Subjective Poverty As Perceived Lasting Social Insecurity: Lessons From a French Survey on Poverty, Inequality and the Welfare State (2015–2018)

Abstract

Literature has long been attentive to the study of subjective happiness or well-being. Key questions developed in the late 1970’s have recently been framed as indicators of subjective economic stress or used to build “consensual poverty lines”. Yet, these notions differ from an authentic – i.e. direct – measure of subjective poverty. We use 2015-2018 French data to determine the share of the population who considers itself as poor and study its social composition. Our results demonstrate that class, family composition and income instability matter as determinants of subjective poverty. The key feature of the group of those who consider themselves as poor is a degraded attitude towards their own future. Finally, we propose a sociological understanding of our subjective poverty indicator