In Poverty Trapped, John Penrose MP argues Britain has failed to abolish poverty because we’ve been looking at it the wrong way. Income inequality is an unhelpful lens that has led politicians to treat the symptoms rather than the causes. We need a new way of not only looking at poverty but also fixing it- it is fatalistic not to try to fix poverty. We’re better than we think- our mobility is better and our wealth more evenly spread than we think, and than many other countries too. But we still have a long way to go.
A better alternative is to improve opportunity for everyone, equipping them with the skills and attitudes to take the opportunities when they appear so you can have more control over your path in life. This is more fulfilling but also it works better and more effectively than equalising pay too.
The UK has benefitted from faster overall growth to increase living standards. That’s valuable but doesn’t fix the structural causes of poverty that reduce our social mobility and health inequalities (which share many of the same underlying causes as poverty). Poverty Trapped is a heavyweight attempt to explain why the left’s intellectual hegemony in this area of policy is a dead-end and needs to change.