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Because ‘poverty’ is a moving waterline generally pretty divorced from material circumstance in developed countries. > Around one-third of Britain’s children –

Because ‘poverty’ is a moving waterline generally pretty divorced from material circumstance in developed countries. > Around one-third of Britain’s children – about 4.5 million – now live in relative poverty, often measured as living in a household that earns below 60% of the national median income after housing costs, a government report published in April found. It makes no sense for poverty to be a fully relative measure, it should be against a basket of goods.

kurthr 11mo ago
It's interesting, because I read that and the following comment, “Most of the increase in child poverty has occurred in large families,” as almost getting the point. The point should be, "how to we forestall demographic collapse?" Well, one way was immigration, but they're doing the opposite of that, so better make it easy to have lots of kids!
- telotortium 11mo ago
  Just another example of why the Tories have completely collapsed in support, even among their erstwhile base.
- whimsicalism 11mo ago
  if you want to nudge people to have kids that they can’t support to solve some fertility crisis (despite automation proceeding at breakneck speed), then just ban abortion.
  - mothballed 11mo ago
    And also provide incentives for marriage, which is associated with higher fertility rates. Recently after dropping no-fault divorce, more onerous child support laws, "red flag" and other temporary protection orders that can be obtained on little more than a mere one-sided claim (David Letterman famously had one against him for "sending coded [abusive] messages through the television"), alimony that relies on old timey presumptions a divorced partner can't work, etc, the calculus is looking ever more desperate. Nowadays marriage still has most the downsides, but the upsides are looking less and less. And even more, the contract can totally change out from under you, you are basically agreeing to a vague contract that society can arbitrarily change at any moment and all the meanwhile scream "you agreed to this" no matter that it was unilaterally changed by a 3rd party to the contract and the playout of the actual terms of the contract hidden within places like family court where it's literally illegal to release the proceedings that allow one to make a rational decision upon ("think of the privacy of the children").
    - whimsicalism 11mo ago
      > provide incentives for marriage, which is associated with higher fertility rates. Not causally it isn’t. I disagree with this entire social project, babies aren’t interchangeable and I don’t want to encourage more children from people whose primary blocker was child support payments. Need to encourage people who are doing well supporting themselves to have more children rather than squeezing out the tenth from two-timing Jimmy.
      - mothballed 11mo ago
        Please provide your evidence there is no causal association between marriage and fertility rates. >I don’t want to encourage more children from people whose primary blocker was child support payments A prime reason why I didn't have kids in my 20s was because I could afford the kids in marriage, but couldn't afford to spend 20% (more like 30% post tax) on child support, as I had calculated it out. And knowing divorce is always possible, not willing to risk that. The actual cost of my kid is like 10% of my income, but because I'm married I'm not forced to spend closer to 30% as a transfer payment with no check it actually goes to the child. Without poorly thought out child support laws I'd have had kids sooner, and possibly more, and the kids would likely have been better off because when I was younger I had more energy and better genetic material to produce them. I would even assert the people thinking ahead of time about child support actually calculated in a way that achieves roughly enough to take kids out of poverty, rather than basically a % of income, are exactly the type of people that should be parents. Under the current system child support can be next to nil, or extremely high if you're high income, rather than revolving around ensuring it is actually a number and check and balance to ensure the payment and spending is to bring kids out of poverty. The current system has less child support for poverty-born children but higher for wealthy-born children, meaning the incentives are precisely backwards from incentivizing children born into higher income marriages and the CS incentives higher for higher-income families to divorce and fall back into the lower-fertility unmarried bucket.
