Social Justice Ireland: 700,000 people are living in poverty

Page 60 - Percentage of the population reporting other types of deprivation by year


Deprication indicator - "Unable to afford a satellite dish":

Overall % (all individuals) ~ 9.4%
Amongst those at risk of poverty (as defined by the report) ~ 13.9%

So the report wants us to believe that all these people are at risk of poverty but 86.1% can afford a satellite dish?
 
Brendan Burgess said:
I have often wondered about this. If poverty is having less than,say, 70% of the average wage, and poverty is always relative, we can never solve the poverty problem.

If the "poor" continue to earn/receive the same amount but those in jobs earn more, then relative poverty will increase. The richer a society gets, the more poverty there will be. Unless the social welfare rate is set at 90% of the average wage. In which case no one will bother working.

Is there no absolute measure of poverty?

Brendan
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Personally I don't believe there is and that therefore such advocacy groups have a fundamentally flawed argument. I would agree with Firefly that poverty should be defined as a certain level of living standard and not level of income
Firefly said:
I always understood absolute poverty to mean that basic food and shelter were not enjoyed. We have lots of people in relative poverty in this country with running water, electricity and ample supply to good, fresh food. To say that such people are poor in IMO is a stretch.
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And as the cost of financing a certain minimum standard of living is different by country and even by region within a country I believe there is no way to quantify poverty by using fractions of averages.

Purple said:
Social Justice Ireland seems to want government policy directed towards an equality of outcome agenda rather than an equality of opportunity agenda. This is fundamentally unjust and morally wrong.
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Absolutely right, and it is government actions that are making equal opportunities increasingly a myth. And just to clarify, equal opportunity does not mean government helping a certain group of people attain their goals, it means not putting any hurdles in the way of anybody striving to achieve a certain goal.

orka said:
Page 60 - Percentage of the population reporting other types of deprivation by year


Deprication indicator - "Unable to afford a satellite dish":

Overall % (all individuals) ~ 9.4%
Amongst those at risk of poverty (as defined by the report) ~ 13.9%

So the report wants us to believe that all these people are at risk of poverty but 86.1% can afford a satellite dish?
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Things like that really make a farce out of something that should be an honourable cause, i.e. charity to those who are actually poor.
 
orka said:
Page 60 - Percentage of the population reporting other types of deprivation by year


Deprication indicator - "Unable to afford a satellite dish":

Overall % (all individuals) ~ 9.4%
Amongst those at risk of poverty (as defined by the report) ~ 13.9%

So the report wants us to believe that all these people are at risk of poverty but 86.1% can afford a satellite dish?
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Just to be clear here is the SJI report - is what you're referring to in here?

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Chris said:
And as the cost of financing a certain minimum standard of living is different by country and even by region within a country I believe there is no way to quantify poverty by using fractions of averages.
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I think more than enough effort has been put into surveys and reports on poverty to justify the compilation of a basket of necessities.

If this was done we'd have proper tranparency on how much extra people could be paid here to offset cost of living differences versus the UK for example.


You might have
  • net rent costs after rental supplement, etc.
  • food (basic staples from the discount stores).
  • Utility bills
  • Cost of household appliances divided by average lifetime.
  • School costs net of back to school allowances
  • Net average health costs allowing for medical card, drugs schemes, etc
This should not be difficult, any reports I've seen on this go about assessing these the wrong way (always exaggerating costs), usually include a certain number of luxury items and always go into nauseating detail on the most trivial of costs losing the point of what they are trying to do
 
A strange report! 300 pages with no executive summary or conclusions. If it states that 700K people are living in poverty I couldn't see it. All graphs, etc appear to be copied from other sources.
 
44brendan said:
A strange report! 300 pages with no executive summary or conclusions. If it states that 700K people are living in poverty I couldn't see it. All graphs, etc appear to be copied from other sources.
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It's on page 55. Yeah, it's basicaslly a mish mash of graphs from the CSO, etc.

They must be expecting no one will crtically analyse it - the more times I go back to it, the less sense it makes.
 
".....those who are already better off as they can afford these second homes in the first place"

Nice conclusion, omitting one small detail that those with second homes are probably in huge negative equity and in retrospect were almost certainly not able to afford them in the first place, they just foolishly took the money thrown at them by the banks

I think I'd better stop reading this now, the illogical conclusions and misinterpretations of statistics are absolutely doing my head in.
 
No continue on reading and Post a summary of the key findings with commentary whe your finished:D
 
Note that the CSO use the phrase "at-risk-of-poverty", so they are not saying that all these 15.8% of the pop are poor, just that they have a low income, and are at risk of being poor.

Here is the CSO data:

PRELIMINARY
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FULL REPORT
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An excellent piece on this topic in today Irish Times by John Kay of the Financial Times

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Fundamentally, poverty is about absolute deprivation.

That is clearly not the end of the story, however. On the World Bank standard, no one in North America or western Europe is poor. And very few people in these continents do not have enough to eat.


We might observe that obesity is a disease not of the rich but of the poor. In making such a statement, we endorse the notion that poverty is relative, not absolute. That principle is enshrined in the UK definition, which rises with the general standard of living.


...
You might therefore be poor if you lack access to antibiotics or Facebook, even though in this respect you are no worse off than the Sun King or John D Rockefeller, and in other respects are considerably better off than most people in the world.
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Very good points made, reminds me of a cartoon I saw years ago with a depiction of a poor African child saying he wanted to go to America because even poor people in America were fat.
 
Yeah, thought the first half of the article was excellent.

Earlier in the week the same section had an article relating the problems in Florida to those in Greece. It was a real thought provoker.
 
Chris said:
Very good points made, reminds me of a cartoon I saw years ago with a depiction of a poor African child saying he wanted to go to America because even poor people in America were fat.
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The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier, a Professor of Economics at Oxford and former World Bank employee is an excellent read on why the poorest of the poor are being left behind.
I struck me that a good chunk of the problems he identifies can be applied on a micro level (with a little imagination) to poor or "socially deprived" areas in any country.
 
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