Join Andrew Dunn chaired by Professor Eric Kaufmann for a seminar exploring how ideology shapes the way poverty is defined, researched and taught.
Hosted by the Centre for Heterodox Social Science and hosted by the Vinson Centre, the talk will examine competing understandings of poverty and the consequences of marginalising academic viewpoints.
Dunn will challenge the intellectual foundations of relative poverty measures, explore the relationship between social science and egalitarian activism, and consider the implications for teaching, research and public policy. He will conclude by asking how we can ensure that social scientific arguments are judged on their merits.
In recent years left-wing academics have become an even larger majority in UK social science, while discrimination against scholars with opposing views has increased. This presentation focuses on how Left-dominated sociology and social policy has handled one topic – the definition of poverty. It highlights the negative consequences for teaching, research and policy debates of marginalizing or excluding valid academic viewpoints.
The relative definition of poverty’s emergence in the 1960s provides an early example of social scientists’ heavy involvement in egalitarian activism and their downplaying of Western civilization’s achievements. The relative definition was widely accepted in social science despite it never being properly defended, and the highly questionable conclusion of the biggest UK poverty study of the last half century has gone unchallenged.
In 2025, Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch was able to confidently reject the conventional ‘60% of median income’ relative poverty measure, immediately after it was adopted by the Labour government, due to it sometimes classing people as entering poverty even though their living conditions improved. The presentation concludes by considering what can be done to help ensure that social scientific arguments are judged on merit.