Policy, Politics and Poverty in South Africa follows through from a United Nations Research Institute for Social Development commissioned report but also from the authors' previous book Class, Race and Inequality in South Africa, although it is far more than a sequel. It deserves to be consulted by anyone interested in issues pertaining to inequality and poverty in South Africa due to the impressive range of material consulted and commented upon and to the insights and fine observations that dot the book. The second chapter exposes not only the literature on these issues but also the statistical analyses which social scientists usually take as read and repeat uncritically. Estimates of poverty in South Africa range unhelpfully from 70% to under 10%. The higher indicators probably reflect common sense understandings of poverty in rich countries; the lowest, such as the US dollar a day marker, really focus on the breadline. So many people cluster around the latter kind of poverty line that the international data can be made to show what are in reality very limited changes as indicating big shifts in the proportion of the poor. This kind of tweaking is ideal for Western aid agencies (or the South African government) eager to show what a difference their inconsequential interventions have made.

What Seekings and Nattrass repeatedly insist is that the big causes of massive inequality and the extent of poverty in South Africa are the very large scale of unemployment, a statistical outlier compared with almost all medium level developed countries, and the failure of the ANC government to find dynamic growth policies that would lift large numbers of poor people substantially. Both of these issues are discussed extensively.

A further line of argument challenges the insistence of most literature on the subject, dominated by critics on the Left, that the South African government is neo-liberal. They concede the importance of some neo-liberal aspects of policy, for instance the disastrous removal of tariff barriers far too quickly after 1994. However considering the social grants, which go out to almost 1/3 of the entire population and have steadily expanded, the fiscal system, trade union legislation or even the ambiguous attitude to privatisation, there are key policy elements which involve catering to the mass of voters and these go right against neo-liberal philosophy.

This ambitious book is too brief really to open up what Seekings and Nattrass call the ‘black box’ of the state. They are themselves somewhat perplexed as to what explains the competence and capacity of the state in some areas and its lack of capability in others. A hypothesis might be that policies are mixed, fundamentally incoherent and often at odds, both within the state and within the ruling party's spectrum of opinion, and this of course goes very well with the chapter on South Africa's continued lack of a committed growth path outside the realm of rhetoric. It goes as well with the often tense relation between white South African capitalists and the government which is far from the embedded Evans model of a developmental state, to which this book pays some attention. As Seekings and Nattrass say, it is a kind of social democracy without social democrats and without anything like the full employment needed to secure a social democracy.

The least satisfying argument in the book is one that derives from drawing a sharp distinction between the poorest fifth of the population, few of whom have formally constituted work and the next group up. There is an assumption that the two are sharply differentiated and a further argument, one that has been repeatedly advocated by Nicoli Nattrass for many years, that South Africa needs to embark on a low-wage (given the imperative to export), high-employment growth path and in so doing, effectively smash union power. This argument is politically naïve in that it chooses to ignore how critical COSATU, the trade union federation, was in creating the conditions which allowed the ANC to come to power and stay there. While this approach sits squarely on the classic approach to development articulated a half-century ago by W. Arthur Lewis, it seems very unlikely that a previously industrialised country can return to a cheap labour route, associated in South Africa with the hated pre-1990 regime. The state offers no plausible development itinerary which might make such sacrifices worthwhile in the short term for the union movement.

Sociologically, this line of argument also does not consider that the very poor in South Africa tend, if they can, to cluster around those with jobs or failing that, social grants. Some employed working class individuals may want to kick the ladder away of would-be dependents but the pressures not to do so are still very strong. This has a very strong gendered dimension which needs to be explored. The striking miners at Marikana usually were trying to support more than one household, back where they grew up and married and no jobs exist, and simultaneously locally where they attract unemployed women. Finding capitalists eager to increase the assembly line or mining complement massively through being able to offer far lower wages would also be difficult.

There are perhaps also a few omissions to mention. Gender and the situation of women in the economy need far more attention generally for a broad analysis. The increasingly sharp differences between regions also do. The authors almost entirely see South Africa as a study in black and white. Coloureds, now as numerous as whites, are hardly mentioned and Indians not at all. Indians are fascinating because, while exhibiting the same increase in intra-group inequality like the other traditional three ‘racial’ categories, they are statistically the biggest post-apartheid success story, starting to pull up to white levels of well-being by some statistical measures. Asking how and why was the essence of a little book I wrote which stopped at 1994 and it is an important question to keep asking.