Polly Pot on Poverty.

Polly Toynbee....in short:

We know that although Britain has almost the highest poverty level in the EU,

That almost might be used to let her off the hook but think of this. GDP per capita at PPP exchange rates in the UK is around $25,000 a year. In Lithuania, $8,400 a year. It’s damn difficult to think of the UK as containing more poverty on those figures...unless of course, you use the magic trick of referring to relative poverty rather than absolute. Which is what the Pollster is doing of course, looking at the income distribution within the UK rather than any attempt to measure actual poverty at all.

There is more than just the err, interesting, use of statistics at play here, no one is surprised when an advocate uses those that best bolster the cause which they push, in Polly’s case social justice.  Using only relative poverty as a measurement leads to the fact that we could all become poorer in absolute terms, having fewer resources with which to meet our desires, yet Polly would claim that we were abolishing poverty if income differentials decreased.

Similarly, if all the poor increased their incomes by 100% and the rich increased theirs by 110%, Pol Pot would claim that poverty had increased....because her metric focuses solely on income differentials, not absolute incomes nor absolute poverty. She’s right (as she told us in an email a few weeks back) that this is indeed a measurement used by the International Great and Good, including the UN and the OECD, but such backing does not reduce the stupidity of the measure.

Just to be extreme, by her standards, using the UN measurements of the Gini Index, (Page 50 and following), the UK has more poverty than : Slovenia, The Czech Republic, Slovakia (really? than the place where all the gypsies are oppressed?), Macedonia, Albania (!!), Uzbekistan (where they boil opposition politicians), Ghana and even friggin’ Ethiopia and Burundi. Yup, more poverty here in dear Old Blighty than two peasant agricultural societies hanging on the edge of mass starvation.

It’s a distinctly silly way of looking at poverty, of trying to measure it, and all and any conclusions reached by trying to do it that way are valueless.

Just in case you don’t get it, I’m all in favour of reducing, abolishing if we can, poverty, it’s just that I think we should be getting out there and creating more wealth, not whining about the unfairness of the current distribution. If we had a perfectly equal distribution of world GDP it would currently be some $7,800 each.

Definitely look at RoomTwelve’s take on a similar point.