We can’t say we’re surprised by child poverty

Torsten Bell rather gives the game away:

….concerns not just of 1990s politicians but of anti-poverty campaigners too: the two great and equal evils to be alleviated were pensioner poverty and child poverty. The inequality surge of the 1980s had left both sky-high…

Our measure of poverty is a relative one - that is, it’s a measure of inequality, not poverty. Formally, living in a household with less than 60% of median household income when adjusted for household size (and can be measured before or after housing costs).

There are two results of this, one from Torsten:

….while, in contrast, child deprivation has stayed stubbornly high: 30% in Britain today are growing up in poverty.

Note how the description changes. From relative poverty to deprivation - these are not, in the slightest, the same things. The other from Gordon Brown:

Chatting to her as the boxes are piled into the back seats is former prime minister Gordon Brown, one of the multibank’s driving forces, who has emerged as a leading campaigner against a child poverty crisis he fears is not receiving the attention it deserves.

Child poverty crisis might be overdoing it. For some portion of this is simply an artefact of how we’re measuring poverty - that relative measure.

We do not insist that this is all of it but we absolutely do insist that this is some part of it. Which is that if we use median household income as our measure then we’re missing an important part of the lifecycle.

It’s simply a truth that income tends to rise with age - experience at work, skills and so on. Things like teaching and nursing incomes, for example, are deliberately designed (with pay bands based upon experience) to rise with age and experience.

Having children tends to come earlier in life than peak earning years. Therefore the median income of those having children is going to be lower than the median income of the working population. This is simply inevitable when we measure poverty relative to median population income but those having children are going to be younger than the general population. Therefore incomes among the childrearing population are going to be lower, on average, than among the general.

Sure, of course, we can all decide we want to do something about this. Or not, as the case may be. But we do still insist that at least some of this idea of child poverty is simply because the population raising children is going to be younger than the general in a society where incomes tend to rise with age. At which point how badly do we want to do anything about this?