    - bryanlarsen 11mo ago
      Those are support for marriage. Despite the stereotypes, the limiting factor for marriage is women -- there are more men that want to marry than there are women. Things that lower the costs and risks of marriage for women will make marriage more common.
  - graemep 11mo ago
    Would that work? It would be a strong incentive for effective contraceptive use, and some people who would have otherwise had a child later will already have one, etc. No idea how it would all add up, but its not obviously true.
    - whimsicalism 11mo ago
      It’s not obviously true that a ban on abortion would lead to more children? Contraceptives aren’t 100% effective. The availability of contraception + abortion is absolutely going to block more children from being born than contraception alone.
- graemep 11mo ago
  > Well, one way was immigration, but they're doing the opposite of that How so? The net migration graph here shows very high levels of immigration: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisory-committee-report-on-net-migration/net-migration-report-accessible https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisor...
nerdponx 11mo ago
It's a measure of inequality, not poverty as such, sure. But practically it's obvious just by looking at the lives of "poor" people that, yeah, they are materially still struggling. I can't speak for Britain but I can speak for the USA: if you did both the "relative poverty" analysis and the "basket of goods" analysis, you'd find a lot of overlap. Splitting hairs over how exactly poverty is defined is just being dismissive of the actual people who are actually experiencing some form of material poverty, and shifting focus away from making things better.
actionfromafar 11mo ago
Not against some kind of social metric then?
- whimsicalism 11mo ago
  What is a social metric?
  - actionfromafar 11mo ago
    If the poverty hinders them too much in pursuing opportunities in education or work, for instance. Something like that. Something to keep an eye out for once the million kids who can't stay warm, dry, clothed and fed are taken care of.
    - whimsicalism 11mo ago
      I’m happy to just look at real median income quantiles. I don’t need it to be tied to an evocative word like ‘poverty’, I think there is still real work to be done to improve the lives of people who are in lower income brackets even if they aren’t in a situation similar to what people imagine when they think of ‘poverty.’
- telotortium 11mo ago
  What social metric in particular? Also, for better or worse, social metrics are easily gamed. While a basket of goods can also be gamed, it's easier to see what's going on and to explain it to people, since it's composed of concrete goods. Also, a basket of goods can be expanded if we want to increase the baseline as living standards in society improve, which we do - a smartphone should now be part of that basket, even though they barely existed 20 years ago.
n4r9 11mo ago
That was a weak sentence, but the following one is stronger: > One million of these children are destitute, going without their most basic needs of staying warm, dry, clothed and fed being met This is still scandalous in a highly developed country like the UK.
- whimsicalism 11mo ago
  I simply do not buy this. I don’t know the UK context very well, so cannot comment on this - but I do know the US context and we vastly inflate malnourishment numbers relative to what is actually measurable by relying on self-survey with misleading questions and overly broad criterion.
  - sc68cal 11mo ago
    So your entire case boils down to "people are lying about being poor"
    - whimsicalism 11mo ago
      You cannot trust self-survey data, I don’t know how many times this has to be hammered in. “One-Third of Americans Making $250,000 Live Paycheck-to-Paycheck, Survey Finds” [0] [0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/a-third-of-americans-making-250-000-say-costs-eat-entire-salary?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/a-third-o...
