British social supports lifted a poor welfare child into the professoriate

Evidence

I grew up in (relative) poverty, and there were times when I really did go to school with holes in my shoes. My upbringing was, in the original sense of the word, quite austere. Household income was a government check, namely, a state retirement pension, plus occasional handouts from my manual-worker father. I am a welfare kid. I am also proud of that fact. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 17

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the personal-history strand of austerity critique — contrasts with empirical austerity chapters in this book and with Mattei’s institutional genealogy.