Because ‘poverty’ is a moving waterline generally pretty divorced from material circumstance in developed countries.
> Around one-third of Britain’s children – about 4.5 million – now live in relative poverty, often measured as living in a household that earns below 60% of the national median income after housing costs, a government report published in April found.
It makes no sense for poverty to be a fully relative measure, it should be against a basket of goods.
Cost of living, accommodation in big cities in particular. ZIRP had a lot to do with this - rents rose in line with values.
Working hours and conditions that are not family friendly.
Pressure on couples with kids to both work full time, which then means a lot of money goes on childcare so they are not that much better off (but landlords and banks are happier with the lower earnings multiple anyway) - but it boosts GDP and profits so that is fine.
A benefits system that reduces payments too rapidly when people earn. It means people keep very little of what they earn. Personally I think there is a good case for UBI as the solution.
> Around 70% of children living in poverty have at least one parent in work.
That should not be happening given there is a reasonable minimum wage.
Its not a UK only problem. The article says.
> De Schutter noted that the country conformed to a pattern of increasing inequality seen in other wealthy countries.
I think a lot of it results from a shift in attitude. The people in power increasingly think poor deserve to be poor, and that they are all "gammon" (to use the British term) and untrustworthy anyway.
Nitpick: "gammon" as a constituency refers to boomers and older Gen X, typically financially comfortable, who are declining in intellectual openness and increasing in strength of opinion. They are called "gammon" because their faces go bright pink as they rail against the EU, immigrants, woke nonsense, and the laziness of today's youth. They can come from any strata of society, but they are made by being insulated from economic reality during their intellectual decline. Their defining characteristic is that they are choleric about topics of which they know nothing, and this makes them easily led by jingoistic tubthumping.
I simply do not buy this. I don’t know the UK context very well, so cannot comment on this - but I do know the US context and we vastly inflate malnourishment numbers relative to what is actually measurable by relying on self-survey with misleading questions and overly broad criterion.
Friend of mine was gathering survey results for a kids programme in London. They take council estate kids to events and do childcare and a bunch of other stuff. When asked what they liked best, the kids kept talking about the food and how you could even have seconds. Meanwhile we’ve got food banks up and down the country struggling to keep up with demand. I know families with three kids to a room smaller than the one my youngest fills with books. I can assure you pretty is very real in London.
As I said, I don’t know the UK context. In the US context, I went to a pretty destitute public schooling system and we provided breakfast, lunch, and (to a limited subset) dinner - plus there is SNAP/EBT.
> I know families with three kids to a room smaller than the one my youngest fills with books.
Housing is much more of an issue for the very poor, at least in the US. But I don’t agree that it has gotten relatively worse on a large timescale.
I volunteer my time with Food Not Bombs. 20% of American children do not know where their next meal is coming from. Many are simultaneously overweight and malnourished, because the foodstuffs the US government subsidizes are calorically dense but nutritionally destitute.
Food banks, subsidized school meals, and SNAP/EBT prevent what would otherwise be children starving to death. As it stands though, the relief is insufficient. Many children from food insecure households have stunted growth and lifelong learning impairments from insufficient protein, calcium, etc.
It boils down to whether people can afford basic essentials like shelter, heating, lighting, and clothing. They do check their income levels. Maybe some people would lie about this, but I don't know why they would.
We know the prices of shelter, heating, lighting and clothing - and we know how much money people make. I see no need in self-id here. The equivalent of these surveys in the US place some people making six-figures in the food insecure bucket.
In the UK at least, we don't generally know how much money people make, nor how much of it goes to debts or other dependencies. Income below £10k does not have to be declared.
A UK organisation with treasonous, multi-generational experience, that's cited in the article, that people refuse to read or believe? Thanks for re-sharing <3
Agreed, this was an example of a similar phenomenon as to why you can’t trust self-id economic situation surveys. FWIW, we see similar effects in food security surveys with six-figure households being classified as food insecure.
I can definitely see a situation where a renting single-earner six-figure household in a place like SF may require assistance. It's all about the relative cost of living and financial situation, you can't really make ground pronouncements like this without ignoring the data.
> Single-person households making under $105,000 a year are classified as “low income” in three Bay Area counties by California’s Department of Housing and Community Development.
Are you saying that based on the semantics of "poor" vs "may require assistance"
vs "low income", or...? My comment has a link that's backed up by a government website.
If we look at $105k in San Francisco, minus federal, state, and local taxes, you're looking at roughly $6,400/month take home pay. If you make a budget out of that, you get $3,000 for rent, $800 for groceries, $250 for transit, $250 for medical, $150 for Internet, $600 for entertainment, $900 to retirement, and then finally $400 towards an emergency fund. If you do not have all those things in your monthly, you are poor. Now, there are certainly people who have less than that, and we could argue the semantics of being destitute, vs simply poor as colloquially defined terms, but the brackets that California’s Department of Housing and Community Development has are: acutely low, extremely low, very low, low, and moderate income.
We can use https://saul.pw/mag/wealth/ and say that even with a $105k/yr salary in SF, you're sitting at ↑3 or ↑4 or so, instead of using the emotionally loaded term poor if it would contribute to having a more thoughtful and substantive discussion.
Do you really believe there are a million destitute starving wet and unclothed children wandering around outside in the UK? Obviously there is some gross exaggeration going on, like most of those million are "cold" because they have worn out hand-me-down jackets and maybe go without dinner sometimes, mostly because their parents are junky pieces of shit who can't be bothered to open a box of slop for the kid even though they're on government programs to pay for the food.
Essentially nobody in the US (except the very elderly with dementia) dies from malnutrition. This would make the malnutrition profile of the US very unusual relative to other developing countries with similar rates of malnutrition as we claim on self-id survey.
The reality is that, compared to other constraints (like housing), food is widely available in the US and even if you are really struggling you can generally get food.
Our surveys classify many families making >$100k as food insecure. [0][1]
> Hospitals are incentivized to diagnose malnutrition by the Inpatient Prospective Payment System, which uses Medicare Severity Diagnosis‐Related Groups to identify a “payment weight.” When severe malnutrition is included on a patient's diagnosis list, a major complication or comorbidity (MCC) classifier is almost always added to the hospitalization claim. 5 Adding an MCC classifier increases reimbursement
If you look at the table, there is almost no relationship between income and likelihood of being marked as a malnutrition case by the hospital receiving reimbursement. (top 25% of income = 20% of cases, bottom 25% of income = 30% of cases).
The median age of these people with severe malnutrition is 70 years old. This is completely consistent with the claim I made around dementia, especially when you consider these people are repeatedly hospitalized oftentimes.
I think it's stated elsewhere that people are overweight yet malnourished due to calorie-dense but low-nutrition food. This leads to overweight health issues that can be attributed to malnutrition but don't fit the profile of "starving to death". The cause of death are other nutrition-related afflictions like diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and even some forms of cancer.
So yes, they're not bones-through-the-skin malnourished, it's more complicated than that.
We're not talking about famine, we're talking about people living in poverty? What's your argument here? That because nobody dies of malnutrition we don't have true poverty?
I was not the person who changed the conversation from ‘relative poverty’ to hunger - the person who replied to me did and I just engaged in that on the merits.
My argument is that you should expect a similar ratio between famine and malnourishment across countries if you are measuring the same thing when you use the word ‘malnourishment.’
I think it is fine for different societies to consider the poverty level to be at different places (e.g. the “poor” in the first world are nothing compared to poverty in many parts of Africa, for example).
Having said that, how do you think about poverty in Britain (or the US)? What, for you, is the poverty line?
The share tells a story that poverty is decreasing at all levels, relatively speaking. The distribution tells the additional story that population has increased: there may be less change in the number of people at the $20-30 level and the $30-40 level in recent decades than the share alone would suggest.
It's interesting, because I read that and the following comment, “Most of the increase in child poverty has occurred in large families,” as almost getting the point.
The point should be, "how to we forestall demographic collapse?" Well, one way was immigration, but they're doing the opposite of that, so better make it easy to have lots of kids!
if you want to nudge people to have kids that they can’t support to solve some fertility crisis (despite automation proceeding at breakneck speed), then just ban abortion.
Would that work? It would be a strong incentive for effective contraceptive use, and some people who would have otherwise had a child later will already have one, etc.
No idea how it would all add up, but its not obviously true.
It’s not obviously true that a ban on abortion would lead to more children? Contraceptives aren’t 100% effective. The availability of contraception + abortion is absolutely going to block more children from being born than contraception alone.
And also provide incentives for marriage, which is associated with higher fertility rates.
Recently after dropping no-fault divorce, more onerous child support laws, "red flag" and other temporary protection orders that can be obtained on little more than a mere one-sided claim (David Letterman famously had one against him for "sending coded [abusive] messages through the television"), alimony that relies on old timey presumptions a divorced partner can't work, etc, the calculus is looking ever more desperate.
Nowadays marriage still has most the downsides, but the upsides are looking less and less. And even more, the contract can totally change out from under you, you are basically agreeing to a vague contract that society can arbitrarily change at any moment and all the meanwhile scream "you agreed to this" no matter that it was unilaterally changed by a 3rd party to the contract and the playout of the actual terms of the contract hidden within places like family court where it's literally illegal to release the proceedings that allow one to make a rational decision upon ("think of the privacy of the children").
> provide incentives for marriage, which is associated with higher fertility rates.
Not causally it isn’t.
I disagree with this entire social project, babies aren’t interchangeable and I don’t want to encourage more children from people whose primary blocker was child support payments. Need to encourage people who are doing well supporting themselves to have more children rather than squeezing out the tenth from two-timing Jimmy.
Please provide your evidence there is no causal association between marriage and fertility rates.
>I don’t want to encourage more children from people whose primary blocker was child support payments
A prime reason why I didn't have kids in my 20s was because I could afford the kids in marriage, but couldn't afford to spend 20% (more like 30% post tax) on child support, as I had calculated it out. And knowing divorce is always possible, not willing to risk that. The actual cost of my kid is like 10% of my income, but because I'm married I'm not forced to spend closer to 30% as a transfer payment with no check it actually goes to the child. Without poorly thought out child support laws I'd have had kids sooner, and possibly more, and the kids would likely have been better off because when I was younger I had more energy and better genetic material to produce them.
I would even assert the people thinking ahead of time about child support actually calculated in a way that achieves roughly enough to take kids out of poverty, rather than basically a % of income, are exactly the type of people that should be parents. Under the current system child support can be next to nil, or extremely high if you're high income, rather than revolving around ensuring it is actually a number and check and balance to ensure the payment and spending is to bring kids out of poverty. The current system has less child support for poverty-born children but higher for wealthy-born children, meaning the incentives are precisely backwards from incentivizing children born into higher income marriages and the CS incentives higher for higher-income families to divorce and fall back into the lower-fertility unmarried bucket.
Those are support for marriage. Despite the stereotypes, the limiting factor for marriage is women -- there are more men that want to marry than there are women. Things that lower the costs and risks of marriage for women will make marriage more common.
pretty obvious. the cause of the fertility crisis writ large is not men choosing to not have children, the entirely reply is clearly projecting some personal injustice the commentator felt into some broader social issue.
Women have risks from pretty much all the things I've mentioned.
I struggle to find any data that shows positive (increasing) correlation between modern family law and marriage rates, so I'm curious where you got your conclusion from that those things are improving women's proclivity to marry.
This was exactly my thought. Poverty reporting has gotten very weird.
While housing, food, etc costs are rising, I still also see teenagers and their parents who I know are very poorly off with $400 sneakers, wearing AirPod Pros and getting $6 lattes from Starbucks.
