A SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE MEASUREMENT OF POVERTY: A REPLY TO PROFESSOR PETER TOWNSEND

I AM grateful to Professor Peter Townsend for writing such a forceful rejoinder to my paper, "Poor, Relatively Speaking". He has confined his attention mainly to the relationship between my paper and his own work, and from his presentation, the reader might get the impression that my paper was primarily devoted to taking "issue with part of my [Townsend's] work on poverty" (p. 659). In fact, that paper was mostly concerned with other-more general-questions about the concept of poverty, though it did inter alia refer to Townsend's work, along with the works of several other contributors to the literature on poverty. I am very happy to respond to Townsend's points, but I believe it is necessary to state first the thrust of my paper, so that Townsend's specific comments can be assessed in that general perspective. Peter Townsend clearly is a truly "complete" sociologist. Not only does he examine my reasoning, which he finds "very confused" and "theoretically naive", he also provides a sociological explanation of my taking on a task in which I have evidently failed so badly. He points out that my "expertise is rooted in third world economies, especially that of India" (p. 663), and while I have, it appears, tried "gradually" to extend my work "to include comparisons with highly industrialized societies", I have been "stung by different theoretical approaches developed in other work published at about the same time" (p. 663). Thus it is that I have had to enter "the fray more openly"-the hard world of "theoretical approaches", and seem to have produced all this "very confused stuff". Townsend combines his explanation of my predicament, related to my third-worldly roots, with an offer of assistance, and I must acknowledge that there is something of the kindness of the U.K. Immigrants Advisory Service in his generous offer to