Impossible Targets: Poverty - 2 comments
Harpymarx has reminded me about the campaign against poverty, which was popular a couple of weeks back, before the David Davis business took off. My criticism of the use of 'relative poverty' is simple enough, and has been stated enough times, but I don't think it's pedantic to repeat it when bloggers and politicians uncritically use a measure that is effectively impossible to target, giving and receiving praise for accidental successes, and condemning worthy failures.
We continue to use 'relative' statistics, but the language of absolutes, confusing ourselves and forcing Governments into the ludicrous position where policies deliberately aimed at improving the life-chances of the poorest are unlikely to have any impact on the standard 'poverty' measure, which is determined - not so much by (a) national income/GDP-per-head, which Governments at least have a chance of influencing - but median income, something which combines the difficulty of (a), with the added complexity that comes with the continually varying distribution of incomes and (possibly also) housing costs.
This is a recipe for confusion and disappointment, that means that no advance in the fight against poverty is ever permanent: one bad year can cancel out five good ones if the statistics turn that way. There are plenty of other reasons for criticising the use of the '60%-of-mean-net-disposable-income' measure', not least the fact the State provides up-front services for free, that the poorest can use without drawing from their limited funds. It might only be a safety-net, but this reduces the moral weight of purely income-based poverty measures.
Yet the Government clings - so it may take credit in good years - to a measure of poverty that makes its child-poverty-elimination target impossible without the kind of radical restructuring of society that would bring incomes closer to the median. But the Government clearly doesn't believe in such a restructuring, and the various charities and pressure groups are hardly going to antagonise donors and activists by associating with radical redistributive politics. In that woolly world, the aim is always to 'persuade' the Government to 'do more', perpetuating the idea that there is a magic lever to be pulled. Thus it's unfair for Harpymarx - undoubtedly a backer of such redistribution - to condemn the Government for missing its own poverty targets, when they must know that (a) a deterioration cannot in itself be a sign of bad faith, and (b) that the impact of worthy measures like Sure Start can only be assessed by a closer look at the statistics than the mainstream media and casual bloggers will normally provide.
As Tom Freeman pointed out last year, there are many alternative measures of 'well-being' that are absolute, comparable, and also moving in the right direction. It must be impossible for Labour to abandon the official poverty measure now, and assuming the Tories are in power within two years, the dropping of poverty targets will make it irrelevant, but if the pressure groups have any sense they will propose a new 'quality of life' index that it is feasible for a future Government to target, that combines an absolute 'fundamentals' element, a relative element that reflects equality of opportunity, and a 'social well-being' element.
Of course one cannot write about Government targets for the poor without a little disgust that such things are necessary at all.
Labels: Government, inequality, poverty, statistics, targets
![[Valid Atom]](http://www.bloggers4labour.org/images/valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom feed")
2 comments so far...
I agree, a lot of rubbish is talked around this subject. My favourite is when someone says "surely, the fourth richest economy in the world shouldn't have so many people in poverty" - which manages to confuse total GDP with GDP per capita as well as absolute with relative.
As the headline poverty measure is relative, you're right that it's incredibly hard to tackle directly - all a governemnt can really do is try to enrich poorer people by some absolute amount, and then hope that this increase is faster than that of the median.
Another (obviously perverse) approach would be to raise taxes sharply on people around the median mark, so the 60% poverty line drops and so does the number of people under it.
But all the rhetorical and concpetual flailing around on this subject does touch a point that matters: as society becomes absolutely richer overall, shouldn't our standards on poverty rasie as well?
Your phrase "a relative element that reflects equality of opportunity" is very intriguing - the fuss about relative poverty is not about material destitution, but the extent to which people at the bottom can participate in society. So maybe on this count we could couple some absolute measure with a persistence-of-poverty indicator - the easier it is for people at the bottm in any given year to move out of it the next, the less does such poverty trap you ina social ghetto.
Interesting post.
1. Joseph Rowntree Foundation are doing some work which you might find interesting on what level of income is needed to allow an acceptable standard of living in Britain. The report should be out this month, more details at:
http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/wip/record.asp?ID=804624&programme=
2. It's not all that hard for the government to hit its 2010 target on child poverty, it would require spending an extra £3 billion on a mix of targeted and universal benefits in next year's budget.
3. The case for the 60% of average income measure is that it is the one used internationally. It is well worth getting a sense of how well different policies pursued by different countries compare, not least to be able to copy some of the good ones and avoid the ones which don't work.
4. It is also fantastically difficult to come up with an alternative 'quality of life' index which is widely agreed on, and whichever set of measures you use doesn't really affect which policies are needed. But the JRF report might help with some of this.
Post a Comment
<< Home