Talk:Speenhamland system

I don't see how the politically motivated reference to the closing of Speen post office has any bearing on the historical facts of the Speenhamland system of poor relief. Perhaps this paragraph should be removed?

Anachronistic
"this led to an unchanged effective market wage instead of a subsidy to workers." I've removed this sentence, because it presumes a functioning, ideal, labour market. This is rarely true, and is certainly false for the period amd place in question. JackyR 17:57, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Page name
I learned of this (in GCSE History) as the Speenhamland system. Could anyone confirm if that is the usual name for it, and if so move the page? I think Speenhamland would be better as a disambiguation page, with links to here and to Speenhamland, Berkshire, which is, after all, the original meaning of the term. -- Blisco 10:27, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

I've added a disambiguation link at the top of this page. I felt this article was much more substantial when compared to the other one. Also, I was struggling to think what to name this one. Speenhamland (welfare model)? So I think that resolves the matter. Greggykins 10:44, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


 * As I said above, "Speenhamland system" is the name my school textbooks used. I don't know if that's the name most used in academic sources, but it seems the most obvious title. The disambiguation link is a good idea for the current setup anyway. --Blisco 16:59, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Speenhamland and The Great Transformation
There may be value in linking this article to the treatment of Speenhamland in Polanyi's The Great Transformation, chapter 7 "Speenhamland, 1795". For Polanyi Speenhamland was largely responsible for the debasement of the rural poor in the transition between paternalistic protectionism and the rise of the  market economy: "During the most active part of the Industrial Revolution, from 1795 to 1834, the creating of a labor market in England was prevented through the Speenhamland Law". --Henri (talk) 17:32, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
 * And is representative of those historians I have read; the natural tendency of the Speenhamland system is to reduce wages to zero. Reading Polanyi or more recent sources to explain this at greater length would be good. But this unsourced sentence is not useful.
 *  Speenhamland has been seen by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation'' to aggravate the underlying causes of poverty in any particular parish,{elucidate|date=August 2013} but more recent research has shown that it helped prevent chronic poverty and malnutrition, thus avoiding declining productivity in the workforce {Citation needed|date=March 2013}.
 * A year of unsourced contentiousness is enough. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:30, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

POV Criticism section
The opinions of a single writer are stated as neutral facts in the criticism section of this article. The very fact that he is writing for a publication called Jacobin should raise suspicions that these statements may be partisan (particularly as they are not backed by any additional sources).

A simple fix would be to prefix every statement with "Rutger Bregman argues ...", instead of stating Rutger Bregman's opinions as objective fact.

31.124.167.135 (talk) 00:56, 7 February 2021 (UTC)