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"POVERTY" OR "INCLUSION"? There's been an interesting debate going on for the last week or so involving the very good recent report from the Center for American Progress on ideas to cut poverty in half. A group of policy people, some of them refugees from the established think tanks, who write at the web site inclusionist.org endorsed the proposals but criticized the report for framing the issue as "poverty" rather than taking "the opportunity to examine which of the powerful alternative frames -- like reducing inequality, rebuilding the middle class, and promoting social inclusion -- would have been the most useful in building public support and political will for the policies that we support, and which of these frames would have been least likely to be co-opted by conservatives."
In general, the "inclusionists" would argue that we should "stop talking about poverty," and instead put forward a broad vision of social inclusion that is both relative (as opposed to the fixed poverty line) and universal, in that it has benefits for and speaks to the aspirations of the middle-class as well as the very poor.
John Halpin from CAP had a response, which included some unforgettable lines: "Replacing a word with thousands of years of moral meaning with a hopelessly vague and confusing term grounded in sociological theory and 1970s French social activism is neither sound strategy nor good public communications."
In general, the "inclusionists" would argue that we should "stop talking about poverty," and instead put forward a broad vision of social inclusion that is both relative (as opposed to the fixed poverty line) and universal, in that it has benefits for and speaks to the aspirations of the middle-class as well as the very poor.
John Halpin from CAP had a response, which included some unforgettable lines: "Replacing a word with thousands of years of moral meaning with a hopelessly vague and confusing term grounded in sociological theory and 1970s French social activism is neither sound strategy nor good public communications."
