Skip to content

Can’t even get definitions right

330,000 children are in extreme poverty as a consequence of that cap. That means they’re living in households with less than 60 percent of median earnings.

No, that’s relative low income:

Relative low income: This refers to people living in households with income below 60% of the median in that year.

Sigh.

We’d also rather expect at least some of this to happen. Incomes tend to rise with age, promotion and experience. Having children tends to be done in the earlier years of adulthood, not the later ones. Therefore we’d expect – expect – children to be in rather lower income households than the general population.

Sigh.

20 thoughts on “Can’t even get definitions right”

  1. I wonder where our household income falls on the scale now that wife and I are both retired? There are only two of us and some cats so our income doesn’t have support any children so maybe we don’t count. As a measure of poverty relative income is absurd anyway, I’m pretty sure that, had it been applied to my family when I was growing up, I would have been classed as being raised in poverty. I had a pretty happy childhood as I recall.

  2. @Stoneyground.

    Likewise. Dad worked on the buses, mum stayed at home, there were 4 kids and at one point the 3 boys were sharing a bedroom. I really ought to be suffering from PTSD as a result of the poverty I didn’t notice us living under at the time.

  3. “extreme poverty” has fuck-all to do with how much you earn compared to the average. A millionaire hobnobbing with billionaires isn’t in “extreme poverty”.

    Extreme poverty is when you’re not sure where your next meal is coming from. Our “poor” are mostly fat bastards.

  4. I enjoyed the contest between Rishi and Mr Smarmer about who had the most deprived childhood.

    Me as a child: no central heating, no fridge, no freezer; until some years after I started primary school no telly and no washing machine. Never had a tumble dryer. Never had a bedroom of my own. Et bloody cetera.

    It wasn’t called “poverty” it was called the 1950s-60s.

    What we did have: fields, woods, harbour, river, sea … an infinitely big playground, in fact, with lots of unsupervised time to enjoy it.

    And, having gone to school before the socialists set out to spoil the state schools, I got a secondary education which was excellent in most subjects. (Not physics but mainly that taught me that if you’re wired for physics you can teach yourself a lot of it anyway.) As a fresher I found I’d been better educated than my new pals who’d been to private schools. Bet not many can say that nowadays. What a wonderful window of opportunity that was, between the Butler Education Act and the antics of Crosland and Williams. Dig ’em up and burn their bodies!

  5. The charities do define poverty by the 60% thing. It just ensures there will always be poverty and always ‘work’ for them to do, as even if every houshold got a £1000 pay rise, the percentages would remain the same

  6. Same nonsense with wealth distribution.
    99% of infants and schoolchildren have zero wealth.
    Most recent graduates have negative wealth.
    Yet someone having managed to pay off some of his mortgage is a capitalist plutocrat.

  7. Theophrastus (First Nation)

    Relative poverty is a measure of inequality, not poverty.

    In the 1950-early 60s, my pater was a director of an anglo-swedish corporation. New company Volvo every two years; and we lived in a 4/5-bedroom detached house in a village outside Newcastle. Yet…we had coke-fired central heating on the ground floor only, no fridge – just a north-facing pantry – no TV for years, no shower ever, and freezing bedrooms in northern winters (which even the demented aunt [b.c1886] – who railed against socialism for creating “the servant problem – survived).

    By the lifestyle of today’s relatively poor, we were deeply deprived back then; and, apart from the Volvo, my parents would consider the luxuries and conveniences the relatively poor have today as riches beyond the dreams of avarice.

  8. Having a child, you might get support from the grandparents, could be financial or free childcare or furniture or other stuff they no longer need. None of this is captured when the LFS try and measure income inequality. It’s all bollocks.

    But it’s rather mad that the part of the country with the highest wages is where you can least afford to have children if you’re paying for them yourself.

