Owen Jones and statistics

It’s not entirely obvious that Owen Jones manages to understand the numbers he uses to support his prejudices:

Not only is the private rented sector chronically lacking in security, it is a rip-off: if they’re on gross median pay in London, young people can expect to hand over nearly half of their pre-tax earnings to a landlord.

Well, no, not really:

In every London borough the average rent for a one-bedroom house or flat on the private market is at least 30% of median pre-tax pay in London. The average across the capital is that a one-bedroom dwelling cost the equivalent of almost half (46.4%) the gross-median pay in London.

It is the median household that pays such a portion of the median individual income. The average (mean, median or mode) household size is greater than one person. This before we even start to think about several people doing a flat- or house- share on a larger property.

We’d also be hard put to think of any time in the past when a one bedroomed dwelling has been an expected part - for single and sole occupancy - of the young Londoner’s experience. It never was true of even those heady days of council housing as the single and lone individual never did gain access to such - not without subletting they didn’t.

Even then the statistic is nonsense as that very claim about median rents means that half the properties out there are cheaper than that. Oh, and when measuring affordability we should be using the - much higher - mean income anyway.

Still, how would it be possible to show that the UK’s neoliberal economy was such a failure if one had to rely upon truth and accuracy? Answer us that one.