It's something I was discussing with a friend of mine. It's very easy to spend money in the US. It's very hard to save money. We reduce friction to consumption, but we put barriers on savings. It's also just simply skipped in school. We don't teach fiscal responsibility to most kids but they are bombarded on TV nonstop with calls for consumerism and even associating that with quality of life and people. I'm not saying they're justified in wasting their money on conspicuous spending, but it's not just solely irresponsibility. There's a whole chain of bad situations that leads to the irresponsible behavior. Good mentorship when young, good parenting, good education, these all make major differentiations and none of which have to do with the individual but everything to do with the environment they grew up in, which they did not choose. By the time they are adults, there's little choice left for them to make. Why not do something that brings immediate gratification? They can't afford to move to a better place, so they choose something that makes them feel good, at least for the short term.
I neither agree nor defend this, but I am posting just to say, it's more complicated than them being just leeches on society, like I think some comments are implying. Forgive me if I'm wrong in my assumption, but I see the argument so much without so much as a bare-minimum attempt to try to understand the others' situation.
That would be a different metric. This want to know how many people can’t afford the basics rather than how many people can’t keep up with the relative Joneses.
I'm asking why we shouldn't expect what is considered "the basics" to increase over time, as technology, aggregate wealth, etc. increases? An example to make this obvious: we should probably consider residential indoor plumbing part of "the basics" now, but of course even the richest people wouldn't have had that 500 years ago. In my view, there's no privileged point in history after which we should stop increasing our expectations for quality of life.
It's a measure of inequality, not poverty as such, sure.
But practically it's obvious just by looking at the lives of "poor" people that, yeah, they are materially still struggling. I can't speak for Britain but I can speak for the USA: if you did both the "relative poverty" analysis and the "basket of goods" analysis, you'd find a lot of overlap. Splitting hairs over how exactly poverty is defined is just being dismissive of the actual people who are actually experiencing some form of material poverty, and shifting focus away from making things better.
What social metric in particular? Also, for better or worse, social metrics are easily gamed. While a basket of goods can also be gamed, it's easier to see what's going on and to explain it to people, since it's composed of concrete goods. Also, a basket of goods can be expanded if we want to increase the baseline as living standards in society improve, which we do - a smartphone should now be part of that basket, even though they barely existed 20 years ago.
If the poverty hinders them too much in pursuing opportunities in education or work, for instance. Something like that. Something to keep an eye out for once the million kids who can't stay warm, dry, clothed and fed are taken care of.
I’m happy to just look at real median income quantiles. I don’t need it to be tied to an evocative word like ‘poverty’, I think there is still real work to be done to improve the lives of people who are in lower income brackets even if they aren’t in a situation similar to what people imagine when they think of ‘poverty.’
Its a misnomer to say British kids live in poverty. Poverty is living without access to food and education. these are guaranteed for them. If they are worried of going under dressed to school then that is not poverty.
In the UK most kids have to buy a uniform for school. I'd rather not have kids be so poor that they can't afford things that the school deems to be a requirement.
I donot want them under dressed too.
But calling kids who have access to good (probably the best?) education and very good food, poor is unacceptable to me. May be its just me.
Don't worry we (the people in the political west) are quickly reverting back to the historical norm that was also in effect during the Victorian era. Few rich people, minimal middle class and lots of poor working class people.
After all capitalism is the same as system as slavery or feudalism. Only the names of the roles are different but the dynamics in society in terms who owns capital and who own the means/result of production and who don't, are the same in every system. (Small minority who own everything)
You can debate the exact statistics all you want, but to anyone not well off right now, both in the US and the UK, it's pretty clear there's a growing cost of living crisis and governments are failing to address it. Frankly a lot of people here have no idea what living in poverty means.
After 2008, others pressed Keynesian stimulus. The UK chose Hayek. Austerity. Councils took the hit. Services vanished. Early-years centres. Youth work. Local welfare. The safety net thinned, then tore. Families slipped through.
Then Covid. Then Ukraine. Prices surged. Wages didn’t. A decade of inflation stacked up while pay stood still. For many, that was a silent pay cut.
Truss turned strain into crisis. Unfunded tax cuts. Markets panicked. Gilt yields spiked. Mortgage costs jumped overnight. Another blow to households already on the edge.
So we end up where CNN reports: record child poverty, even among full-time workers; parents unable to cover the basics as the social architecture collapses.
Into that anger steps Reform UK. They offer a protest vote. But their plan is the same old mix: deep cuts, a smaller state, and migration as the scapegoat. The very recipe that helped bring us here.
Huh? There were stimulus packages under Gordon Brown, up until 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7745340.stm
Then until 2012 the Bank of England did a lot of "quantitative easing", hundreds of billions of pounds of it, supposedly a kind of stimulus.
Children are in poverty because some people grab vastly more than their share of the world's wealth, and then they buy legislation and elections, to take even more.
A challenge is that usually, within an attempt at a fair and equitable society, some TPOS will try to be a king or billionaire, or to ride the coattails of one. The society needs to tell those people no, and get them mental health care, to heal whatever makes them act like a TPOS.
This is the fixed pie policy, which assumes there's a limited amount of wealth to go around. And therefore, any time somebody gets "too much" of it, the conclusion is they must be why others have less.
This is not true.
And it's important to understand that it's not true, because understanding a problem is the key to helping solve it.
In pre-agricultural times, the average person was lucky to own a few dozen items. Today, the average person in a developed Western country owns a few thousand goods. Western households possess over 100,000 goods on average. There's vastly more wealth than ever. Especially if you multiply these numbers by the massively expanded population of Earth compared to prehistoric times.
Therefore, it's necessarily the case that wealth can be created and not merely stolen or shared.
You're responding to the words "grab" and "take", and leading up to an argument in which wealth is created, by a Great Man, who deserves the wealth and power that He created, or else He wouldn't have incentive to create wealth?
People can collaborate to create wealth that they share.
The problem is when someone says "I am so great, that I deserve more wealth and power than other people".
Because of a bad experience in kindergarten, or because their parents told them that.
