'Poverty is regarded as a social problem' which was the outcome of a survey research on poverty in London. Who was the Scholar of this research ?

Question

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Correct — B, Charles Booth. Booth's survey of London, published as 'Life and Labour of the People in London', is the study the question describes. The first volume appeared in 1889 and the work grew to nine volumes between 1892 and 1897 and seventeen by 1902-03. Booth set out to investigate the East End expecting to disprove what he thought were exaggerated claims about destitution, and found instead that about 35 per cent of the population was living in abject poverty — a higher figure than the campaigners he doubted had alleged. That result is why the survey matters intellectually: it moved poverty out of the language of individual idleness and moral failure and into the language of social structure, showing it to be shaped by conditions such as employment, education, religion and administration. Booth is credited with initiating the systematic study of poverty in Britain, and his colour-coded street maps of London, grading every street by the condition of its inhabitants, are the origin of the poverty-map method still used today. Read alongside Seebohm Rowntree's York surveys from 1901, which produced the first quantified poverty line, Booth's work is the foundation of empirical poverty research.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Henry George, the American political economist, wrote 'Progress and Poverty' (1879) — a theoretical argument that poverty accompanies progress because of private appropriation of land rent, and the source of the single-tax movement. It is an argument about causes, not a survey of London households.  (c) Sir Henry Maine belongs to comparative jurisprudence, not poverty research. His 'Ancient Law' (1861) is remembered for the movement of progressive societies 'from status to contract' — a thesis about legal and social evolution.  (d) Kingsley Davis was a twentieth-century American demographer and sociologist, associated with the Davis–Moore thesis on social stratification and with popularising the term 'population explosion'. He is far too late, and in the wrong country, to be the author of a Victorian London survey.

Concept: The social-survey method is the idea that a social condition can be established by counting it. Before Booth, British debate about poverty ran on anecdote and moral assumption; Booth's contribution was to send investigators street by street, classify households, and publish the numbers. Once poverty could be measured, it could be argued about as a social problem with social causes and social remedies — which is the sentence the question quotes. This is the intellectual line that runs to Rowntree's poverty line in 1901, and eventually to every official poverty estimate any government publishes.

State PCS 2022 Q18 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q18 — Economy PYQ with Answer