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The poor you shall always have with you
Dec. 16th, 2011 09:35 amThere seems to me to be a conflation of the issues of poverty and inequality. These are different things, and fixing one does not necessarily help the other. First, poverty tends to be measured as income, and inequality tends to be measured as wealth. But ignoring that, you could halve the consumption of the top 1% without making a damn bit of difference in the lives of the poor. Or you could double the income of the bottom 20%, and it still wouldn't noticeably impact measures of inequality.
But, more frustratingly, it wouldn't make a difference in the official poverty percentage either. Government statistics define poverty relative to the spending of a family in a certain percentile. While this doesn't fix the poverty percentage at the exact same number forever, because you can have a lumpy curve, it does make it impossible to eliminate, or even particularly make progress against, poverty, as defined by the government.
If someone came to me with some charts and graphs showing "people require X, Y, and Z to reach goal A, which is what we've established as the minimum a human being should live at. X + Y + Z cost $n, we should make sure everyone has at least $n", I could probably be talked into it. I could definitely be talked into it if A was defined as "the threshold at which hard work and other virtues are rewarded" a.k.a. the amount necessary to keep people out of a sick system. $n would still move around, because new things (like cars or computers) become necessary (raising n), but then get cheaper (lowering n). Although this still wouldn't change the measured poverty rate, because that does not count government benefits as income, which means at every government program to decrease poverty by dispensing money fails by definition (same source as above).
But, more frustratingly, it wouldn't make a difference in the official poverty percentage either. Government statistics define poverty relative to the spending of a family in a certain percentile. While this doesn't fix the poverty percentage at the exact same number forever, because you can have a lumpy curve, it does make it impossible to eliminate, or even particularly make progress against, poverty, as defined by the government.
If someone came to me with some charts and graphs showing "people require X, Y, and Z to reach goal A, which is what we've established as the minimum a human being should live at. X + Y + Z cost $n, we should make sure everyone has at least $n", I could probably be talked into it. I could definitely be talked into it if A was defined as "the threshold at which hard work and other virtues are rewarded" a.k.a. the amount necessary to keep people out of a sick system. $n would still move around, because new things (like cars or computers) become necessary (raising n), but then get cheaper (lowering n). Although this still wouldn't change the measured poverty rate, because that does not count government benefits as income, which means at every government program to decrease poverty by dispensing money fails by definition (same source as above).