We can point fingers at the rich for making more money but really we should be hounding our government for wasting money. All the taxes and confiscation in the world won't fill this bottomless pit
Just today:
"£700m nuclear conservation plan would save one salmon every 12 years"
Both. Today's rich are wealthier than the rich of the past, but today's poor are also wealthier than the poor of the past.
It's also the case that quality of life differences have shrunk between the two groups, not because life has worsened for the rich, but because it's improved for the poor. Bill Gates' car, music, TV shows, phone, pants, meals, etc. aren't that much better than the average person's, today.
The total wealth owned by UK billionaires is estimated at a small fraction of that (£300b?). Even seizing all of it isn't going to solve anything long-term (but will create new long-term problems)
Billionaires are a symbol of unfairness, but eliminating them won't make a significant long-term difference to those at the bottom. Unless they're put out of work as all that wealth, mostly tied up in companies, is liquidated.
Billionaires are a very small group. There is far more wealth held by people with assets of, say, over £100m, or even £10m?
> Unless they're put out of work as all that wealth, mostly tied up in companies, is liquidated.
No one is going to close down profitable businesses because they have to pay more tax. The value of shares might fall a bit, that is all. I do not even think that, because money will just shift around, not disappear.
> but will create new long-term problem
I do not think it will. IMO it would be a net benefit.
Yup. And the other side has put out "A quarter of a million 11-year-olds overweight - including almost half of the poorest kids" at the same time ! Hah.
I don't know what you mean with your comment, so I want to add here for clarity that obesity is nowadays a strong sign of bad quality food, which incidentally is also the cheapest food. Or in simpler words, the bigger you are the chances there are you got there by eating junk food. Are they starving? No obviously not. Are they healthy? Also obviously not. This means an increased burden on the health system and at least some inconvenience on everything else - starting from bigger seats in the buses. And no I don't accept that my society lets them suffer and die - I'll be adding this before somebody starts suggesting things like "their fault".
You could ask the same question, why are the kings/emperors/despots and their rich oligarch friends of any given country XYZ wealthy and living luxurious lavish lives in palaces and private yachts etc while the common folks live in slums?
I find it interesting to read the threads on this topic. There is little discussion of how to fix the problem, mostly conservatives trying to disengenuously argue that the problem is somehow exagerated. This is absurd of course. What's the point of living in a developed nation if we still have large numbers of people living in poverty? The ideal outcome is that there aren't any.
"Richest" means nothing in 2025, given the UK has a great track record of not understanding what they have and selling off their prized companies and assets overseas. This decline has only accelerated since then, beyond poverty.
It's gotten to the point where this Labour government is considering an IMF loan given the dire state of the countries finances.
I predict that the UK will become a third world country by the end of 2038 if they don't reverse this urgently.
The advancement of AI, the UK is again behind and "AGI" or "ASI" will make their decline 1000x even worse before at least 2030.
That'll definitely help. But you need a certain amount of forced re-distribution to reduce relative poverty significantly below 30% because it's defined as 60% of median.
Either that or find a way to significantly reduce the number of children that people in the bottom 30% are sprogging.
Because resources are finite, and already divided amongst older generations. It's a basic flaw in economy that the older folks don't want to talk about.
Except our resources are not so finite. At least in the first world, we have plenty of food for everyone. Grocery stores throw away millions of tons of food a year. We could use that food to feed people instead of letting it go bad, but instead children will go hungry "because a profit cannot be taken from an orange."
You're right though that there is a basic flaw in the economy that older folks don't want to talk about.
Because ‘poverty’ is a moving waterline generally pretty divorced from material circumstance in developed countries.
> Around one-third of Britain’s children – about 4.5 million – now live in relative poverty, often measured as living in a household that earns below 60% of the national median income after housing costs, a government report published in April found.
It makes no sense for poverty to be a fully relative measure, it should be against a basket of goods.
That was a weak sentence, but the following one is stronger:
> One million of these children are destitute, going without their most basic needs of staying warm, dry, clothed and fed being met
This is still scandalous in a highly developed country like the UK.
Multiple causes
Cost of living, accommodation in big cities in particular. ZIRP had a lot to do with this - rents rose in line with values.
Working hours and conditions that are not family friendly.
Pressure on couples with kids to both work full time, which then means a lot of money goes on childcare so they are not that much better off (but landlords and banks are happier with the lower earnings multiple anyway) - but it boosts GDP and profits so that is fine.
A benefits system that reduces payments too rapidly when people earn. It means people keep very little of what they earn. Personally I think there is a good case for UBI as the solution.
> Around 70% of children living in poverty have at least one parent in work.
That should not be happening given there is a reasonable minimum wage.
Its not a UK only problem. The article says.
> De Schutter noted that the country conformed to a pattern of increasing inequality seen in other wealthy countries.
I think a lot of it results from a shift in attitude. The people in power increasingly think poor deserve to be poor, and that they are all "gammon" (to use the British term) and untrustworthy anyway.
Your claim is that this problem is getting worse?
Nitpick: "gammon" as a constituency refers to boomers and older Gen X, typically financially comfortable, who are declining in intellectual openness and increasing in strength of opinion. They are called "gammon" because their faces go bright pink as they rail against the EU, immigrants, woke nonsense, and the laziness of today's youth. They can come from any strata of society, but they are made by being insulated from economic reality during their intellectual decline. Their defining characteristic is that they are choleric about topics of which they know nothing, and this makes them easily led by jingoistic tubthumping.
I'm skeptical of these descriptions. Usually it's something like kids that sign up for free lunch or some survey.
You should look at something objective like underweight or households without heat.
I simply do not buy this. I don’t know the UK context very well, so cannot comment on this - but I do know the US context and we vastly inflate malnourishment numbers relative to what is actually measurable by relying on self-survey with misleading questions and overly broad criterion.
