There could be few scholars better placed than Peter Saunders to attempt the kind of synthesis that is this book's ambition and contribution. Long a resilient and bridge-building researcher, Saunders has always insisted on the importance of blending concepts and perspectives from different disciplines and intellectual traditions. He has also been a major force in moving poverty research beyond its tendency to fasten upon new approaches − poverty lines, compound disadvantage, social exclusion or deprivation − as if each somehow replaces the last. He has also grasped, to a greater extent than many other researchers, the importance of listening to the poor, and to those who work most closely with them. His work, securely grounded in Australian debates and complexities but of broad international significance, establishes that if we are to tackle poverty more effectively, we must comprehend it in ways that capture the experiences and insights of people living or working within its tangled threads.

A key factor in the book's accessibility is Saunders’ admirable clarity about his ambitions. ‘In order to understand the nature of social disadvantage in modern societies’, he writes, ‘it is necessary to explore the similarities and differences between poverty, deprivation and exclusion and identify the factors that connect them together in some circumstances, but not in others’ (p. 1). Most especially, Saunders argues, it is important to move beyond a definition of poverty based on low income − which often implies, of course, that increasing incomes will be a necessary and sufficient remedy to poverty − and to focus instead on deprivation and exclusion, which take us closer to understanding and tackling poverty as an unacceptable standard of living and opportunity. But he does not want simply to discard the focus on income, or on income redistribution. This is, accordingly, a clear, concrete and accessible book about complexity: the complexity of definition and study, and the complexity of what then needs to be done.

In the first chapter, Saunders adeptly summarises the key debates about methods, measurements and approaches, arriving at a focus on devising better indicators to identify the nature and extent and social disadvantage, which includes building those indicators in part based upon ‘the insights, knowledge and experiences of those living at the coalface of poverty’ (p. 9). There are two chapters on income poverty, which reflect upon Australia's differences and show how incorporating information about actually achieved living standards helps establish whether people with low incomes are indeed poor, reducing the number of poor households while providing ‘more compelling evidence that poverty exists’ (p. 65). After a chapter introducing the three projects − Left Out, Missing Out and Community Understanding of Poverty and Social Exclusion − that provide the bulk of the material for what follows, Saunders proceeds to an analysis of deprivation and then social exclusion, before summarising the consequences for both policy and research in a final chapter.

Researchers in countries other than Australia are likely to find particularly interesting the chapters on deprivation and social exclusion, which draw on projects in which Saunders and his collaborators developed a very direct engagement with people living on low incomes and workers in welfare agencies. Interviews with welfare service clients allowed the development of research instruments grounded in experience, while the clients were also asked to quantify their own problems using indicators derived from broader norms. Having developed a robust list of broadly agreed ‘essentials of life’ (p. 113), for instance, Saunders is able to measure deprivation and multiple deprivation in ways that bolster informed intuition − in Australia, for example, sole parents and the unemployed are worst off − with sophisticated yet accessible quantitative explanations. He even managed to carry this qualitative researcher through a regression analysis and probit estimates. This culminates in a discussion of how Australian advocates would benefit from utilising the concept of ‘consistent poverty’ (p. 171), combining deprivation and low income, as ‘a better basis on which to generate the evidence needed to convince policy-makers that poverty exists’ (p. 177). Saunders also develops a clear and coherent argument about the potential benefits of a stronger focus on social exclusion in Australia, whatever the misgivings about its sometimes clumsy political capture.

Of course, many researchers reading this book will be looking in on an Australian debate, but they will find much that is familiar and useful. The issue in poverty research, as ever, is how we change minds. That's partly a matter of contributing to the development of better social policy, but it is also, as Saunders recognises, a matter of making arguments that citizens find credible and that ‘those with the power to bring about change’ (p. 16) will find compelling. That will, in turn, mean accessible definitions and measurements, which will always involve judgements and will always be contestable. We are not there yet, perhaps especially in terms of understanding why so many citizens are prepared to believe palpable nonsense about poverty, but the material in this book does much to help. What might prove particularly important is the emphasis on how people who are not themselves poor understand poverty, deprivation and social exclusion, which raises key questions about how poverty's stories are shaped, proved and told. What Saunders has achieved in Down and Out is to link that ambition − in a particularly effective way − with the evaluation and refinement of the robust, sophisticated measurements that must always play a role in the tactics of argument and demonstration.