The Guardian trips over its own poverty numbers

Ah well, journalists and numeracy, eh? Never the twain shall meet and all that.

For the newspaper has managed to trip over its own preferred definitions of numbers here:

The Guardian view on child poverty: free school meals are a help, but not a panacea

No, not really. Free school meals will change the number of children measured as being in poverty by zip, nada, nowt.

Child poverty is defined as living in a household on less than 60% of median household income, adjusted for size (and before or after housing costs to taste). We do not include free school meals - or not school meals - in our definition of the income that is being measured. Therefore the presence - or not - of free school meals makes no difference - that nada, nowt - to the recorded levels of child poverty.

Sure, sure, we agree that a freebie hot meal in the middle of the day makes such children less poor. But given that we’ve all decided upon (or, as we take it to be, we’ve allowed the loons to do our defining for us) a definition of poverty that doesn’t include some of what is done to alleviate poverty then we end up here. We alleviate poverty and yet measure it as not alleviating poverty.

Now, so far you could get this from a Chris Snowdon tweet. But we need to go further:

But step back from the table and the bigger picture comes into view. Child poverty, of which poor diets are a symptom, cannot be tackled by schools alone. Reducing it means raising family incomes through the benefits system – as well as trying to boost wage growth.

Neither of those would change child poverty either. If we raise everyone’s income by throwing more benefits at them this changes child poverty by nowt. Because we’re using a relative measure of poverty. And this is also true of wages:

We’ve raised real wages by about 25% since 1993. You know, -ish. And:

We’ve not had much effect upon child poverty. For the obvious reason that we do not define poverty by how much people have. We define it by how much they have relative to others in that time and place. Which does mean that even if everyone’s incomes go up by 25% in real terms then we’ve the same amount of poverty we started with.

So, you know, a little message for the innumerates at The Guardian. Wage growth doesn’t reduce child poverty. Because we’re not measuring poverty, let alone child poverty, by real wages but by relative. And free school meals has nowt effect because we don’t count the effect of free school meals in our measure of poverty either.

For the rest of us, a little lesson in how we live in one of the richest countries ever to bestride the planet and yet our politics is dominated by fools mithering about poverty. By any real or absolute standard - even by a current global standard let alone historical - there is not one single poor person in the UK of today.

For the measure they’re using is that if the kid down the street has Air Jordans and you’re stuck with a pair of Primark tackies then you’re poor. An absurdity in a country which only two centuries ago used to stuff shoeless waifs up chimnies.

Tim Worstall