consumption [7]. For Proudhon
poverty was an inseparable feature of humanity (people’s needs, and
hence relative poverty, increase with increases in production). His con-
cept of “basic needs” included not only what people need to survive
but also those objects a particular society identified as essential to an
acceptable living standard.
If one were to generalize, it would appear that the social Darwinist
model of poverty is based on principles of the struggle for existence,
natural selection, the inevitability of social inequality, and the lack of
need for radical reforms, which purportedly would harm both society
and the poor themselves. All social phenomena, poverty included, were
seen through the prism of Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest.
The cult of enterprise and wealth was preached, and the poor were
considered personally responsible for the material difficulties that had
placed them at the bottom of society. (The fact that they were there,
supporters of social Darwinism might say, meant that they were quite
at home with their life of destitution.)
Representatives of another trend, the egalitarian one, preached univer-
sal equality as the principle of organization of social life (E. Reclus, Karl
Marx, and F. Engels). For them poverty was only a social evil, nothing
more, a consequence of a specific type of either distributive relations
(Reclus) or production relations and surplus value (Marx and Engels).
 JULY-AUGUST 1997 49

In his book Wealth and Indigence Reclus the sociologist distin-

guished between poverty and its extreme form, indigence. Those who
were able to meet only their basic needs he considered poor [8]. For
this he calculated the minimum resources necessary for maintaining
physical existence. Anyone who met this minimum he considered poor,
anyone who did not was relegated to the ranks of the indigent. The
condition for overcoming poverty was equal distribution of the prod-
ucts of the land and of industry among all strata of society.
Marxism understood poverty to mean the absence of the means of
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production among those who by their labor promoted the accumulation

of wealth by those who owned the means of production. The classics
of Marxism distinguished two types of poverty (for some reason called
immiseration): absolute and relative. Absolute immiseration reflects a
decrease in the proletariat’s living standard compared with the preced-
ing historical period. Relative immiseration occurs when the propor-
tion of national income received by the exploiting class grows at the
same time as the share received by the working class decreases. Marx
believed that the accumulation of capital would lead to an increase in
the size of the proletariat (pauperization), and that most of the popula-
tion would remain indigent [9]. Poverty is the form and the measure of
exploitation of the workers. It is determined by the development of the
forces of production and commodity-money relations, as well as by
the degree of parasitism of the ruling class.
Very abstract units are used here as criteria of poverty: ownership of
the means of production and the degree of exploitation of the workers.
The latter characterized not poverty itself, but only the essence of the
conflict between capitalists and workers. The poverty line was defined not
in terms of the average living standard of the majority of the population,
but in terms of the prospering minority’s standard of consumption.
Marxism exerted a major influence on how the problem of poverty
was conceived. Many Western sociologists linked poverty only to cap-
italist society. Marxism, by its very existence as a theory, stimulated
the development of other approaches in which considerable attention
was devoted not so much to the economic aspects of poverty as to the
mechanisms of its reproduction.
The French sociologist F[rederic] Le Play spent much time studying
the family. He calculated the poverty line on the basis of family bud-
gets and used this as an absolute criterion of poverty (this took into
account only what an individual needed for physical survival). The
 50 SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Englishmen C[harles] Booth and [Benjamin] S[eebohm] Rowntree (who

studied poverty in England in the late nineteenth century) are consid-
ered pioneers: they took as their point of departure in defining poverty
the individual’s ability to satisfy basic needs for food, clothing, and
housing. “By poor I understand those who have a regular weekly in-
come adequate for a family, and by very poor I mean those who have
less than this. The poor are those whose needs are not satisfied in
accordance with the normal living standards in a particular country”
[retranslated from the Russian.-Ed.] [ 101.
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Booth attempted to establish realistic criteria for the definition of

