Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Indicators of material deprivation are increasingly used in both the academic and the political debate as alternatives or supplements to traditional indicators of poverty. Where there is an extensive literature on the implications of growing up in a (financially) poor household for future success, little is known about how material deprivation relates to long-run outcomes. This study uses longitudinal data from the 1970 British Cohort Study to assess the relationship between different domains of household deprivation and outcomes in adult life. We execute a range of different estimation methods to assess the nature of the relationship between both material and immaterial deprivation and future social progress. We find that deprivation relates to a very diverse set of outcome variables but the magnitude of these relationships are generally small, once we account for important background characteristics.  Deprivation has relatively strong ties to non-cognitive skills, mental health and life satisfaction, but only very modest (conditional) connections to educational attainment and income. Estimates are especially low for `traditional’ indicators of material deprivation that relate to household possessions and housing conditions. The results for the strictly material domains of deprivation are largely in line with previous literature that aims to identify causal links between family income and education, health or future income. The results of this study indicate that those findings are not due to inherent limitations in using family income as an indicator of disadvantage, but rather support the notion that the most relevant aspects of the family for future success are of a more immaterial nature.