In this chapter, we explore three examples of how thinking about poverty and unemployment shapes poverty policy. The link forged by the Puritans between personal character and fortune has been particularly influential in shaping poverty policy. Recent and contemporary accounts of poverty often revert to the formula that character is all, circumstances nothing, while other, opposed, accounts formulate the issue in the same framework, simply reversing the causality favored by the Puritans and insisting that circumstance is all and character has nothing to do with the problem. This view, in its more recent formulations, has required that we find ways to measure poverty so that we can gauge the effectiveness of poverty initiatives, the second topic of the chapter. We begin with the problem of unemployment and suggest that the way we understand the causes of unemployment affects who we judge to be responsible and what measures for alleviating poverty are seen as appropriate. We end by considering the idea of individual responsibility and its implications for thinking about poverty policy.

Self-correcting and crisis prone markets

England's New Poor Law of 1834 responded to the concern that poor relief leads to withdrawal from the labor market and encourages idleness. We see the same concern in the last quarter of the twentieth century in the idea that welfare payments would encourage people to remain outside of the workforce.