  9. Some bloke on't t'internet

    I’m a bit on the fence about this.
    OK, it’s a bit arbitrary that you gets support for two kids, but not a third (or fourth or …).
    But then, all the articles I see where they’ve drummed up some poor single parent complaining about how bad it is … I find myself thinking “so, didn’t you think about that before you had the third (or fourth or …) child ?” OK, so there’s a few “unexpected” children and changes in circumstances, but in general each child is a choice – and surely part of the decision should be “will we be able to afford it”. A lot of the articles seem to distill down to “I want lots of kids and have other people pay for them”.
    As TW has pointed out in the past (I think), the state supports parents because having a steady fresh supply of new people is a good thing overall – not least because we’ll be relying on their economic efforts to keep us in our old age in the same way that our economic efforts keep (or kept) our parent in old age. But at some point (which will always be arbitrary) there needs to be a limit.

  10. @SBotI
    You’re treating the population as uniform. In reality it’s the surplus productive who are well below replacement. And it’s the negative productive above replacement.
    It does actually matter who is being born. Bad news for the ant-racists & equality fanatics amongst us. But that doesn’t stop it being true.

  11. Theophrastus (First Nation)

    What BiS says + 100

    Subsidise UK child-rearing and all you will get is more muslims (aka future Labour voters).

    Modern, ’emancipated’ young women tend to imagine that a career in local government/charities/HR will bring fulfillment. When it doesn’t, when their lower reproductive tracts are well used, and when fertility time is ticking, she will often retreat to childlessness…and, perhaps, present her situation as somehow a choice because, er, men…and an attempt to “save the planet”…

    This how a civilisation dies!

  12. I had a privileged upbringing, purely because of m father’s hard work. But as a young kid, I was most surprised to find that our neighbours had furniture in their front room! All that was in ours
    was a piano and a black and white telly (lucky us!) on which my dad used to watch rugby internationals, dressed in his overcoat as he could afford to heat the room.

  13. Now we’re all four Yorkshiremen…
    We didn’t have a TV but the charlady and her retired agricultural labourer husband did.
    So John and I occasionally sneaked off to watch Top of the Pops with Jimmy Saville.

  14. It is getting harder and harder not to mention the four yorkshiremen sketch or the Largo from the New World Symphony.

    One thing that I remember from growing up is that things gradually improved over time. I can remember freezing cold bedrooms in the winter but our beds were super cozy. We would jump out of bed and get dressed with lightening speed. Later we got a storage heater on the landing, it still wasn’t warm but at least it wasn’t freezing cold. Eventually the house got proper central heating.

  15. Well I didn’t have a TV, heating, a cooker, a bathroom or much more than I stood up in. So ya boo. Although I was living in a bedsit on the Gloucester Road. Two years later I had an E-Type.
    It doesn’t matter where you came from it matters where you want to go to.

  16. I suggest a competition:

    When did Spud get anything right?
    Answers on a (small) postcard, sent to Ely (but not to the pubs).

  17. BiS @ 4.06, check out the movie ‘Idiocracy’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsJFNQd62Wk , it predicts precisely what you say about who the replacements will be.

    AAIUI, Martin Lewis was on the box explaining that the two child cap only applies to those who are receiving Universal Credit or Tax Credits and have more than two kids.

    It doesn’t apply to those who have / are going to have half a dozen chavs.

  18. I reckon that the new Labour government is well on the way to reducing “child poverty” anyway. On the basis that “poverty” is based on a threshold of 60% of average income – as more and more wealthy non-doms bail-out, the average is going to go down – and Shazam! more kids’ families are lifted out of “poverty”. Job done!

    Ain’t Labour wonderful? (/retorical!!)

  19. @ dearieme
    As the only boy I had a bedroom of my own after I was 6 when we moved back to England from Scotland but otherwise “Snap”.
    However the local Socialists had already decided not to allow the local Grammar Scools to teach kids to pass Oxbridge Entrance so I got a scholarship to a Public School.
    The Loughborough University study that is quoted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation demands as a minimum far more luxuries than I enjoyed, or even dreamed of, as a middle-class child.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *