Tim Worstall

Polly on Child Poverty

Lovely to see how the grand project of circular reasoning works again. Having all but abolished absolute poverty in the UK the definition is changed to being relative poverty. We can therefore all go on crying out for something to be done about poverty.

The rhetoric allows us to associate being in relative poverty (less than 60% of median household incomes, adjusted for housing costs and family size) with being in absolute (living under t’ sweet paper in middle of t’ motorway).

Then in order to solve such ‘poverty’  as we have defined it we get this:

Her excellent report makes sensible recommendations for improving the
various New Deals to help poor families into better jobs. But she
concludes with this overwhelming truth: "The major drivers of poverty –
such as high levels of wage and wealth inequality – remain considerable
impediments towards reaching the 2020 child-poverty target, suggesting
that far greater changes to the distribution of wealth, earnings and
opportunity in society will be necessary."

Because we have defined poverty in the beginning as a relative thing then only by highly redistributive taxation can we end such poverty as we have defined it. Entirely circular reasoning, all stemming from the way that the ‘problem’ has been defined in the first place.

In

3 responses

  1. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    My mother-in-law grew up in real poverty. She ended up with deformed feet because the only shoes she ever got were hand-me-downs. It’s not the same as worrying that your trainers are not quite dernier cri.

    Reply
  2. Verity Avatar
    Verity

    I remember around a year ago,there were articles about an older single mother whose three daughters (youngest was 12 – oldest, I think, just turned 16) were all pregnant. There was a photo of them in the living room of their (free) council flat. There was absolutely no furniture in the room, but there was a mega,mega plasma TV. And the mother was whining that the council would have to give them a larger flat when the three babies were born.
    Obviously, none of these three girls will ever have a job. They will live out their entire lives as comfortable guests of the taxpayer.
    It must be just awful to be “poor” in Britain.

    Reply
  3. HJHJ Avatar
    HJHJ

    Verity, it’s all about incentives and the people you mention are just responding to incentives. Due to the tax and benefits system they know that there is very little of improving their lot by their own efforts and they also know that they will get state benefits to a similar level if they don’t. So they make the decision to get on with their lives. There is no incentive to be self reliant – all the incentives are to depend on the state.
    So don’t be too harsh on them, be harsh on those that designed this system.
    Incidentally, I do accept that there is such a thing as relative poverty as well as absolute poverty and we should have some concern about it because if the disparities are too large it will make it difficult for many people to participate in the same world as the rest of us. But defining it arbitrarily as a certain % of median income is mad. Neither do I think that overtly redistributive policies are effective or even moral. Government needs to take a very hard look at how it has created the poverty trap and how, for example, professional cartels benefit the middle classes and the rich but discriminate against the poor.

    Reply

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