poverty: income level and the satisfaction of basic needs, as well as the
norms and standards necessary to maintain a certain level of work
capacity and health. “Booth’s studies for London and Rowntree’s stud-
ies for York demonstrated that 30 percent of the population lived their
whole lives in the grip of constant need” [ 111.
In his studies of the family Rowntree concluded that two types of
poverty existed: primary and secondary. Primary poverty characterizes
a family with insufficient means to meet basic needs even if those
means are optimally used. Secondary poverty applies to those families
whose basic needs are not satisfied owing to the irrational expenditure
of resources [ 121. He succeeded in doing something that no one before
him had ever done; namely, to distinguish between those who were
genuinely poor and those who were simply wasteful. From this flows
the division of responsibility for poverty into personal and social. In
analyzing his data he attempted to determine the actual number of the
needy (linking poverty with unemployment, the wage level, and housing
conditions) and criteria for calculating the poverty line. Rowntree defined
the poverty line on the basis of the family income necessary to
satisfy basic needs (food, housing, clothing). He took this level as
the absolute poverty line, which could be regulated only by altering
food prices independently of the level and distribution of personal
income [12].

The study of poverty in the twentieth century

The methods and principles developed by Booth and Rowntree had a

major influence on subsequent studies of poverty. Some sociologists
copied them outright, although they also attempted to introduce certain
modifications [13). Before 1971 Mackenzie, in particular, held this
 JULY-AUGUST 1997 51

view, although he was criticized by most economists [12, p. 81. For his
part, F.A. Hayek believed that poverty could not be eliminated by
force. The scale of poverty might be reduced, but for this to occur it
was necessary to raise the overall level of the population’s well-being.
But on the whole, poverty is necessary for the social good [14]. In
another book Hayek underscored the normalcy of poverty in human
society. Poverty must be accepted as an inescapable reality and one
must propagandize the idea of individuals’ personal responsibility for
their condition, including poverty. Hayek fought to limit state interven-
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tion, on the presumption that it was unfair to infringe anyone’s fiee-

dom to choose a preferred way of life or life style [ 151.
A new view of poverty emerged in the sixties. M[olly] Orshansky,
who worked for the U.S. Social Security Administration, established
quantitative parameters for housing, clothing, and other basic necessi-
ties required to satisfy vital needs. She used Engels’s coefficient deriv-
ing data from a budget survey. After determining the cost of a diet
necessary to maintain health, she multiplied it by an inverse fraction of
this coefficient, which measured the relative share of spending for food
in an average family’s income. That is how the United States defined
its relative poverty line until the eighties [ 12, p. 81.
Another approach appeared in the seventies. Individuals or families
were regarded as poor if their resources did not allow them to lead a
lifestyle considered respectable in a given society. Some sociologists
limited these resources to the acquisition of the goods necessary to
meet basic needs, while others saw the problem more broadly, assum-
ing that the resources at a person’s or a family’s disposal must enable
them to participate fully in the life of society. The second approach is
now called the concept of relative deprivation. Marshall and Townsend
played leading roles in developing it.
The English sociologist P[eter] Townsend provided the following
definition of relative poverty in his well-known book Poverty in the
United Kingdom (1979):

Individuals, families, and social groups of the population may be con-

sidered poor if they do not have the resources to participate in social
life, to maintain the types of diet and conditions of life, labor, and
leisure that are normal or at least widely accepted in the society in
which they live. Their resources are considerably smaller than those of
the average individual or average family, and as a result they are ex-
 52 SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

cluded from the normal lifestyle and from generally accepted models of
behavior, customs, and types of activity. [Retranslated from the Rus-
sian.-Ed.] [ 161