Friend of mine was gathering survey results for a kids programme in London. They take council estate kids to events and do childcare and a bunch of other stuff. When asked what they liked best, the kids kept talking about the food and how you could even have seconds. Meanwhile we’ve got food banks up and down the country struggling to keep up with demand. I know families with three kids to a room smaller than the one my youngest fills with books. I can assure you pretty is very real in London.
As I said, I don’t know the UK context. In the US context, I went to a pretty destitute public schooling system and we provided breakfast, lunch, and (to a limited subset) dinner - plus there is SNAP/EBT.
> I know families with three kids to a room smaller than the one my youngest fills with books.
Housing is much more of an issue for the very poor, at least in the US. But I don’t agree that it has gotten relatively worse on a large timescale.
I volunteer my time with Food Not Bombs. 20% of American children do not know where their next meal is coming from. Many are simultaneously overweight and malnourished, because the foodstuffs the US government subsidizes are calorically dense but nutritionally destitute.
Food banks, subsidized school meals, and SNAP/EBT prevent what would otherwise be children starving to death. As it stands though, the relief is insufficient. Many children from food insecure households have stunted growth and lifelong learning impairments from insufficient protein, calcium, etc.
Source: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
You should consider touring Appalachia, especially eastern Kentucky. The poverty there will make you think you're in a third world country.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2018/06/contempt-poo...
I grew up in this area. My parents didn't have electricity until they were teenagers. (I'm 32 for reference.)
The study's methods and definitions are described on page 10 of the full report, which can be downloaded PDF from their website: https://www.jrf.org.uk/deep-poverty-and-destitution/destitut...
It boils down to whether people can afford basic essentials like shelter, heating, lighting, and clothing. They do check their income levels. Maybe some people would lie about this, but I don't know why they would.
We know the prices of shelter, heating, lighting and clothing - and we know how much money people make. I see no need in self-id here. The equivalent of these surveys in the US place some people making six-figures in the food insecure bucket.
In the UK at least, we don't generally know how much money people make, nor how much of it goes to debts or other dependencies. Income below £10k does not have to be declared.
If you need an authoritative source, look no further than the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2025-the-essential-guide-t...
A UK organisation with treasonous, multi-generational experience, that's cited in the article, that people refuse to read or believe? Thanks for re-sharing <3
>I simply do not buy this
fair enough
>I don’t know the UK context very well
bro
So your entire case boils down to "people are lying about being poor"
You cannot trust self-survey data, I don’t know how many times this has to be hammered in.
“One-Third of Americans Making $250,000 Live Paycheck-to-Paycheck, Survey Finds” [0]
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/a-third-o...
One-Third of Americans they surveyed, or did they survey all Americans?
of Americans surveyed
Living paycheck to paycheck is not the same thing as being in poverty
Agreed, this was an example of a similar phenomenon as to why you can’t trust self-id economic situation surveys. FWIW, we see similar effects in food security surveys with six-figure households being classified as food insecure.
I can definitely see a situation where a renting single-earner six-figure household in a place like SF may require assistance. It's all about the relative cost of living and financial situation, you can't really make ground pronouncements like this without ignoring the data.
> may require assistance
Yes, depending on their family size.
But that is very different from ‘food insecure’ after receiving federal/state benefits and I do not believe that is a thing that really happens.
> a situation where a renting single-earner six-figure household in a place like SF may require assistance.
You think someone in SF earning six figures should be considered poor?
It made the news a few years back:
> Single-person households making under $105,000 a year are classified as “low income” in three Bay Area counties by California’s Department of Housing and Community Development.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/under-100k-low-income-s...
Ok I’ll answer. They are not poor.
Are you saying that based on the semantics of "poor" vs "may require assistance" vs "low income", or...? My comment has a link that's backed up by a government website.
If we look at $105k in San Francisco, minus federal, state, and local taxes, you're looking at roughly $6,400/month take home pay. If you make a budget out of that, you get $3,000 for rent, $800 for groceries, $250 for transit, $250 for medical, $150 for Internet, $600 for entertainment, $900 to retirement, and then finally $400 towards an emergency fund. If you do not have all those things in your monthly, you are poor. Now, there are certainly people who have less than that, and we could argue the semantics of being destitute, vs simply poor as colloquially defined terms, but the brackets that California’s Department of Housing and Community Development has are: acutely low, extremely low, very low, low, and moderate income.
We can use https://saul.pw/mag/wealth/ and say that even with a $105k/yr salary in SF, you're sitting at ↑3 or ↑4 or so, instead of using the emotionally loaded term poor if it would contribute to having a more thoughtful and substantive discussion.
Do you think someone earning 100,000 and who chooses to live in SF should be considered poor?
What word do you want to use? The word poor has a lot of emotional baggage. What does it mean to you for someone to be considered poor?
Do you really believe there are a million destitute starving wet and unclothed children wandering around outside in the UK? Obviously there is some gross exaggeration going on, like most of those million are "cold" because they have worn out hand-me-down jackets and maybe go without dinner sometimes, mostly because their parents are junky pieces of shit who can't be bothered to open a box of slop for the kid even though they're on government programs to pay for the food.
I don't see why parental neglect suddenly makes it okay.
Nobody said it's okay, but it's not the same thing as poverty making kids go hungry.
That's a pretty radical claim. Do you have any sources?
edit: so many downvotes from asking a simple question
Essentially nobody in the US (except the very elderly with dementia) dies from malnutrition. This would make the malnutrition profile of the US very unusual relative to other developing countries with similar rates of malnutrition as we claim on self-id survey.
The reality is that, compared to other constraints (like housing), food is widely available in the US and even if you are really struggling you can generally get food.
Our surveys classify many families making >$100k as food insecure. [0][1]
0: https://cosm.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Economic-Cha... 1: https://cosm.aei.org/why-the-usda-is-justified-in-ending-the...
