> 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.
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!
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").
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.
>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.
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.
No idea how it would all add up, but its not obviously true.
How so? The net migration graph here shows very high levels of immigration: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisor...
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.
> 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.
“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...
You think someone in SF earning six figures should be considered poor?
> 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...
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.
if life in a place is expensive, and jobs in the same area do not pay enough to cover those expenses, then a person with that job in that area is poor.
I would love to see a sample of a handful of cases of these 100k earners who we should consider poor and in need of assistance to make ends meet.
- East Bay (El Cerrito, Richmond, Concord, Walnut Creek, Martinez)
- North Bay (Petaluma, Novato, Vallejo, Santa Rosa)
Within 90mins:
- South Bay (Milpitas, South San Jose, Morgan Hill, Gilroy)
This one throwaway is basically holding up your entire argument. This is just an assumption, and one you won't be able to substantiate.
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.
That's funny. Because I lived in Peckham for a decade, and it's obvious to me that money is fucking fucking tight for a lot of working families.
It's obvious to me that zero-hour contracts have massively reduced labour power.
It's obvious to me that energy bills are crippling.
It's obvious to me that there has been galloping inflation over the last decade.
It's obvious to me that all food has become more expensive since Brexit, notably including fresh fruit and veg.
It's obvious to me that rent is increasing faster than wages, and that it's well over 50% of income for millions of households.
It's obvious to me that benefits can be speciously cut at any moment, by policy of "climate of hostility", leaving a recipient unable to cover bills for a month while they take time off work and chid care to bang their heads on the bureaucracy.
When I say "obvious", I mean it literally: these things are in plain sight. When you say it, what I understand you to mean is that you have strong preconceptions making your blind. Could you kindly not Marie Antoinette in my country, thanks ever so.
edit: so many downvotes from asking a simple question
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...
Having said that, how do you think about poverty in Britain (or the US)? What, for you, is the poverty line?
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.’
> 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.
This article is not free to access but focuses on children: https://www.jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(22)00315-X/abs...
It found around 6.4% of child hospital admissions were diagnosed with malnutrition in 2019.
This other article says there were around 1.6 million child hospital admissions in 2019, suggesting around 100k cases of malnutrition in hospital admissions: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10616761/
Some of that will be due to newborn feeding difficulties, e.g. babies with tongue-tie or a challenging latch. But most parents will usually find a way to feed their baby before it gets to the hospitalisation stage.
So yes, they're not bones-through-the-skin malnourished, it's more complicated than that.
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.
https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2025-the-essential-guide-t...
> 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.
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...
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.)
It seems to me this may be one part of the problem. De-industrialisation means people in developed nations have surged towards cities because that is where most jobs are. But lower paid jobs just don't pay enough to support a reasonable life for a poor family in London. It would be far easier support a family on a minimum wage job in the NW or NE of the UK than in London. But there don't seem to be enough jobs to do that.
Additionally, and I say this admitting I am speaking from a position of relative ignorance, there are a huge number of non UK born immigrants, living in state subsidised housing in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I don't fully understand why this is, but maybe it is because people are placed close to other family, maybe because of jobs.
As an immigrant to the UK myself, I'm aware that I should be very sensitive to criticisms of the system, but it does feel weird to have more than 50% of social housing in the capital allocated to people not born in the country. Please take this comment with as much charity as you can, I fully admit I am not close to the reasons for this.
It's worth adding the context that more than two thirds of that 50% have a British passport [0], and that around 40% of London's population is foreign-born [1]. This is more a natural product of circumstance than it is anything to do with preferring immigrants over British-born individuals.
[0] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/fact-check-foreigne...
fair enough
>I don’t know the UK context very well
bro
If a child is obese, they are not necessarily nourished. They might very well be deficient in multiple vital minerals and vitamins, and could be paying the price in terms of their thinking ability, strength, growth potential, and overall health.
The US is actually a perfect example of this. Our government subsidized food, a lot, but a lot of that is corn. Most ultra-processed corn products are essentially nutritionally worthless.
You should look at something objective like underweight or households without heat.
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.
of course, it's relative to their starting point, but on average it's true. it's really not hard to measure that.
I don't use Facebook, lol. You just defined yourself by checking off all the usual liberal talking points and practically claiming that conservatives are old and brain-addled simpletons. There was no nuance afforded to conservative views anywhere in it.
>The axis is not leave/remain or pro/anti-immigration, it's having an interest in nuance versus settling for simplistic answers.
There are simple wrong answers and nuanced wrong answers, and the left employs both kinds of narrative to achieve their ends. I do have nuanced views but I refuse to take part in further fence-sitting and waffling when it comes to issues that affect me.
> liberals are in favor of practically unlimited immigration
Do you think "liberals" (are you from the UK btw?) are in favour of 5 billion people immigrating to the UK? Of course not. They just disagree that the current levels of immigration are as big a problem as right-wing media makes out.
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.
Endless growth on a finite planet is impossible. And we aren't prioritising expanding beyond the one planet.
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.
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.
Can you link which comments you are referring to?
When exactly were we given a choice?
Kids don't play outside and ride bikes for miles like the used too. They just stare at screens.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Why? It does not follow at all.
> And unless you can destroy capitalism on a global scale, there'll always be countries eager to take in very wealthy people.
So what? Let them take them. There are few consequences of that because non-financial assets are mostly not portable.
Just today:
"£700m nuclear conservation plan would save one salmon every 12 years"
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.
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.
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.
There is no such dichotomy.
