How would you define child poverty?

POVERTY in Britain. When parents and children cant afford to have 3 meals aday;or go properly clothed to school. I dont think ha;f the average wage is a bad rough guide

Arguing that income isn't the best measure of poverty is surreal.

It's like saying that riches aren't a good measure of wealth or that illness isn't a good way of measuring health.

By all means, we should measure drug dependency, long-term unemployment and family breakdown. But those aren't measures of poverty and don't always correlate with it. They're measures of drug dependency, long-term unemployment and family breakdown!

It's hard to avoid the conclusion this attempt to redefine poverty is intended to mask falling incomes and rising inequality.

MrPants do you mean we want our incomes to increase above 100% of the median income (which is what, I think, the article refers to) or 100% of our current income level (i.e. not fall)?

MammaBrussels It is statistically possible to remove everyone from relative poverty see point 2 of this list

The article reads, "it is still mathematically possible for every household to be moved from below 60 per cent of the median to above without the median moving... It is only when incomes increase above 100 per cent that the median shifts."

But what we all want is for our incomes to increase above 100%. This is what growth in the economy is. If we want our incomes to stay at 100% or even fall back, we need to engineer either economic stagnation or a recession.

Bullshit to that, some long term unemployed are better off then the working.

I do think if a figure is put on it then it should be one after housing so instead of it being £12,000 per year then it should be (as an example) £7,500 after housing costs for an appropriate sized home.

Debt appears to be a real confounding figure in this issue as in other 'are benefits enough' debates. What about families where the income should be enough but the family is still skint and doing without essentials because of debts?

Good points mammabrussels

futzing about with complaints about "what we really meeeeeean by poverty" is just a way of wriggling out of taking responsibility for doing something about it.

I mean there will be the odd anomaly, probably, but who cares? the nature of statistics is that they are usually flawed attempts to access big picture truths out of aggregates of facts and figures. Complaining about the fuzzy edges doesn't mean anything really, except an unwillingness to take responsibility.

It is statistically possible to remove everyone from relative poverty see point 2 of this list

The trouble with including drug-addiction, for example, in the measure of poverty is that you're in danger of mixing up the cause of poverty with the effects

It allows you to differentiate between the deserving and the undeserving poor though.

The 60% figure isn't an indicator of how many need help (as far as I know). You could take what's called a budget standard approach (which I think was the approach used by Rowntree at the start of the 20th century). Work out what a family's 'necessities' are, calculate the cost if the family's income doesn't meet these necessities they are living in poverty. It's not a perfect measure either but it could be used to assess falling living standards alongside other statistical indicators.

The trouble with including drug-addiction, for example, in the measure of poverty is that you're in danger of mixing up the cause of poverty with the effects of poverty which makes it difficult to draw conclusions about causality from data IYSWIM.

Definitions of relative poverty - at least when they are not supplemented by some estimate of absolute poverty - are are almost bound to lead to problems. They can give absurd results and can distort government policies.

To illustrate with an extreme example, suppose 1% of the population were multi millionaires and the other 99% were on the poverty line, subsisting on wages clustered in a narrow band around £1 a day.

The median wage (i.e. such that half earn below as above it) it essentially £1 a day. No one earns less than 60% of this. So the poverty rate in such a society is zero - QED. Except that by any common sense understanding of poverty, the rate is 99%.

Of course the real world (at least in the affluent West) is not anything like as stark as this. However, such definitions do lead to governments footling around with the figures, in order to raise people from below to above an arbitrarily defined line. After which they proudly claim to have lifted x number of people "out of poverty", whether or not those lucky people have really noticed any difference.

but poverty is relative. It is something quite different to not have a fridge in 2012 to 1932, it is quite different to live on £12k a year in 2012 to 1982.
Of course whether people are in poverty or not changes as in context. It is stupid to think you can pick a number and go "5634! THAT is poverty."

There is a whole episode of the West Wing on roughly this issue.

I agree that the current system is bonkers. You can reduce poverty using this method (though I agree, not eradicate). Broadly if incomes cluster closer to the centre, there will be a smaller 'tail' of people at below 60% of the median. However, it is bonkers that the number of people in poverty then fluctuates with the fortunes of the economy as a whole.

I am not a Tory by any means, but I do actually have some respect for them for not just taking the good news story that poverty fell and actually coming out to talk about this.

I am not sure how you do measure poverty accurately though.

But the government will claim that 300,000 families have been brought out of poverty because they have done X,Y and Z. The general public don't understand what poverty actually means, to the average 'Joe' on the street, poverty could mean no heating, no food, no carpets etc. The average 'Joe' will be chuffed to bits with the government. Free school meals and housing benefit should be used as a measure of assessing help, not a classification that people don't understand.

The advantage of using the traditional definition is that it provides reliable, comparable data that can be analysed by demographic groups. The current definition is universally accepted and used for comparison between nations. Personally, I'm always suspicious of politicians changing statistical concepts/ methods as it suggest they're trying to massage the figures.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation have some fantastic, thought provoking resources that provide indicators of poverty.

Poverty is purely about money, actually.

Unless you go for all out communism. Interesting how often the Tories come up with communist policies. Like the one about getting everyone to live on benefits and work for free on workfare.

Instead of the median (the middle person) we should look at using the mean - the true average, where everyone's income is added up and then divided by the total number of people.

This is better because it will show if, for example, the super-rich have raided 99% of the people, leaving third world conditions for the majority, and obscene wealth for the 1%.

state education and no second home

No. Poverty is about the material conditions of your life, and while there are other ways of being disadvantaged aside from having a low income, this is an ideologically motivated bastardisation of a word in order to imply that money doesn't matter, or matters less.

Or in other words, trivial matters like raising the minimum wage would not help the poor, this is saying, because POVERTY IS DEEPER THAN THAT, ie, their fault, ie let's do fuck all about actual money and who has it and whether or not that's fair.

There are two levels of poverty:

A "survival" level, which includes food, heating, adequate housing - that allows people to stay alive and healthy. There are people in the UK who fall even below this level - look at the food banks springing up across the country, like third-world conditions. No wonder there were riots.

A relative poverty level, which the 60% of median income level attempts to measure, and relates to equality. This is important for community cohesion, trust, civil participation, and a huge range of other things like crime levels.

The Median income is the income of the person in the middle. It will not change as people come out of relative poverty.

The first thing must be to take people above "survival" poverty. Then to gradually lift people until none are below 60% of the middle person.