…about people living in miserable material conditions. It is a measure of relative poverty, or a difference in material goods. This is obviously most useful for the promotion of envy and class hatred. It also allows the glossing over of the twin Marxist errors of the “pauperization of the proletariat” in advanced capitalist economies, and the notion that people have no identity outside their membership of an economically determined class.
It is handy for promoters of class hatred to use ‘poverty’ as an issue. First the relative measure is easy to falsify. It is notorious that in the UK, satellite television dishes appeared disproportionately (in the late 1980s early 1990s) among low-income families before spreading to higher income brackets. On the other hand the only people I’ve ever met who didn’t own television sets in the UK were both in the top 20 per cent of incomes.
What value does one put on television ownership? The price of the set? How does one measure the value of the service provided by broadcasting? What about foreign holidays? If a low-income family travels to Spain for the same relative price as their parents once went to Morecombe on the British coast, are they really no better off?
Taking the measure of a household 60 per cent below the average household I once discovered a cute fraud in the British Household Survey (I’m sorry I don’t recall the year but it was in the early 1990s). “Household” is not the same thing as a house full of people. The bottom fifteen per cent households in the UK in the early 1990s had an average of 1.1 people living in them. The top fifteen percent had over four people living in them. The age distribution was equally revealing. I forget the exact figures, but elderly people and students were the bulk of the bottom fifteen percent of the population. This of course fits with what we know of individual people’s incomes over a lifetime: low-income as a youth, rising income until retirement and a drop in income except where large capital savings have been made.
I calculated that the income per person of the top fifteen percent households was about five times that of the bottom fifteen percent per person households, after taxes and cash benefits were taken into account. Considering that students and elderly people aren’t generally earning salaries, or of they are, these would often be part-time or seasonal, British “poverty” isn’t all its cranked out to be by campaigners for class hatred.
This has intriguing consequences for ways of “tackling poverty”…
More on this subject tomorrow
There used to be a joke going around that went:
Q. What do you call the box on the back of a satellite dish?
A. A council house.
Boom and, if you will, boom.
You touch on something quite germaine here:
What value does one put on television ownership? The price of the set? How does one measure the value of the service provided by broadcasting? What about foreign holidays? If a low-income family travels to Spain for the same relative price as their parents once went to Morecombe on the British coast, are they really no better off?
It is a common argument among some otherwise thoughtful libertarians that “real” economic growth (at least in the US) has been stagnant since the ’60s. This is pure bunk. Any casual observer can see that both agragate economic activity, and standards of living are far higher than they were 35 years ago.
You seem to dance around the very point many economist will make when discussing poverty measures. That is, it is only a measure of one’s income and not their consumption. While poverty rates based on income may make for a reasonable proxy to measure the poor over time, presumably it is the concern for substandard consumption, which all the hand wringing is about. Therefore, it is consumption that we really want to measure, but that is difficult both to measure and to adjust for over time.
the great thing is when a government meets a crisis such as high heating oil prices (big concern in canada and the US)… give “the poor” cash subsidies to help pay the heating bill… now of course students who come from upper middle and upper income brackets can afford to move out of the house and will generally have to file income tax (work for family firms to income split, etc) but have low income… so “the poor” who are driving 60k cars, going to europe for a few months, and who are on very nice family incomes get cash rebates…
the concern isn’t even consumption level, it’s mobility… students have low consumption as well as income (unless you include tuition) but that changes post grad…. and then there’s the issue where “deprivation” is completely relative… can only afford 55 tv channels, used car, and slow computer… and have to use a play station, not ps2…