In England, government bodies regularly establish what they call

official poverty. The poverty line usually depends on this.
Townsend holds that 25 percent of the English people live in or
close to real poverty. Almost 50 percent are constantly in fear of it.
Only a few can hope to avoid the sad experience of poverty, and then
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only for a brief period in the course of their lives. He sees this as a
result of capitalism. Perhaps the author’s political biases dictate the
logic of his calculations, for they are in many respects based on a
subjective index of relative deprivation which he himself has con-
structed. Like all left-wingers he thinks that the national pie cannot
grow indefinitely. Hence to help the poor it must be redistributed
[17,p. 1291.
More and more often, sociologists are concluding that poverty is a
normal phenomenon in the social life of society. This is reflected in the
popularity of the concept of “structural poverty.” This signifies recog-
nizing poverty as a component part of the social system; that is, a
problem that cannot be resolved through economic progress alone. The
economist A[martya K.] Sen does not see the essence of poverty in the
quantity of goods. He adopts a concept of opportunities: whereas rela-
tive poverty is measured in coordinates of goods or properties, absolute
poverty is measured in coordinates of opportunities [ 181.
A way of defining poverty levels based on the opinions of ordinary
consumers, not on assessments by official experts, has recently been
proposed in Holland. The poverty line (the so-called Leiden definition
of the poverty line) is determined from respondents’ responses to the
question of the minimum income necessary to support an adequate life
style as a function of respondents’ present income [ 12, p. 171.
The experience of countries with developed economies can be ap-
plied to the problem of poverty. Measuring poverty involves developing a
methodology that one can use to determine who should be classified as
poor and how to calculate the level (threshold) of poverty [Table 13.
One may conclude from an analysis of foreign publications that criteria
of poverty are, on the whole, the same, but that specific choices
made for practical purposes depend largely on the average living
standard and cultural level a country has achieved. The main crite-
 JULY-AUGUST 1997 53

Table I

Methods of Measuring Poverty [17, p. 1291

Number of
As % of overall people (in
Categories population millions)

Those living below official poverty line 6 3.20

Those living between official poverty line and
40% above it (“on the edge of poverty”) 22 11.86
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Those with less than 50% of average per capita

income, composed of wages and benefits
(“within poverty”) 9 5.00
Those with between 50% and 79% of average
per capita income, composed solely of wages
and benefits yon the edge of poverty”) 30 16.10
Those with less than 50% of average per capita
income, when that income also includes stock
dividends, rents from home ownership, and
other earnings (“within poverty”) 23 12.56

rion of poverty is per capita income. The results depend on the size
and composition of families.
In the United States [Table 21, the official definition of poverty was
the one proposed by M. Orshansky, according to which the poverty
line (or minimum family income) was determined by multiplying the cost
of food in a typical household diet by three. A study conducted in 1955
was the source of that figure. The study showed that an average family
of three or more people spent about 35 percent of its income on food.
The subsistence minimum, or the poverty threshold, was projected over
the long term and indexed in accordance with changes in prices [ 191.
A sociological study was conducted in Holland in 1983 for the
purpose of establishing objective and subjective poverty lines. Income
level, with the minimum set by the respondents themselves, was the
subjective criterion. Objective criteria included the size and composi-
tion of the household and the number and age of the children. An
average geometrical level was calculated from the respondents’ an-
swers. A family with an income lower than the average geometrical
level was considered poor [2 11. In world practice, poverty is measured
in terms of the subsistence minimum. The poverty level in each coun-
try is determined by an index that represents the proportion of poor in
 54 SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Table 2
Differentiationof American Families by Income Level [20]
Income distribution among families, as Yo
groups
Year 1 2 3 4 5 Richest 5%
1950 4.5 12.0 17.4 23.4 42.7 17.3
1960 4.8 12.2 17.8 24.0 41.3 15.9
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1970 5.4 12.2 17.6 23.8 40.9 15.6

1980 5.1 11.6 17.5 24.3 41.6 15.3
1984 4.7 11.0 17.0 24.4 42.9 16.0

the population (aged fifteen or older). In the former socialist countries,

the consumer-basket method was most widely used.
In Hungary, social and subsistence minimums are used. The social
minimum is a modest level of consumption that, in addition to satisfy-
ing basic needs, enables a person to enjoy goods and services at a
particular level of economic, social, and cultural development.
The subsistence minimum is a level of consumption sufficient only
for the satisfaction of basic needs. In 1991 modifications were intro-
duced in the method used to calculate the subsistence minimum. The
consumer basket of foods is calculated not only in terms of quantities
of particular products, but also in terms of a necessary quantity of fats
and carbohydrates, which in turn depends on age-related characteris-
tics of people’s nutrition and on the structure of their nutrition at dif-
ferent times of the year.
Two methods are used in Bulgaria to calculate the subsistence mini-
mum: an absolute and a relative method. The relative estimate is based
on differentiating the poverty threshold as a percentage of a specific,
average social standard prevailing in society at large. As living stan-
dards rise, the property threshold also rises, and so do the expenditures
necessary to maintain the minimum socially acceptable standard [22].
The study of poverty in Russia
The first study of a working-class budget and everyday life in the
Soviet period was conducted in Petrograd on the initiative of S.G.
Strumilin in May-June 1918. This work continued under the direction
of A.M. Stopani and was extended to forty cities throughout the coun-
 JULY-AUGUST 1997 55

