The current economic slowdown is going to increase poverty we are told:

Million more Britons pushed in to poverty by Christmas, warn charities

That rather depends upon how you’re measuring poverty. By the usual standard, relative poverty as being in a household on less than 60% of median income, it’s highly likely that poverty will fall. For median income is certainly going to fall while the incomes of those at the bottom - being largely based upon benefits that aren’t going to fall - won’t. We’d not insist that this relative poverty will fall this year, not insist, but it is possible and we’d argue that highly likely.

So, what other measure are they using here at the IPPR?

200,000 more children are among those expected to be below pre-virus poverty line, as job losses hit family incomes

Ahh, no, you don’t get to do that, that’s a bad faith argument, one tantamount to casuistry. For that is a switch from a relative measure of poverty to an absolute one. Poverty of under 60% of household income now is a relative measure. The use of what was under 60% of household income at some point in the past is an absolute measure. That’s actually what the official and current definition of absolute poverty is, under what 60% of household income in 2010/11 was.

The importance of this? Britain was less unequal in the 1970s, there were fewer people under that 60% threshold then. But there’s near no one at all today under what was 60% of median household income in the 1970s. By that absolute measure of poverty it has been entirely vanquished. Even the use of an absolute measure from only a few months ago is still to be using an absolute, not relative, measure.

Switching between the two measures just because it’s convenient for your argument is that tantamount to casuistry. For the IPPR does more normally use that relative measure, not an absolute. Tsk, it’s really not something anyone even pretending to be serious should do.