In 1942, at the height of the Second World War, the British academic and former civil servant William Beveridge issued a report titled Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942). Already preparing for peace, Beveridge identified “Five Giant Evils” that needed to be confronted and defeated once the war was won. These five evils were “squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease.” Beveridge believed that all five had to be addressed through concerted government action, with improved housing (“squalor”), universal secondary education (“ignorance”), income transfers to the poor (“want”), full employment (“idleness”), and a national health service (“disease”).
Sales of the full Beveridge report broke 100,000 within a month. When a more accessible summary was produced, a further 600,000 copies were distributed. Beveridge, a soft-spoken academic, became a household name. His plan became the animating vision for postwar British society. Although a Liberal,1 Beveridge helped prepare the ground for the Labour Party’s victory in 1945 and the resulting creation of the National Health Service, universal school system, and social insurance schemes for the unemployed and elderly.
Beveridge’s report was not only about poverty in the narrow sense of lack of income, or “want,” but also about poverty and disadvantage as broader concepts. He understood, in other words, that disadvantage is multidimensional. This insight remains a useful one. There is a continuing, mostly facile debate over whether the U.S. won or lost the War on Poverty declared by President Lyndon B. Johnson more than five decades ago. But among its other problems, this argument is often restricted to a narrow, income-based conception of what it means to be poor. Of course poverty is about a lack of money. But it is not only about that. This is one reason many other labels are used: disadvantaged, vulnerable, at-risk, low-skilled, economically insecure, socially excluded, and so on. Poverty as a lived experience is often characterized not just by low income, but by ill health, insecurity, discomfort, isolation, and lack of agency.2 In practice, of course, the various dimensions of poverty often go together. A lack of paid work almost always means a low income, which can induce stress that leads to health problems, make accessing health care more difficult, and so on.
[For more of this paper, written by Richard Reeves, Edward Rodrigue, and Elizabeth Kneebone, go to http://www.brookings.edu/~/med..._FullPaper.pdf?la=en]
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