      - hexator 11mo ago
        Living paycheck to paycheck is not the same thing as being in poverty
        whimsicalism 11mo ago
        Agreed, this was an example of a similar phenomenon as to why you can’t trust self-id economic situation surveys. FWIW, we see similar effects in food security surveys with six-figure households being classified as food insecure.
lars512 11mo ago
Here's data based on absolute poverty lines Distribution: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-up-to-30-dollars?country=~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio... Share: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-in-poverty-relative-to-different-poverty-thresholds?country=~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-in-poverty-relative... The share tells a story that poverty is decreasing at all levels, relatively speaking. The distribution tells the additional story that population has increased: there may be less change in the number of people at the $20-30 level and the $30-40 level in recent decades than the share alone would suggest.
tshaddox 11mo ago
Why doesn't it make sense to expect (or at least hope) that the quality of life increases over time for all relative income/wealth brackets?
- mc32 11mo ago
  That would be a different metric. This want to know how many people can’t afford the basics rather than how many people can’t keep up with the relative Joneses.
  - tshaddox 11mo ago
    I'm asking why we shouldn't expect what is considered "the basics" to increase over time, as technology, aggregate wealth, etc. increases? An example to make this obvious: we should probably consider residential indoor plumbing part of "the basics" now, but of course even the richest people wouldn't have had that 500 years ago. In my view, there's no privileged point in history after which we should stop increasing our expectations for quality of life.
- bluescrn 11mo ago
  Because world population has exploded, old people are living longer and expecting increasingly complex/costly modern healthcare, and we've used up all the easily accessible fossil fuels and other natural resources. Endless growth on a finite planet is impossible. And we aren't prioritising expanding beyond the one planet.
Scubabear68 11mo ago
This was exactly my thought. Poverty reporting has gotten very weird. While housing, food, etc costs are rising, I still also see teenagers and their parents who I know are very poorly off with $400 sneakers, wearing AirPod Pros and getting $6 lattes from Starbucks.
- basilgohar 11mo ago
  It's something I was discussing with a friend of mine. It's very easy to spend money in the US. It's very hard to save money. We reduce friction to consumption, but we put barriers on savings. It's also just simply skipped in school. We don't teach fiscal responsibility to most kids but they are bombarded on TV nonstop with calls for consumerism and even associating that with quality of life and people. I'm not saying they're justified in wasting their money on conspicuous spending, but it's not just solely irresponsibility. There's a whole chain of bad situations that leads to the irresponsible behavior. Good mentorship when young, good parenting, good education, these all make major differentiations and none of which have to do with the individual but everything to do with the environment they grew up in, which they did not choose. By the time they are adults, there's little choice left for them to make. Why not do something that brings immediate gratification? They can't afford to move to a better place, so they choose something that makes them feel good, at least for the short term. I neither agree nor defend this, but I am posting just to say, it's more complicated than them being just leeches on society, like I think some comments are implying. Forgive me if I'm wrong in my assumption, but I see the argument so much without so much as a bare-minimum attempt to try to understand the others' situation.
  - whimsicalism 11mo ago
    > it's more complicated than them being just leeches on society, like I think some comments are implying. Can you link which comments you are referring to?
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

