Nationalising the anti-poverty agenda

摘要

The theme of this article is that research into poverty has to be multi-disciplinary and, perhaps more controversially, that the dominant discipline should be political science. At present, to the extent that poverty, research is multi-disciplinary, the dominant discipline is economics. We are looking at a situation in which a small (but technically sophisticated) economics tail is trying to wag a very large political dog. We need to arrive at a position from which we understand much better how the politics of national anti-poverty strategies works, so that the economists of poverty can play the role that Keynes once envisioned for them, similar to that of humble but competent dentists.