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Almost ten years ago now - doesn't time fly when you're having fun? - I stuck up a post on these pages ridiculing the idea of relative poverty. At the time, relative poverty - that is the idea that if your household income is lower than 60% of the median then you are in poverty - was quite the political idea. My thought on it was that it was a bloody awful system of measuring anything because by using it as a methodology it is perfectly possible to reduce the incidence of relative poverty by making better-off people poorer whilst having precisely no effect on the standard of living of the people at the bottom. I recall that at the time I got told I was wrong by all the people who used to be fans of Tony Blair and are now jolly quiet about that period in their lives, but it's interesting to note that since the 2008 crash precisely what I was criticising has actually happened - incomes have fallen and as a result the incidence of relative poverty has also fallen in the UK. Not because of any increase in living standards, but because incomes overall have declined. I'd make a pithy observation about how this is what happens when you pursue 'fairness' as an agenda at the expense of economic credibility, but I've done that before and I wouldn't want to bore you by being right about it all over again.
Anyway, as a result we don't hear that much about relative poverty any more. Instead, the measure is now based on how, if you spend more than a proportion - usually 10% - of your income on something, you are said to be in poverty. So if you spend 10% of more of income on fuel, you are in fuel poverty, or 10% or more on food, then you are in food poverty and so forth.
Now that interests me. I recently spent a goodly amount of my time researching a book about Britain in the 1920s, and one interesting statistic I came across was how much people spent on food. Due to a lack of preservative methods, wastage, no refrigeration, lower crop yields and so forth, food was more expensive ninety years ago. Considerably more expensive, as it happens. In 1923, an affluent middle-class household could expect to spend up to 25% of their income on food.
As a figure, that really jumped out at me. It's one of those signposts of just how much life has improved for everyone in the last century. Less than a hundred years ago, spending a quarter of your income on nosh was pretty much normal. Now, spending 10% of your income on nosh is considered a red flag for intervention by the social services and a hand-wringing article by Owen Jones. Thanks to improvements in production and the supply chain, the price of a food calorie has plummetted over the period and is still doing so - it's no coincidence that when I was little the news would always be full of famines in places like North Africa, India and South East Asia, and now the only place in the world where obesity isn't a pressing public health concern is sub-Saharan Africa. It's a triumph of human ingenuity and the march of technology.
That aside, the other thing which struck me is the idea that if more than 10% of your income goes out on a single thing then you are considered to be in poverty because of it. The reason that got my attention was because of an article I read a while ago in The Economist (I think), which observed that if you tot up all the varied ways the government slurps cash out of your pocket - income tax, Ni, Vat, taxes on fuel and rates and savings and pensions and so on, the average UK taxpayer coughs out some 54% of their income in tax.
54% of income expended as tax? I thought to myself. That is a lot. I was wondering if anyone could help me come up with a snappy catchphrase to describe this state of affairs? I'm thinking it should be maybe two words, but what they might be escapes me for the moment.
Anyway, as a result we don't hear that much about relative poverty any more. Instead, the measure is now based on how, if you spend more than a proportion - usually 10% - of your income on something, you are said to be in poverty. So if you spend 10% of more of income on fuel, you are in fuel poverty, or 10% or more on food, then you are in food poverty and so forth.
Now that interests me. I recently spent a goodly amount of my time researching a book about Britain in the 1920s, and one interesting statistic I came across was how much people spent on food. Due to a lack of preservative methods, wastage, no refrigeration, lower crop yields and so forth, food was more expensive ninety years ago. Considerably more expensive, as it happens. In 1923, an affluent middle-class household could expect to spend up to 25% of their income on food.
As a figure, that really jumped out at me. It's one of those signposts of just how much life has improved for everyone in the last century. Less than a hundred years ago, spending a quarter of your income on nosh was pretty much normal. Now, spending 10% of your income on nosh is considered a red flag for intervention by the social services and a hand-wringing article by Owen Jones. Thanks to improvements in production and the supply chain, the price of a food calorie has plummetted over the period and is still doing so - it's no coincidence that when I was little the news would always be full of famines in places like North Africa, India and South East Asia, and now the only place in the world where obesity isn't a pressing public health concern is sub-Saharan Africa. It's a triumph of human ingenuity and the march of technology.
That aside, the other thing which struck me is the idea that if more than 10% of your income goes out on a single thing then you are considered to be in poverty because of it. The reason that got my attention was because of an article I read a while ago in The Economist (I think), which observed that if you tot up all the varied ways the government slurps cash out of your pocket - income tax, Ni, Vat, taxes on fuel and rates and savings and pensions and so on, the average UK taxpayer coughs out some 54% of their income in tax.
54% of income expended as tax? I thought to myself. That is a lot. I was wondering if anyone could help me come up with a snappy catchphrase to describe this state of affairs? I'm thinking it should be maybe two words, but what they might be escapes me for the moment.