There are millions of hospitalisations in the US every year where the patient is malnourished: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11613653/
From your article:
> Hospitals are incentivized to diagnose malnutrition by the Inpatient Prospective Payment System, which uses Medicare Severity Diagnosis‐Related Groups to identify a “payment weight.” When severe malnutrition is included on a patient's diagnosis list, a major complication or comorbidity (MCC) classifier is almost always added to the hospitalization claim. 5 Adding an MCC classifier increases reimbursement
If you look at the table, there is almost no relationship between income and likelihood of being marked as a malnutrition case by the hospital receiving reimbursement. (top 25% of income = 20% of cases, bottom 25% of income = 30% of cases).
The median age of these people with severe malnutrition is 70 years old. This is completely consistent with the claim I made around dementia, especially when you consider these people are repeatedly hospitalized oftentimes.
I think it's stated elsewhere that people are overweight yet malnourished due to calorie-dense but low-nutrition food. This leads to overweight health issues that can be attributed to malnutrition but don't fit the profile of "starving to death". The cause of death are other nutrition-related afflictions like diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and even some forms of cancer.
So yes, they're not bones-through-the-skin malnourished, it's more complicated than that.
We're not talking about famine, we're talking about people living in poverty? What's your argument here? That because nobody dies of malnutrition we don't have true poverty?
I was not the person who changed the conversation from ‘relative poverty’ to hunger - the person who replied to me did and I just engaged in that on the merits.
My argument is that you should expect a similar ratio between famine and malnourishment across countries if you are measuring the same thing when you use the word ‘malnourishment.’
That's disingenuous; I did not focus the conversation only on hunger.
I think it is fine for different societies to consider the poverty level to be at different places (e.g. the “poor” in the first world are nothing compared to poverty in many parts of Africa, for example).
Having said that, how do you think about poverty in Britain (or the US)? What, for you, is the poverty line?
Here's data based on absolute poverty lines
Distribution: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
Share: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-in-poverty-relative...
The share tells a story that poverty is decreasing at all levels, relatively speaking. The distribution tells the additional story that population has increased: there may be less change in the number of people at the $20-30 level and the $30-40 level in recent decades than the share alone would suggest.
It's interesting, because I read that and the following comment, “Most of the increase in child poverty has occurred in large families,” as almost getting the point.
The point should be, "how to we forestall demographic collapse?" Well, one way was immigration, but they're doing the opposite of that, so better make it easy to have lots of kids!
> Well, one way was immigration, but they're doing the opposite of that
How so? The net migration graph here shows very high levels of immigration: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisor...
if you want to nudge people to have kids that they can’t support to solve some fertility crisis (despite automation proceeding at breakneck speed), then just ban abortion.
Would that work? It would be a strong incentive for effective contraceptive use, and some people who would have otherwise had a child later will already have one, etc.
No idea how it would all add up, but its not obviously true.
It’s not obviously true that a ban on abortion would lead to more children? Contraceptives aren’t 100% effective. The availability of contraception + abortion is absolutely going to block more children from being born than contraception alone.
And also provide incentives for marriage, which is associated with higher fertility rates.
Recently after dropping no-fault divorce, more onerous child support laws, "red flag" and other temporary protection orders that can be obtained on little more than a mere one-sided claim (David Letterman famously had one against him for "sending coded [abusive] messages through the television"), alimony that relies on old timey presumptions a divorced partner can't work, etc, the calculus is looking ever more desperate.
Nowadays marriage still has most the downsides, but the upsides are looking less and less. And even more, the contract can totally change out from under you, you are basically agreeing to a vague contract that society can arbitrarily change at any moment and all the meanwhile scream "you agreed to this" no matter that it was unilaterally changed by a 3rd party to the contract and the playout of the actual terms of the contract hidden within places like family court where it's literally illegal to release the proceedings that allow one to make a rational decision upon ("think of the privacy of the children").
> provide incentives for marriage, which is associated with higher fertility rates.
Not causally it isn’t.
I disagree with this entire social project, babies aren’t interchangeable and I don’t want to encourage more children from people whose primary blocker was child support payments. Need to encourage people who are doing well supporting themselves to have more children rather than squeezing out the tenth from two-timing Jimmy.
Please provide your evidence there is no causal association between marriage and fertility rates.
>I don’t want to encourage more children from people whose primary blocker was child support payments
A prime reason why I didn't have kids in my 20s was because I could afford the kids in marriage, but couldn't afford to spend 20% (more like 30% post tax) on child support, as I had calculated it out. And knowing divorce is always possible, not willing to risk that. The actual cost of my kid is like 10% of my income, but because I'm married I'm not forced to spend closer to 30% as a transfer payment with no check it actually goes to the child. Without poorly thought out child support laws I'd have had kids sooner, and possibly more, and the kids would likely have been better off because when I was younger I had more energy and better genetic material to produce them.
I would even assert the people thinking ahead of time about child support actually calculated in a way that achieves roughly enough to take kids out of poverty, rather than basically a % of income, are exactly the type of people that should be parents. Under the current system child support can be next to nil, or extremely high if you're high income, rather than revolving around ensuring it is actually a number and check and balance to ensure the payment and spending is to bring kids out of poverty. The current system has less child support for poverty-born children but higher for wealthy-born children, meaning the incentives are precisely backwards from incentivizing children born into higher income marriages and the CS incentives higher for higher-income families to divorce and fall back into the lower-fertility unmarried bucket.
Those are support for marriage. Despite the stereotypes, the limiting factor for marriage is women -- there are more men that want to marry than there are women. Things that lower the costs and risks of marriage for women will make marriage more common.
pretty obvious. the cause of the fertility crisis writ large is not men choosing to not have children, the entirely reply is clearly projecting some personal injustice the commentator felt into some broader social issue.
Women have risks from pretty much all the things I've mentioned.
I struggle to find any data that shows positive (increasing) correlation between modern family law and marriage rates, so I'm curious where you got your conclusion from that those things are improving women's proclivity to marry.
Just another example of why the Tories have completely collapsed in support, even among their erstwhile base.
This was exactly my thought. Poverty reporting has gotten very weird.
