Child Poverty

I dealt with this back in 2007 but like an annoying weed look what popped up in my news feed.

Choice cuts:

The annual study into poverty laid bare how thousands of children cannot afford basic treats

More than half a million children do not celebrate their birthday or special occasion because of lack of money

with 31 per cent of all children [...] unable to take a week's holiday with their family.

The poverty line is defined as when a household's income, after tax, is worth 60 per cent or less of the national median income

Yeesh they're not even bothering to hide their shoddy definitions any more are they. Oh no we only have enough money to put a roof over our heads and keep our family fed poor old us.

Honestly 60% or less of the median income, we can only be thankful they didn't go for average.

For those still hazy on statistics the median is the imaginary point where you can split whatever it is you're measuring into two equal portions. So in this case the income where half the households earn more and half earn less.

Then they take 60% of this figure (because 60 is magical, no I don't know why it's 60) and that's the poverty figure. So something that starts off almost rational becomes less rational.

Because the poverty is only relative to everyone else in that country. Try telling some kid in Zimbabwe that technically he's better off than some kid in Britain and see what happens.

Now in order to show how silly this is I was going to plot the data of household income to show exactly how far off from the magic 60.1% target they are and then demonstrate what the plot would have to look like to have no-one below that 60% figure. Except there's no data. Oh well there is data but it's been handily bundled up ready for us and I want it raw. Take this for example, handy eh? Except without the raw data behind it there's nothing I can do with it.

Again for those hazy quintiles are similar to the median but split by 20% rather than 50%, think 100 people lined up in order of income then stick a flag between each group of 20.

So I can't find any data that hasn't already been averaged or split by county or basically re-presented from the raw, heck even a simple 0-£1000, £1001- £5000 with number of households would do, but nope we've just shown the end figures.

[Update - Wikipedia does give me household income figures for the USA. Taking these figures as read and using the same poverty line we get a figure of $26,633 which means roughly 30% of all households are in 'poverty'. If we want to raise them all above the line (and assuming every household's income is the maximum for that group) the USA would need to find roughly $373bn dollars a year to give to them. Yeah I can see that happening.]