A STATISTICAL STUDY IN CAUSES OF POVERTY.
EVERY student of statistics dealing with poverty is more or less familiar with the weaknesses and limitations of "case- counting" as a method of determining the share borne by dif- ferent factors in causing human misery. This method, in its ordinary form, consists in simply assigning each case of distress to its most prominent cause and then counting the total number of cases assigned to each cause. It is evident to anyone that results so gained must be very erroneous, so long as only one element is selected from the large number of complex causes that go to make up any given case of distress.
A multitude of causes contribute to the final result in every individual case of poverty. For example : The husband, a not very competent workman, and occasional drinker, is thrown out of employment by the stopping of the factory where he had been working. A child falls sick owing to defective drainage, and this unusual expense causes him to allow his trades-union dues to elapse just before a period of general financial depres- sion. Discouraged and tired of "looking for work/' and his resources exhausted, he applies for charity. Is the "cause of distress" lack of employment, incompetency, intemperance, sick- ness, bad sanitation, trades unionism, or "general social condi- tions" beyond the control of the individual ? Manifestly it is any, all, or none of these, according to the individual bias of the compiler, and the particular time and circumstances under which the "case was investigated." Yet this example is typ- ical, and it is from just such cases that the majority of our sta- tistics on the causes of poverty are compiled, by the simple (?) process of determining the single dominant cause of distress in each case and then adding the results ; with this difference, that much more is supposed to be known about the above case than is known about a majority of the cases registered with charity
organization societies.
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