try [23]. The first attempt at a broad budget investigation was

complicated by the civil war, but it was nonetheless of major practical
significance. The results of this study provided information about
the working population’s material situation, available supplies, and
nutrition. It served as the basic material for new budget studies in
different areas of the country: in 1920 in Kharkov, Donbass, and
Petrograd; in 1921 in Tashkent; in 1922 in Petrograd, the Urals, and so
forth [24].
S.G. Strumilin developed a cost-of-living index based on the results
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of analyzing a worker’s budget and consumption and the current list of

prices. His methodological elaborations became the basis of the first
unionwide monthly budget study of white- and blue-collar workers
under the direction of G.S. Polliak. This study was conducted in Moscow
and Petrograd, as well as in fifteen industrial centers of the RSFSR and
large Ukrainian cities in December 1922 (after 1923 they were con-
ducted in November and hence were called the “November” studies).
They were repeated every year until 1928. Altogether, 1,190 workers’
families, 244 unmarried workers, and 297 white-collar employees were
surveyed. The general questions used in these studies are presented in
Polliak’s publications. N.A. Filippova, in her notes to the tables pub-
lished in the book The Budgets of Blue- and White-Collar Workers,
meticulously describes the methods of selecting the subjects and the
statistical treatment of all the numerical results [24, p. 91.
In his article entitled “On the Living Standard of the Working Class
in the USSR,” G.S. Polliak took a new approach to the question of
methods of measuring working-class living standards. In addition to
individual wages, he began to include the whole sum of monetary and
social services that the state added to workers’ budgets (such as educa-
tion, public health, cultural services and everyday amenities, etc.).
In 1918 the first attempts were made to calculate a subsistence
minimum in order to introduce a mandatory minimum wage. But no
unified methodology for the calculations had yet been created. Hence
the subsistence minimum was calculated as a physiological minimum,
and money spent for food was taken as the principal item of expendi-
tures. The subsistence minimum was calculated on the basis of either
data from budget investigations on actual consumption or physiologi-
cal norms. In practice calculations were based on the actual possibili-
ties for obtaining food supplies in a particular territory, which were
much lower than the physiological norms developed by physiologists.
 56 SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

The share of food outlays in total spending varied from 26 to 72

percent of the overall subsistence minimum [23, p. 271.
The minimum wage was brought into line with the subsistence min-
imum and varied significantly throughout the country. Hence subsis-
tence minimums also varied radically; they could not be compared or
used to establish wage rates. Thus, in 1921 the calculation of local
subsistence minimums was abandoned. Thereafter, the cost of a set of
budget items was used only to evaluate the cost-of-living index and
fluctuations in real wages.
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In the early thirties, calculations of a subsistence minimum were

wholly abandoned, since the process of building the foundations of
socialism was complete, as it was then proclaimed, and socialism had
purportedly eliminated all reasons for poverty to exist. Work resumed
in a number of research institutes only in the sixties, but even then the
results of the studies were kept strictly secret.
Data on differences in the material well-being of Soviet people, and
on differentiation in the population’s living standards, were accessible
only to a narrow circle of specialists and top leaders. “Those who
determined policy, its goals and its methods, proceeded from the thesis
that there was an unconditional unity and homogeneity of living condi-
tions in socialist society, so that it was easier to control people in an
administrative-command system. Given that view, exploring the real
contradictions of our existence and classifying people into those
who were well-off and super-rich, on the one hand, and those who
could barely make ends meet, on the other, were not encouraged”
~ 2 5P.
, 31.
In 195657 an official minimum wage was introduced into the econ-
omy: twenty-seven to thirty-five rubles per month. From then on, the
distribution of all workers and employees according to wage level was
calculated. But until 1988 these data were secret. In 1968 the official
minimum wage reached sixty rubles per month, and by 1981 it was
seventy rubles. According to L. Rzhanitsyna, “Thirty to thirty-five
years after the policy of reducing poverty began in 1956, the number of
people with wages below seventy rubles per month dropped almost to
zero, although this group previously had included most workers. The
proportion of those receiving eighty rubles per month or less (the mini-
mum introduced in the thirteenth five-year plan) dropped by twenty-six
times, including a twelvefold drop after the sixty-ruble minimum was
established in 1968 and a drop of 5.6 times after the seventy-ruble
 JULY-AUGUST 1997 57