On one hand, markets and incentives work. When people can earn and gain more, by providing more value to their fellow man, people do work more + smarter + better + provide more value to their fellow man. This is not speculative or just a theory, this is an actual fact that has been observed for hundreds of years across dozens of societies. This has nothing to do with some moral imperative about what people "deserve". It's just pure incentive -- it's better for society as a whole if you incentivize people to work and provide services, to create new technology, to complete engineering projects, etc etc. We absolutely should give people more money if they create more value.
On the flip side, of course these people aren't 100.000% responsible for their own success, and completely entitled to all the profits, or deserving of holding all the power in society. If you build a fortune in a capitalist, market-driven economy, that's almost certainly only possible because you are making good use of the economic and political "rails" that have been laid before you and that made this possible. For example, your country almost certainly has a police force and a military that can protect the safety of you and your business. It almost certainly has a judicial branch that have created legal frameworks to limit your liability and allow you to take entrepreneurial or scientific risks. Etc. Pretty much everybody agrees with this. Which is why every western country has a progressive taxation system that taxes the rich at higher rates than the poor or middle class. In the United States, for example, the top 1% of earners paid 40% of the nation's income tax.
In a world of two people, where today I have one piece of bread and you have two, then tomorrow I have two pieces of bread and you have 10, I am worse off.
And this is where we fundamentally disagree. I think the important measurement is how much pie the average person has. I think the important measurement is how much pie the people with the least pie have.
> In a world of two people, where today I have one piece of bread and you have two, then tomorrow I have two pieces of bread and you have 10, I am worse off.
If you think you're worse off in a world where you have twice as much stuff, just because your neighbor got more than you, to me, that speaks more to a psychological problem.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a safe, happy, secure, abundant, middle-class environment in the 90's. Meanwhile, Bill Gates was accumulating billions of dollars, more than 10,000x what my parents made. Despite that, I was happy, I did not feel worse off than middle class kids from generations before me, and I would certainly not trade away 50% of the fortunate childhood I had just to see Bill Gates cut down to size.
It's a huge problem for the obvious reasons. Nobody wants a country where only the rich people have a say, or have influence, or wield political power, or own all the land. Because this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the rich then bend the rules to favor themselves. For example, I personally think it's ridiculous that we need a lower capital gains income tax rate to "spur investment." Investment was just fine back when capital gains rates were the same as normal income tax rates, and I see this as a way for the rich to just benefit themselves.
That said, a system where the wealthy benefit is partly intentional. The whole idea of incentivizing people to earn wealth is that the wealth should be useful. It only works if it's useful. If extra wealth doesn't allow one to buy more land, or exert more power, or gain more attention, or live more comfortably, then it's pointless and does not serve its purposes as an incentive. This is literally the entire point of it. The issue is not that it happened, it's the degree to which it happens.
My fear with #1 is that the degree of difference will be too much. This is absolutely something to keep in check. It's a tough problem to solve. But on the flip side, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Any political or financial system that we have is going to have some inefficiencies and some disadvantages.
My fear with #2 is that people have lost the plot, and believe so firmly in "equality of outcomes" that they can't stomach any amount of inequality. Some inequality is okay! We're never going to have a completely equal world, and that's okay. I had a happy, safe, abundant middle-class upbringing, and it didn't bother me one bit that Bill Gates is a billionaire.
I believe the only way forward that won't always lead to large scale war and destruction is to come up with a system that does not allow any amount of concentrated power. That means as close to zero wealth inequality as we can get while keeping a functioning economy. But for that we'd first need better ways to make decisions collectively, as political power can't have any centralization either.
Also, most industries aren't winner-take-all. There is constant disruption, new entrants, etc. Very few huge companies last 100 or even 50 yers. And the vast majority of all companies are small. We have more artists than ever, more entrepreneurs than ever. Media has fragmented more today than ever before.
But my biggest concern with thought experiments like this is with throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Poverty is decreasing at a rapid rate, quality of life is improving, widespread famine has been largely eliminated, major warfare has maintained historic lows for 70+ years, technology is rapidly bringing education + communication + entertainment + transportation + medicine to more people than ever at cheaper prices than ever. We've essentially solved most of humanity's biggest problems with our current systems. Why press "reset" on all of that, just to eliminate a much smaller problem (some rich people having more than the rest of us)?
The comment you replied to made no such argument, that the pie is fixed.
And you can look up how big slice of the pie the ultra rich are having…
I don’t understand why you are bringing up pre agrarian society.
That is literally the fixed pie fallacy.
Nobody is arguing that extreme inequality is a good thing, but to say that child poverty exists due to other people literally taking their "share" of the wealth is untrue.
In fact, it's generally the opposite. The forces that are allowing people to get bigger slices of a bigger pie (investments in science, engineering, and technology, driven by market competition) are also what are driving the pie to increase in size, and giving more pie to everyone.
Global poverty has been decreasing at an incredible rate. Widespread famine has disappeared. There's more cheap access to transportation, medicine, food, and entertainment than ever before. Almost everyone's pie is increasing.
I don't understand why you would prefer a world in which people have less pie, just so it could be more equal to others' pie.
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)
Would you agree that civilization has more resources today than 50 years ago, 500 years ago, 5000 years ago?
We transform raw materials and come up with ideas and combine things in new ways that are more than what earth provides.
We create wealth.
You're right though that there is a basic flaw in the economy that older folks don't want to talk about.
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?
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.
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 :-(
The UK chose both. Vast amounts of QE and correlated ZIRP. Additionally austerity.
IncreasePosts•2mo ago
https://lite.cnn.com/2025/11/24/uk/britain-child-poverty-int...
llamasushi•2mo ago
pluralmonad•2mo ago