That was a weak sentence, but the following one is stronger:
> 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.
Multiple causes
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.
Your claim is that this problem is getting worse?
Nitpick: "gammon" as a constituency refers to boomers and older Gen X, typically financially comfortable, who are declining in intellectual openness and increasing in strength of opinion. They are called "gammon" because their faces go bright pink as they rail against the EU, immigrants, woke nonsense, and the laziness of today's youth. They can come from any strata of society, but they are made by being insulated from economic reality during their intellectual decline. Their defining characteristic is that they are choleric about topics of which they know nothing, and this makes them easily led by jingoistic tubthumping.
I simply do not buy this. I don’t know the UK context very well, so cannot comment on this - but I do know the US context and we vastly inflate malnourishment numbers relative to what is actually measurable by relying on self-survey with misleading questions and overly broad criterion.
Friend of mine was gathering survey results for a kids programme in London. They take council estate kids to events and do childcare and a bunch of other stuff. When asked what they liked best, the kids kept talking about the food and how you could even have seconds. Meanwhile we’ve got food banks up and down the country struggling to keep up with demand. I know families with three kids to a room smaller than the one my youngest fills with books. I can assure you pretty is very real in London.
As I said, I don’t know the UK context. In the US context, I went to a pretty destitute public schooling system and we provided breakfast, lunch, and (to a limited subset) dinner - plus there is SNAP/EBT.
> 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.
I volunteer my time with Food Not Bombs. 20% of American children do not know where their next meal is coming from. Many are simultaneously overweight and malnourished, because the foodstuffs the US government subsidizes are calorically dense but nutritionally destitute.
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...
You should consider touring Appalachia, especially eastern Kentucky. The poverty there will make you think you're in a third world country.
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.)
The study's methods and definitions are described on page 10 of the full report, which can be downloaded PDF from their website: https://www.jrf.org.uk/deep-poverty-and-destitution/destitut...
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.
We know the prices of shelter, heating, lighting and clothing - and we know how much money people make. I see no need in self-id here. The equivalent of these surveys in the US place some people making six-figures in the food insecure bucket.
In the UK at least, we don't generally know how much money people make, nor how much of it goes to debts or other dependencies. Income below £10k does not have to be declared.
If you need an authoritative source, look no further than the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2025-the-essential-guide-t...
A UK organisation with treasonous, multi-generational experience, that's cited in the article, that people refuse to read or believe? Thanks for re-sharing <3
>I simply do not buy this
fair enough
>I don’t know the UK context very well
bro
So your entire case boils down to "people are lying about being poor"
You cannot trust self-survey data, I don’t know how many times this has to be hammered in.
“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...
One-Third of Americans they surveyed, or did they survey all Americans?
of Americans surveyed
Living paycheck to paycheck is not the same thing as being in poverty
Agreed, this was an example of a similar phenomenon as to why you can’t trust self-id economic situation surveys. FWIW, we see similar effects in food security surveys with six-figure households being classified as food insecure.
I can definitely see a situation where a renting single-earner six-figure household in a place like SF may require assistance. It's all about the relative cost of living and financial situation, you can't really make ground pronouncements like this without ignoring the data.
> may require assistance
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.
> a situation where a renting single-earner six-figure household in a place like SF may require assistance.
You think someone in SF earning six figures should be considered poor?
It made the news a few years back:
> 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...
Ok I’ll answer. They are not poor.
Are you saying that based on the semantics of "poor" vs "may require assistance" vs "low income", or...? My comment has a link that's backed up by a government website.
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.
Do you think someone earning 100,000 and who chooses to live in SF should be considered poor?
don't they choose to live in SF because that's where they got the job? if they would move they would lose the job, because you generally can't take your job with you. (remote work being the exception)
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 don't know whether you've been to San Francisco, but most (about all?) people who can get a 100k job in SF has quite a bit of mobility w.r.t. where they could live or who they work for.
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.
how long would the commute be though. if you have to spend more than two hours commuting each day in order to afford living with the money you earn in SF then i'd see that as a problem.
Within 1 hour commute that you could live comfortably on 100k:
- 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)
What word do you want to use? The word poor has a lot of emotional baggage. What does it mean to you for someone to be considered poor?
They’re uncomfortable, but not poor.
Thank you for that. That was a lot of back and forth to get there though.
Do you really believe there are a million destitute starving wet and unclothed children wandering around outside in the UK? Obviously there is some gross exaggeration going on, like most of those million are "cold" because they have worn out hand-me-down jackets and maybe go without dinner sometimes, mostly because their parents are junky pieces of shit who can't be bothered to open a box of slop for the kid even though they're on government programs to pay for the food.
> Obviously
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.
I don't see why parental neglect suddenly makes it okay.
Nobody said it's okay, but it's not the same thing as poverty making kids go hungry.
So? One million kids going without food, shelter or warmth is scandalous. It's scandalous if it's because welfare payments are too low. It's scandalous if it's because we're failing to identify neglect. Scandalous either way.
Why would a story about parental neglect be framed with discussion about Britain being one of the wealthiest countries, if not to deflect blame from neglectful parents onto society as a whole by insinuating that not enough money is spent?
I mean I agree that that's not the perceived thrust of the article. However, parental neglect is largely a product of the environment. Parents rarely just naturally don't care for their children. There's usually other factors; stress, debt, addiction, mental health issues etc... . These are things that a state can provide support with. It's very challenging to access good quality talking therapy, for example. And a well-funded welfare system could do more to identify children in neglected situations, and to work with the families to bring them out of it.
That's a pretty radical claim. Do you have any sources?
edit: so many downvotes from asking a simple question
Essentially nobody in the US (except the very elderly with dementia) dies from malnutrition. This would make the malnutrition profile of the US very unusual relative to other developing countries with similar rates of malnutrition as we claim on self-id survey.
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...
There are millions of hospitalisations in the US every year where the patient is malnourished: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11613653/
From your article:
> 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.
I think it's stated elsewhere that people are overweight yet malnourished due to calorie-dense but low-nutrition food. This leads to overweight health issues that can be attributed to malnutrition but don't fit the profile of "starving to death". The cause of death are other nutrition-related afflictions like diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and even some forms of cancer.
So yes, they're not bones-through-the-skin malnourished, it's more complicated than that.
We're not talking about famine, we're talking about people living in poverty? What's your argument here? That because nobody dies of malnutrition we don't have true poverty?
I was not the person who changed the conversation from ‘relative poverty’ to hunger - the person who replied to me did and I just engaged in that on the merits.
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.’
That's disingenuous; I did not focus the conversation only on hunger.
I think it is fine for different societies to consider the poverty level to be at different places (e.g. the “poor” in the first world are nothing compared to poverty in many parts of Africa, for example).
Having said that, how do you think about poverty in Britain (or the US)? What, for you, is the poverty line?
I'm skeptical of these descriptions. Usually it's something like kids that sign up for free lunch or some survey.
You should look at something objective like underweight or households without heat.