kurthr 11mo ago

It's interesting, because I read that and the following comment, “Most of the increase in child poverty has occurred in large families,” as almost getting the point. The point should be, "how to we forestall demographic collapse?" Well, one way was immigration, but they're doing the opposite of that, so better make it easy to have lots of kids!

telotortium 11mo ago
Just another example of why the Tories have completely collapsed in support, even among their erstwhile base.
whimsicalism 11mo ago
if you want to nudge people to have kids that they can’t support to solve some fertility crisis (despite automation proceeding at breakneck speed), then just ban abortion.
- mothballed 11mo ago
  And also provide incentives for marriage, which is associated with higher fertility rates. Recently after dropping no-fault divorce, more onerous child support laws, "red flag" and other temporary protection orders that can be obtained on little more than a mere one-sided claim (David Letterman famously had one against him for "sending coded [abusive] messages through the television"), alimony that relies on old timey presumptions a divorced partner can't work, etc, the calculus is looking ever more desperate. Nowadays marriage still has most the downsides, but the upsides are looking less and less. And even more, the contract can totally change out from under you, you are basically agreeing to a vague contract that society can arbitrarily change at any moment and all the meanwhile scream "you agreed to this" no matter that it was unilaterally changed by a 3rd party to the contract and the playout of the actual terms of the contract hidden within places like family court where it's literally illegal to release the proceedings that allow one to make a rational decision upon ("think of the privacy of the children").
  - whimsicalism 11mo ago
    > provide incentives for marriage, which is associated with higher fertility rates. Not causally it isn’t. I disagree with this entire social project, babies aren’t interchangeable and I don’t want to encourage more children from people whose primary blocker was child support payments. Need to encourage people who are doing well supporting themselves to have more children rather than squeezing out the tenth from two-timing Jimmy.
    - mothballed 11mo ago
      Please provide your evidence there is no causal association between marriage and fertility rates. >I don’t want to encourage more children from people whose primary blocker was child support payments A prime reason why I didn't have kids in my 20s was because I could afford the kids in marriage, but couldn't afford to spend 20% (more like 30% post tax) on child support, as I had calculated it out. And knowing divorce is always possible, not willing to risk that. The actual cost of my kid is like 10% of my income, but because I'm married I'm not forced to spend closer to 30% as a transfer payment with no check it actually goes to the child. Without poorly thought out child support laws I'd have had kids sooner, and possibly more, and the kids would likely have been better off because when I was younger I had more energy and better genetic material to produce them. I would even assert the people thinking ahead of time about child support actually calculated in a way that achieves roughly enough to take kids out of poverty, rather than basically a % of income, are exactly the type of people that should be parents. Under the current system child support can be next to nil, or extremely high if you're high income, rather than revolving around ensuring it is actually a number and check and balance to ensure the payment and spending is to bring kids out of poverty. The current system has less child support for poverty-born children but higher for wealthy-born children, meaning the incentives are precisely backwards from incentivizing children born into higher income marriages and the CS incentives higher for higher-income families to divorce and fall back into the lower-fertility unmarried bucket.
  - bryanlarsen 11mo ago
    Those are support for marriage. Despite the stereotypes, the limiting factor for marriage is women -- there are more men that want to marry than there are women. Things that lower the costs and risks of marriage for women will make marriage more common.
- graemep 11mo ago
  Would that work? It would be a strong incentive for effective contraceptive use, and some people who would have otherwise had a child later will already have one, etc. No idea how it would all add up, but its not obviously true.
  - whimsicalism 11mo ago
    It’s not obviously true that a ban on abortion would lead to more children? Contraceptives aren’t 100% effective. The availability of contraception + abortion is absolutely going to block more children from being born than contraception alone.
graemep 11mo ago
> Well, one way was immigration, but they're doing the opposite of that How so? The net migration graph here shows very high levels of immigration: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisory-committee-report-on-net-migration/net-migration-report-accessible https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisor...

nerdponx 11mo ago

It's a measure of inequality, not poverty as such, sure. But practically it's obvious just by looking at the lives of "poor" people that, yeah, they are materially still struggling. I can't speak for Britain but I can speak for the USA: if you did both the "relative poverty" analysis and the "basket of goods" analysis, you'd find a lot of overlap. Splitting hairs over how exactly poverty is defined is just being dismissive of the actual people who are actually experiencing some form of material poverty, and shifting focus away from making things better.

actionfromafar 11mo ago

Not against some kind of social metric then?

whimsicalism 11mo ago
What is a social metric?
- actionfromafar 11mo ago
  If the poverty hinders them too much in pursuing opportunities in education or work, for instance. Something like that. Something to keep an eye out for once the million kids who can't stay warm, dry, clothed and fed are taken care of.
  - whimsicalism 11mo ago
    I’m happy to just look at real median income quantiles. I don’t need it to be tied to an evocative word like ‘poverty’, I think there is still real work to be done to improve the lives of people who are in lower income brackets even if they aren’t in a situation similar to what people imagine when they think of ‘poverty.’
telotortium 11mo ago
What social metric in particular? Also, for better or worse, social metrics are easily gamed. While a basket of goods can also be gamed, it's easier to see what's going on and to explain it to people, since it's composed of concrete goods. Also, a basket of goods can be expanded if we want to increase the baseline as living standards in society improve, which we do - a smartphone should now be part of that basket, even though they barely existed 20 years ago.

n4r9 11mo ago

That was a weak sentence, but the following one is stronger: > One million of these children are destitute, going without their most basic needs of staying warm, dry, clothed and fed being met This is still scandalous in a highly developed country like the UK.

