Quick, quick, we need another recession to reduce poverty!

Get the government onto it, stat!

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation tells us of just horrible poverty in the UK. Except, of course, what they are talking about is not poverty at all. It’s inequality.

Now, yes, inequality is something to at least think about, Adam Smith and his linen shirt and all that (not being able to afford a linen shirt does not make you poor. Except, if you live in a society where not being able to afford a linen shirt is regarded as a mark of poverty then in that society if you are linen-shirtless then you are poor in that society). But that is inequality within that society, not poverty in the sense of the absolute poverty still out there in other parts of the world, that $1.90 a day stuff still suffered by some 700 million people.

The distinction is right there in the JRF report:

It might sound very surprising that measured levels of poverty fell in the first year of the pandemic. This is likely due to changes to overall incomes, policy choices and how the pandemic affected population groups differently. A falling average income caused the relative poverty line to drop.

Poverty, in the definition used, is being at less than 60% of median income suitably adjusted for household size, housing costs and so on. If median income drops but low end incomes don’t - given that low end incomes are largely benefits they don’t - then poverty, by this definition, drops in a recession.

We’re all poorer but poverty falls. This isn’t a good way to measure poverty, is it? Because the simplest and most obvious way of reducing poverty by this measure is to have a good and hard recession. Which is, as a policy recommendation, positively insane.

Despite observation of Whitehall and Westminster over the decades we are really still quite sure that positive insanity is not a useful basis for policy. Even if it has been that basis, it’s not useful. Therefore we need to stop using this measure of poverty, don’t we?