For most of human history, almost everyone believed that if you were poor, you deserved to be poor: Either you were lazy, or you weren't smart enough to succeed, or (the more common perspective) it was your fate or destiny to be poor because you were born into poverty, and therefore less worthy as a human being. In all of these cases, no one expected the lives of poor people to change. Wealthier people did find that helping the poor survive could be a good use of their resources at times, and some took on the task of helping the poor, either grudgingly or with great enthusiasm. Still, socioeconomics--using economic factors to explain how societies work--hadn't been invented yet. Poverty was seen as an unsolvable problem, and poor people were considered a burden on everyone else.
Charles Booth was an unlikely pioneer in the field of socioeconomics. A wealthy man, Booth decided to tackle the problem of poverty in his city by documenting it for the first time. He went from door to door throughout London, interviewing, studying, and even living with every class of person he could find. The thematic maps he created soon showed some surprising information about the demographics of London--that is, the characteristics of its different populations.
Charles Booth sent a team of researchers door to door throughout London, interviewing people about
their occupations, financial situations, and ways of life. Then he created a series of color‐coded maps
showing the income levels and social classes of every street in London. The yellow areas on Booth’s
maps showed wealthy areas while pink and red were the middle classes. Blue and black were used to
show the poorest areas. On Booth’s maps, areas of poverty appeared as just specks of black or dark blue
in the middle of an area of pink, red, or yellow, suggesting that poor people lived everywhere in London,
instead of all in one or two neighborhoods.
Before Charles Booth mapped poverty in London, poverty has been seen as very much a morality
problem. Booth showed that poverty was a much more complex problem with a large number of causes.
He used his data maps to convince people that poverty could to be addressed and that life in the city
overall could be improved if the solution took its causes into account instead of dismissing poverty as
the result of some people’s moral failings.
Booth’s maps helped persuade the British government to enact new housing laws to improve living
conditions for the poor and to introduce old age pensions for Londoners who were not able to save
money for retirement because they had barely survived when they could work.
Question
What was the impact of Booth's poverty maps in London?