Table 3

Distribution of White- and Blue-Collar Workers by Wage Level

(% of total) and Size of Differences [26]
Year
Group, by wage
in rubles 1946 1956 1968 1976 1981 1986

Below 80 86.9* 70.3 32.3 15.0 6.3 4.8

80-1 00 6.9 13.1 21.1 14.5 13.5 11.2
100-140 4.2 10.1 25.5 25.9 24.6 21.1
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140-200 2.0 3.9 14.5 27.5 36.2 29.5

200-300 0.7 1.9 4.4 12.7 17.9 22.7
300-400 0.3 0.4 1.1 2.4 4.2 7.4
Above 400 1.o 1.9 3.1
Decile coefficient (10
percent most highly
paid to 10 percent
lowest paid) 3.28 2.88 3.35 3.12 3.38

*Not including those working in place of students.

minimum was established in 1981.” But the proportion of highly paid

people in the economy increased even more rapidly (Table 3).
Most Soviet economists and politicians considered as poor those
families “whose incomes lagged substantially behind the average level
of material well-being achieved in the country,” while the concept of
underprivileged [maloobespechennost] was treated as a relative cate-
gory [27]. The criterion for identifying someone as underprivileged
(“poverty” was not used in Russian terminology, which substituted the
concept of “underprivileged”)was the absolute, aggregate, average per
capita income established by the state.
In L.S. Rzhanitsyna’s opinion, the underprivileged were “those mem-
bers of a society who live in accordance with its laws, but lack the
minimum essential standard of consumption that it recognizes” [25, p.
451. N.M. Rimashevskaia, in a book on the results of a famous study
conducted as part of the Taganrog-I1 project, wrote that when sociolo-
gists studied living standards, they focused on problems connected to
the existence of poorly paid and underprivileged population strata.
“Moreover, comprehensive studies in this area conducted over many
years have brought us to the conclusion that problems of the ‘under-
privileged and poorly paid’ do not exist in pure form, since under
 58 SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

conditions of distribution according to one’s work these population

categories will always exist.” She goes on to say that the “task of
reducing the number of poorly paid workers and underprivileged fam-
ilies in itself has no real socioeconomic content. It is only a conse-
quence of imperfect distributive relations (wages, pensions, etc.)”
[281.
Consequently, the main reasons for the existence of the underprivi-
leged in Russia included the relatively low wage levels, the presence of
dependents in the family, low pensions, low stipends, and inadequate
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children’s benefits. The criteria of poverty used today in Russia give

only a provisional description of the prevalence and structure of pov-
erty. They cannot serve as the main instrument of state social policy.
“The poverty level is defined on the basis of the subsistence minimum
(i.e., a certain volume of particular goods counted in physiological
units) ensuring the satisfaction of minimum standards of existence in a
particular country’’ [29].
According to data from studies conducted by the Institute of Socio-
economic Problems of the Population, Russian Academy of Sciences,
about 90 percent of families fell below the poverty line as a result of
the liberalization of prices in January 1992 [30, p. 61. The population’s
real income fell to one-third of the 1989 level.
“If 90 percent of the population is poor, in actual practice society
must altogether abandon social support of the truly poor families” [30,
p. 481. In the near future sociologists must either revise their old cri-
teria of poverty or make them more stringent and develop a new con-
ception of poverty.