whimsicalism 11mo ago
I simply do not buy this. I don’t know the UK context very well, so cannot comment on this - but I do know the US context and we vastly inflate malnourishment numbers relative to what is actually measurable by relying on self-survey with misleading questions and overly broad criterion.
- sc68cal 11mo ago
  So your entire case boils down to "people are lying about being poor"
  - whimsicalism 11mo ago
    You cannot trust self-survey data, I don’t know how many times this has to be hammered in. “One-Third of Americans Making $250,000 Live Paycheck-to-Paycheck, Survey Finds” [0] [0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/a-third-of-americans-making-250-000-say-costs-eat-entire-salary?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/a-third-o...
    - hexator 11mo ago
      Living paycheck to paycheck is not the same thing as being in poverty
      - whimsicalism 11mo ago
        Agreed, this was an example of a similar phenomenon as to why you can’t trust self-id economic situation surveys. FWIW, we see similar effects in food security surveys with six-figure households being classified as food insecure.

lars512 11mo ago

Here's data based on absolute poverty lines Distribution: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-up-to-30-dollars?country=~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio... Share: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-in-poverty-relative-to-different-poverty-thresholds?country=~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-in-poverty-relative... The share tells a story that poverty is decreasing at all levels, relatively speaking. The distribution tells the additional story that population has increased: there may be less change in the number of people at the $20-30 level and the $30-40 level in recent decades than the share alone would suggest.

tshaddox 11mo ago

Why doesn't it make sense to expect (or at least hope) that the quality of life increases over time for all relative income/wealth brackets?

mc32 11mo ago
That would be a different metric. This want to know how many people can’t afford the basics rather than how many people can’t keep up with the relative Joneses.
- tshaddox 11mo ago
  I'm asking why we shouldn't expect what is considered "the basics" to increase over time, as technology, aggregate wealth, etc. increases? An example to make this obvious: we should probably consider residential indoor plumbing part of "the basics" now, but of course even the richest people wouldn't have had that 500 years ago. In my view, there's no privileged point in history after which we should stop increasing our expectations for quality of life.
bluescrn 11mo ago
Because world population has exploded, old people are living longer and expecting increasingly complex/costly modern healthcare, and we've used up all the easily accessible fossil fuels and other natural resources. Endless growth on a finite planet is impossible. And we aren't prioritising expanding beyond the one planet.

Scubabear68 11mo ago

This was exactly my thought. Poverty reporting has gotten very weird. While housing, food, etc costs are rising, I still also see teenagers and their parents who I know are very poorly off with $400 sneakers, wearing AirPod Pros and getting $6 lattes from Starbucks.

basilgohar 11mo ago
It's something I was discussing with a friend of mine. It's very easy to spend money in the US. It's very hard to save money. We reduce friction to consumption, but we put barriers on savings. It's also just simply skipped in school. We don't teach fiscal responsibility to most kids but they are bombarded on TV nonstop with calls for consumerism and even associating that with quality of life and people. I'm not saying they're justified in wasting their money on conspicuous spending, but it's not just solely irresponsibility. There's a whole chain of bad situations that leads to the irresponsible behavior. Good mentorship when young, good parenting, good education, these all make major differentiations and none of which have to do with the individual but everything to do with the environment they grew up in, which they did not choose. By the time they are adults, there's little choice left for them to make. Why not do something that brings immediate gratification? They can't afford to move to a better place, so they choose something that makes them feel good, at least for the short term. I neither agree nor defend this, but I am posting just to say, it's more complicated than them being just leeches on society, like I think some comments are implying. Forgive me if I'm wrong in my assumption, but I see the argument so much without so much as a bare-minimum attempt to try to understand the others' situation.
- whimsicalism 11mo ago
  > it's more complicated than them being just leeches on society, like I think some comments are implying. Can you link which comments you are referring to?

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]