While housing, food, etc costs are rising, I still also see teenagers and their parents who I know are very poorly off with $400 sneakers, wearing AirPod Pros and getting $6 lattes from Starbucks.
It's something I was discussing with a friend of mine. It's very easy to spend money in the US. It's very hard to save money. We reduce friction to consumption, but we put barriers on savings. It's also just simply skipped in school. We don't teach fiscal responsibility to most kids but they are bombarded on TV nonstop with calls for consumerism and even associating that with quality of life and people. I'm not saying they're justified in wasting their money on conspicuous spending, but it's not just solely irresponsibility. There's a whole chain of bad situations that leads to the irresponsible behavior. Good mentorship when young, good parenting, good education, these all make major differentiations and none of which have to do with the individual but everything to do with the environment they grew up in, which they did not choose. By the time they are adults, there's little choice left for them to make. Why not do something that brings immediate gratification? They can't afford to move to a better place, so they choose something that makes them feel good, at least for the short term.
I neither agree nor defend this, but I am posting just to say, it's more complicated than them being just leeches on society, like I think some comments are implying. Forgive me if I'm wrong in my assumption, but I see the argument so much without so much as a bare-minimum attempt to try to understand the others' situation.
> it's more complicated than them being just leeches on society, like I think some comments are implying.
Can you link which comments you are referring to?
Why doesn't it make sense to expect (or at least hope) that the quality of life increases over time for all relative income/wealth brackets?
That would be a different metric. This want to know how many people can’t afford the basics rather than how many people can’t keep up with the relative Joneses.
I'm asking why we shouldn't expect what is considered "the basics" to increase over time, as technology, aggregate wealth, etc. increases? An example to make this obvious: we should probably consider residential indoor plumbing part of "the basics" now, but of course even the richest people wouldn't have had that 500 years ago. In my view, there's no privileged point in history after which we should stop increasing our expectations for quality of life.
It's a measure of inequality, not poverty as such, sure.
But practically it's obvious just by looking at the lives of "poor" people that, yeah, they are materially still struggling. I can't speak for Britain but I can speak for the USA: if you did both the "relative poverty" analysis and the "basket of goods" analysis, you'd find a lot of overlap. Splitting hairs over how exactly poverty is defined is just being dismissive of the actual people who are actually experiencing some form of material poverty, and shifting focus away from making things better.
Not against some kind of social metric then?
What social metric in particular? Also, for better or worse, social metrics are easily gamed. While a basket of goods can also be gamed, it's easier to see what's going on and to explain it to people, since it's composed of concrete goods. Also, a basket of goods can be expanded if we want to increase the baseline as living standards in society improve, which we do - a smartphone should now be part of that basket, even though they barely existed 20 years ago.
What is a social metric?
If the poverty hinders them too much in pursuing opportunities in education or work, for instance. Something like that. Something to keep an eye out for once the million kids who can't stay warm, dry, clothed and fed are taken care of.
I’m happy to just look at real median income quantiles. I don’t need it to be tied to an evocative word like ‘poverty’, I think there is still real work to be done to improve the lives of people who are in lower income brackets even if they aren’t in a situation similar to what people imagine when they think of ‘poverty.’
Its a misnomer to say British kids live in poverty. Poverty is living without access to food and education. these are guaranteed for them. If they are worried of going under dressed to school then that is not poverty.
In the UK most kids have to buy a uniform for school. I'd rather not have kids be so poor that they can't afford things that the school deems to be a requirement.
I donot want them under dressed too. But calling kids who have access to good (probably the best?) education and very good food, poor is unacceptable to me. May be its just me.
How many kids aren’t able to attend school because they don’t have school uniforms?
It's nothing new. Regardless, today's conditions aren't nearly as bad as they used to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condition-of-England_question
But are they better than in, say, 2007?
Don't worry we (the people in the political west) are quickly reverting back to the historical norm that was also in effect during the Victorian era. Few rich people, minimal middle class and lots of poor working class people.
After all capitalism is the same as system as slavery or feudalism. Only the names of the roles are different but the dynamics in society in terms who owns capital and who own the means/result of production and who don't, are the same in every system. (Small minority who own everything)
You can debate the exact statistics all you want, but to anyone not well off right now, both in the US and the UK, it's pretty clear there's a growing cost of living crisis and governments are failing to address it. Frankly a lot of people here have no idea what living in poverty means.
Britain is a poor country with London attached to it
After 2008, others pressed Keynesian stimulus. The UK chose Hayek. Austerity. Councils took the hit. Services vanished. Early-years centres. Youth work. Local welfare. The safety net thinned, then tore. Families slipped through.
Then Covid. Then Ukraine. Prices surged. Wages didn’t. A decade of inflation stacked up while pay stood still. For many, that was a silent pay cut.
Truss turned strain into crisis. Unfunded tax cuts. Markets panicked. Gilt yields spiked. Mortgage costs jumped overnight. Another blow to households already on the edge.
So we end up where CNN reports: record child poverty, even among full-time workers; parents unable to cover the basics as the social architecture collapses.
Into that anger steps Reform UK. They offer a protest vote. But their plan is the same old mix: deep cuts, a smaller state, and migration as the scapegoat. The very recipe that helped bring us here.
Send help :-(
Huh? There were stimulus packages under Gordon Brown, up until 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7745340.stm Then until 2012 the Bank of England did a lot of "quantitative easing", hundreds of billions of pounds of it, supposedly a kind of stimulus.
Children are in poverty because some people grab vastly more than their share of the world's wealth, and then they buy legislation and elections, to take even more.
A challenge is that usually, within an attempt at a fair and equitable society, some TPOS will try to be a king or billionaire, or to ride the coattails of one. The society needs to tell those people no, and get them mental health care, to heal whatever makes them act like a TPOS.
This is the fixed pie policy, which assumes there's a limited amount of wealth to go around. And therefore, any time somebody gets "too much" of it, the conclusion is they must be why others have less.
This is not true.
And it's important to understand that it's not true, because understanding a problem is the key to helping solve it.