Notes

1. A[dam] Smit[h], Issledovanie o prirode i prichinakh bogatsva narodov

(Moscow: Sotsekgiz, 1962), pp. 6&69,73-75.
2. Spravochnoe posobie po istorii nemarksistskoi zapadnoi sotsiologii (AN
SSSR, ISI; Moscow: Nauka, 1986), p. 192.
3. T.R. Mal’tus [Malthus], O w t zakona o naselenii (Moscow, 1895).
4. G. [Herbert] Spencer, Sotsial ’naia statika. Izlozhenie sotsial ’nykh zakonov
obuslavlivaiushchikh schast ’e chelovechestva (St. Petersburg, 1906).
5 . L.L. Bernard and J. Bernard, Origins of American Sociology (New York,
1943).
6. F.G. Giddings, Osnovaniia sotsiologii (Kiev-Kharkov, 1898), p. 152.
7. P.-J. Proudhon, Bednost’kakekonomicheskiiprintsip(Moscow, 1908), p. 10.
8. E. Rekliu [Reclus], Bogatstvo i nishcheta (Moscow, 1906), p. 33.
 JULY-AUGUST 1997 59

9. K. Marks [Man], and F. Engel‘s [Engels], Sochinenii, 2d ed., vol. 23, pp.
656-60.
10. Ch[arles] Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London (London-New
York, 1892), p. 33.
1 1. A. Bebel‘, Zhenshchina i sotsializm (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1959), p. 401.
12. A. Makouly [Alastair McAuley], “Opredelenie i izmerenie bednosti,”
Bednost‘: zgliad uchenykh nu problemu (MOSCOW, 1994), pp. 7-1 0.
13. J.T. Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty, 190&1980 (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 198I), pp. 6-9.
14. F.A. Hayek, Doroga k rabstvu (London, 1983), p. 226.
15. F.A. Hayek, Pagubnaia samonadeiannost oshibki sotsializma (Moscow:
I:
Downloaded by [Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi] at 05:15 16 April 2016

Novosti, 1992).
16. P. Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979), p. 3 1.
17. Handbook for Sociology Teachers, ed. R. Goom and P. McNeill (London:
Heinemann Education Books Ltd., 1982).
18. A.K. Sen, “Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement,” Economet-
rics, vol. 81 (March 1976),pp. 285-307.
19. V.M. Zherebin and N.M. Rimashevskaia, “Problemy bor’by s bednost‘iu v
razrabotkakh zarubezhnykh pravitel’stvennykh i mezhdunarodnykh organizatsii,”
Bednost‘: vzgliad uchenykh nu problemu (MOSCOW, 1994), pp. 25-26.
20. N.J. Smelser, Sociology (Englewood Cliffs, [NJ], 1988), p. 164.
21. L. Luchkina, “0bednosti i opredelenii prozhitochnogo minimuma,” Miro-
vaia ekonomika i mezhdunarodnykh. otnosheniia, 1993, no. 2, p. 135.
22. Statistiku, 1990, nos. 8-9, p. 4 14.
23. T. larygina, “Bednost’ v bogatoi Rossii,” Obshchestvennye nauki i so-
vrernennost’, 1994, no. 2, pp. 2535.
24. E.O. Kabo, “Byt,” Informatsionnyi biulleten ‘, no. 13: Byt, vremia, demo-
grafiia, pt. 1 (Moscow: AN SSS, IKSI, 1968), pp. 5-6.
25. L.S. Rzhanitsyna, Dokhody: woven ‘, differentsiatsiia, garantii (Moscow:
Profizdat, 1991).
26. Trud v SSSR (Moscow: Finansy i statistika, 1988), p. 146.
27. M. Mozhina, “Bednye. Gde prokhodit cherta?” Swbodnaia mysl’, 1992,
n o . 4 , ~ 11.
.
28. N.M. Rimashevskaia, “Struktumye izmeneniia v tendentsii rosta blago-
sostoianiia (itogi kompleksnogo issledovaniia),” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia,
1985, no. 4, p. 29.
29. L.A. Khakhulina and M. TuCek, “Raspredelenie dokhodov: bednye i bogatye
v postsotsialisticheskykh obshchestva (nekotorye resul’taty sravnitel’nogoanaliza),”
in Kuda idet Rossiia? Alternativy obshchestvennogo razvitiia, pt. 2 (Moscow,
Aspekt-Press, 1999, p. 167. [Translated in Sociological Research, vol. 35, no. I ,
pp. 2&32.-Ed.]
30. Bednost ‘: vzgliad uchenykh nu problemu (Moscow, 1994).