Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Greg Duncan

Oration given on 16 July 1999

Chancellor, the Senate of the University have resolved that the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred on PROFESSOR GREG DUNCAN.

We are often told that in this country at any rate we live at a time of unprecedented affluence. Overall objectively, that is no doubt true, yet we are left with an uneasy feeling that all is not well. But while some countries - broadly speaking the industrialised West - grow ever richer, others are becoming poorer and poorer.

Even in the affluent countries the gap between the well-off in society and poor is widening. It may be that a poor person in Britain is noticeably better off in material terms than say a poor person in many an African state. Still, the poor Britain suffers from what social scientists describe as "relative deprivation."  In other words, the lack of an income, possessions and services necessary to lead a reasonably fulfilling life.

Human kind has made enormous advances in the century just ending, yet there is a palpable danger that poverty both within and between states may constitute the biggest threat to global stability in the new millennium.

But it may be objected, how can we know in quantitative terms, the scale and nature of such a threat? What is poverty? How can it be measured? What are its dimensions both relative and absolute? Are there remedies for it, and if so what are they? Is a child born into poverty condemned to spend her or his entire life in that condition? Are there preventative or curative measures that governments could take in order to remedy the blight of poverty? Now these are just a few, a very few, of the most obvious questions, the answers to which we need to know. There are many others.

Even in the richest country in the world, the United States of America, poverty and its attendant problems remain among the  most intractable issues confronting society and jeopardising political stability. John Steinbeck’s question posed in the hungry thirties, has still not been fully answered. “Must the hunger become anger” he asked, “and the anger fury before anything will be done?”

It was against this kind of background that the Panel Study of  Income Dynamics (PSID) came into being some thirty years ago in 1969, during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson who continued the programme of social and economic reform initiated by his predecessor President John F Kennedy. It was a decade of extreme political and social tension in America, and as part of  President Johnson’s War on Poverty, the US Bureau of the Census had commissioned a nation-wide assessment of the extent to which the War on Poverty was affecting people’s economic well-being. Out  of this sprang the PSID which was to track the economic circumstances of a nationally representative sample (or panel) of 5,000 low-income families over an extended period of time. In other words, this was not to be just a snap shot, as it were, of a group of people at a single moment in time. It was, rather, a scientifically selected sample of families who were to be re-questioned and re-assessed over a prolonged time-scale.

All of this somewhat lengthy pre-amble is by way of introducing today’s distinguished honorary graduand Professor Greg Duncan.

At the end of what was supposed to its fifth and final year the PSID project was joined by a young second year, economics graduate student at the University of Michigan, Greg Duncan. He was to go on to become the PSID’s principal investigator, professor of economics and Distinguished Research Scientist at Michigan’s Survey Research Centre. Subsequently, since 1995, Greg Duncan has been professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University, and deputy director of the Northwestern/University of Chicago, Joint Centre for Poverty Research.

In the course of his outstanding career, Professor Duncan has concentrated his research on questions of income distribution, child poverty and welfare dependence. Just to name but a few of the most recent publications of which he is author, co-author or team leader, gives an idea of the work that he has been doing over the years; Economic Deprivation and Early Childhood Development, The Consequences of Growing up Poor, Neighbourhood Resources and Child Development;  and Welfare Dynamics and Welfare Reform, a project that continues.

Part of the mission statement of the Joint Centre reads as follows:

“By social science research, the Joint Centre for Poverty Research seeks to influence the discussion and formation of policy (designed to advance our understanding of the causes and consequences of poverty) and the behaviour and beliefs of individuals and organisation. The longer term goal is to contribute to the reduction in poverty in the United States."

‘Mission’; ‘influence’, ‘goal’ -  the very language shows that Professor Duncan and his colleagues, while meticulous in their scholarship, nonetheless have an explicit commitment to exert influence on the policy makers who control the budget and the political machine. They, if you like, help to supply the decision makers with the empirical data and its interpretation with which to formulate policies, set priorities and take decisions.

This year the University of Essex celebrates the tenth anniversary of the setting up of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Research Centre on Micro-Social Change, established in 1989, to conduct the British Household Panel Study. Its main objective is to further understanding of social and economic change at the level of the individual and the household in Britain into the next century. In other words, its doing in the United Kingdom much the same kind of research that for the past thirty years the PSID has been doing in America.

The British Household Panel Study did not come to Essex merely by chance. Colleagues from a variety of disciplines were involved in its being selected against stiff competition from other universities  But, as its members are quick to acknowledge, Greg Duncan was generous in the extreme in sharing his unrivalled expertise with them. He provided advice on complex design issues,  together with warnings about the pitfalls involved in such studies. He was patient, he was sensible, he was helpful. But professionally, his outstanding quality is that he inspires those around him. Little wonder, then, that as well as the Essex-based British Study he has been called upon by similar project groups in Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Ireland and Canada as well by the European Union.

It is, then, with very great pleasure and no small amount of gratitude that the University seeks today to honour Professor Duncan. Above all, we recognise his outstanding work in eliciting and working to eradicate the causes of poverty and improving the life chances of children and young people.

Chancellor, I present to you Professor Greg John Duncan.