In pre-agricultural times, the average person was lucky to own a few dozen items. Today, the average person in a developed Western country owns a few thousand goods. Western households possess over 100,000 goods on average. There's vastly more wealth than ever. Especially if you multiply these numbers by the massively expanded population of Earth compared to prehistoric times.
Therefore, it's necessarily the case that wealth can be created and not merely stolen or shared.
You're responding to the words "grab" and "take", and leading up to an argument in which wealth is created, by a Great Man, who deserves the wealth and power that He created, or else He wouldn't have incentive to create wealth?
People can collaborate to create wealth that they share.
The problem is when someone says "I am so great, that I deserve more wealth and power than other people".
Because of a bad experience in kindergarten, or because their parents told them that.
We can point fingers at the rich for making more money but really we should be hounding our government for wasting money. All the taxes and confiscation in the world won't fill this bottomless pit
Just today:
"£700m nuclear conservation plan would save one salmon every 12 years"
My question is: does this tax money get spent on the poor, or is making the rich richer?
Both. Today's rich are wealthier than the rich of the past, but today's poor are also wealthier than the poor of the past.
It's also the case that quality of life differences have shrunk between the two groups, not because life has worsened for the rich, but because it's improved for the poor. Bill Gates' car, music, TV shows, phone, pants, meals, etc. aren't that much better than the average person's, today.
The UK government spends £1.3 trillion per year.
The total wealth owned by UK billionaires is estimated at a small fraction of that (£300b?). Even seizing all of it isn't going to solve anything long-term (but will create new long-term problems)
Billionaires are a symbol of unfairness, but eliminating them won't make a significant long-term difference to those at the bottom. Unless they're put out of work as all that wealth, mostly tied up in companies, is liquidated.
Billionaires are a very small group. There is far more wealth held by people with assets of, say, over £100m, or even £10m?
> Unless they're put out of work as all that wealth, mostly tied up in companies, is liquidated.
No one is going to close down profitable businesses because they have to pay more tax. The value of shares might fall a bit, that is all. I do not even think that, because money will just shift around, not disappear.
> but will create new long-term problem
I do not think it will. IMO it would be a net benefit.
> Billionaires are a very small group. There is far more wealth held by people with assets of, say, over £100m, or even £10m?
Which is precisely why we can't 'eliminate billionaires'.
Because before long it's a push for full-on communism, and even owning £100k is too much.
And unless you can destroy capitalism on a global scale, there'll always be countries eager to take in very wealthy people.
Article perfectly timed to justify the UK Budget in two days, where they will raise taxes.
There were rumours they would remove the 2 child cap on child benefit
By raising taxes to everybody else
That became more than just rumours yesterday but we shall see. I'd say it's very very likely personally
Yup. And the other side has put out "A quarter of a million 11-year-olds overweight - including almost half of the poorest kids" at the same time ! Hah.
I don't know what you mean with your comment, so I want to add here for clarity that obesity is nowadays a strong sign of bad quality food, which incidentally is also the cheapest food. Or in simpler words, the bigger you are the chances there are you got there by eating junk food. Are they starving? No obviously not. Are they healthy? Also obviously not. This means an increased burden on the health system and at least some inconvenience on everything else - starting from bigger seats in the buses. And no I don't accept that my society lets them suffer and die - I'll be adding this before somebody starts suggesting things like "their fault".
Because the wealth is not distributed evenly.
You could ask the same question, why are the kings/emperors/despots and their rich oligarch friends of any given country XYZ wealthy and living luxurious lavish lives in palaces and private yachts etc while the common folks live in slums?
If you're getting the paywall on cnn, you can either disable javascript, or replace "www." in the url with "lite."
https://lite.cnn.com/2025/11/24/uk/britain-child-poverty-int...
This is amazing. Thank you for this.
I prefer the paywall.
I find it interesting to read the threads on this topic. There is little discussion of how to fix the problem, mostly conservatives trying to disengenuously argue that the problem is somehow exagerated. This is absurd of course. What's the point of living in a developed nation if we still have large numbers of people living in poverty? The ideal outcome is that there aren't any.
"Richest" means nothing in 2025, given the UK has a great track record of not understanding what they have and selling off their prized companies and assets overseas. This decline has only accelerated since then, beyond poverty.
It's gotten to the point where this Labour government is considering an IMF loan given the dire state of the countries finances.
I predict that the UK will become a third world country by the end of 2038 if they don't reverse this urgently.
The advancement of AI, the UK is again behind and "AGI" or "ASI" will make their decline 1000x even worse before at least 2030.
Capitalism.
> Capitalism
That'll definitely help. But you need a certain amount of forced re-distribution to reduce relative poverty significantly below 30% because it's defined as 60% of median.
Either that or find a way to significantly reduce the number of children that people in the bottom 30% are sprogging.
Also, nobody was gay during communism in the Soviet Union, and the disabled were invisible.
The answer is buried 2/3rds of the way through the article.
Yes, that's how articles work.
It's actually not how it works in good journalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
We all decided we want to have free journalism (A.K.A. paid by ads), there's a conflict there. Keep the reader scrolling past more ads.
>We all decided
When exactly were we given a choice?
Because resources are finite, and already divided amongst older generations. It's a basic flaw in economy that the older folks don't want to talk about.
> Because resources are finite
Would you agree that civilization has more resources today than 50 years ago, 500 years ago, 5000 years ago?
Except our resources are not so finite. At least in the first world, we have plenty of food for everyone. Grocery stores throw away millions of tons of food a year. We could use that food to feed people instead of letting it go bad, but instead children will go hungry "because a profit cannot be taken from an orange."
You're right though that there is a basic flaw in the economy that older folks don't want to talk about.
Because governments are best at wasting resources. It's a classic example of "not your money spent on not yourself"=maximum waste.
Because markets are best at concentrating wealth.
Exactly, there is a reason the pre-market feudal period is known as the ‘great flattening’ of wealth and hierarchy.