"Sucks to be a child in UK," study sez, "USA just about as lame for tots."

What, no Finland?

The United States was ranked worst for health and safety...The highest ranking for the United States was for education where it was ranked 12th out of the 21 countries.

Stellar performance.

So if we reduce the average wage we alleviate poverty!

go back to Russia!

(not really, just don't see the point of such a broad definition of 'poverty' - even if this study does only focus on rich western countries)

Or Sweden. Or Denmark. Or, anywhere but the UK and the US, it seems.

In other words, they treat each other like shit.

(I don't blame the kids for this)

"In a society which is very unequal, with high levels of poverty, it leads on to what children think about themselves and their lives. That's really what's at the heart of this," Bradshaw told a news conference."

if it's coming without maintenance from the other parent no probably not.

Fair enough, but using this definition of poverty in a country where the national average income is £2,500 a family with an annual income of £1,550 would not be poor. Even if you accept that relative poverty (and not just absolute poverty) matters, this is a pretty questionable supposition.

doubt there's a significant gap between them

The use of this definition of poverty means that the US and the UK are guaranteed to score badly in comparing child poverty.

Most of continental Europe applies economic and taxation policies that are more redistributive than the US and the UK. Gordon Brown believes that these more redistributive tax systems stifle incentive; in effect he accepts more relative poverty as a price worth paying for less actual poverty.

He may be right, or he may be wrong. But it is begging the question to say that his policies must be bad for children because they result in more child poverty,and to "prove" this by reference only to relative poverty. By that criterion, a country applying redistributive tax and benefits policies will be deemed successful in combating child poverty, even if those policies are wrecking its economy.

xpost

kids are attracted to gangs because the drugs trade is much more profitable (in the short term) than the kind of job you can expect on the other side of schooling in a shitty south london comp abandoned by its LEA in favour of the local 'city academy' or whateverthefuck.

if it were that simple all kids in that situation would be in gangs.

you're part of the problem!

That we have an unequal society is a separate issue.

If people get less than 60% of the average income but still have houses and food and health care and clothes and basic amenities then they are not living in poverty - they are just poorer than the well off. Poverty should be defined by what people have and don't have, not by a percentage of what someone else earns.

in effect he accepts more relative poverty as a price worth paying for less actual poverty

This is a fair position to take, though it's fair to say that he's failed to make the desired impact on the second part of that.

well, they have significantly worse food, life expectancy, 'basic amenities' etc than the well-off. it being an unequal society is not a separate issue, not in the least! the problem with child poverty specifically is that it doesn't even give the children a chance. it's that inequality that i think even liberals have a problem with.

All I'm saying is that "60% of average income = poverty" is a nonsense. If a million average earners get a 10% pay cut and everyone else stays the same it doesn't mean the poorest people are better off, yet by that definition people will technically have moved out of poverty. Defining poverty in purely relative terms makes no sense.

well... it might, depending on the effects on the rest of the economy. prices would likely have to adjust down &c.

Ironically, for the first time evah, all three UK parties are now committed to eradicating child poverty by 2020.

The most depressing thing I have read so far this year was Alan Milburn's admission that, within ten years or so, it is unlikely that a child raised in a UK council house (as he was), would ever grow up to become a member of the Cabinet again.

Who are the "some people" on ILX can't get their head round the seriousness of "relative" poverty? Me? All I'm saying is the this arbitrary 60% number is no way of measuring how many people are in poverty.

I know what poverty means. I see it every fucking day. The people I know in poverty don't give a flying fuck what percentage of the average wage they don't make.

Yes, possibly, eventually - but what I'm getting at is that the cut itself would magically instantly take thousands of people out of poverty while they were still, as far as they can see, skint and starving.

Would you like to tell skint people with no clothes on their backs that they're no longer in poverty because the average wage fell?

I don't know what 23K buys you in England, but that is roughly the equivalent of $45K, here, and even adjusting for inflation, that means that between the age 9 and 18, I was raised in poverty. I had no idea.

I think there's more to the debate about relative standard of living vs. absolute standard of living.

By that criterion, a country applying redistributive tax and benefits policies will be deemed successful in combating child poverty, even if those policies are wrecking its economy.

What's interesting is that so many countries have managed healthy economies and good absolute standards of living while applying re-distributive economic policies.

So why would you have it any other way?

Concentrating solely on income also ignores the massive debt elephant in the room. There are a load of people on more than £13k who are in deep deep shit.

xxxposstssss

The difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Continental approaches to taxation and welfare are common knowledge, and I can't imagine that anyone seriously disputes that Brown has stuck to the Anglo-Saxon model. Obviously some of the measures he has introduced (eg the minimum wage) have intended or even achieved some redistributive effect, but this has been small-scale tinkering - the general thrust of his economic policy has been much more laissez-faire/liberal than the Continental model. Your concept of him as some kind of failed redistributionist strikes me as almost bizarrely wrong.

My objection to this part of the study has nothing to do with rich man's guilt. It just strikes me as self-defeating. The Anglo-Saxon approach, at least in the hands of a centre-left politician like Brown, assumes that a relatively liberal economic approach will result in a bigger economy, and benefit society - including its children - overall, even if one of the side-effects is more relative poverty. You can't defeat, or even engage with, that argument by simply noting that relative poverty exist, because that is already factored into everyone's expectations, even those of its proponents. For an effective critique, you need to demonstrate that either:

-- redistribution does not in fact inhibit the economy in the way that Anglo-Saxon theorists suggest; or that

-- even if it does, the unfair distribution of wealth is too high a price to pay for a bigger economy

of course, both of these arguments are much more difficult to make than the tautological one made by this study -- that economic policies that allow bigger variations in income are bad for children, because they result in bigger variations in income.

Our adolescents are vile, stroppy, sarcastic ingrates, which explains exactly why their lives are worth living

Barbara Ellen
Sunday February 18, 2007
The Observer

And so, in the only parents' race that really matters, we limp in last, egg fallen from the spoon, potato sack tangled around the ankles. Last week, the Unicef report (An Overview of Child Wellbeing in Rich Countries) placed our children overall bottom of the world's 21 most developed territories, behind the top-ranking Netherlands and Scandinavia, and countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic.

Not only were British children ranked 'worst off' in the developed world - with the highest rates of drunkenness, obesity, bullying, early sexual intercourse, cannabis-taking, and teenage pregnancy - they made it clear that they felt worst off: unhealthy, unhappy with family relationships and friendships, more likely to feel left out, disenfranchised. Ultimately, the picture painted by the Unicef report was of British childhood as the 'toxic' equivalent of a nuclear-waste dump, oozing through the soil of this green and pleasant land - the makings of a true asbo nation. It was time for British parents to feel ashamed and responsible, and of course we did. At first, anyway.

Hand-wringing aside, are British children really the most deprived in the developed world? The last time you looked in a school playground was it bursting at the seams with drunk, stoned, pregnant, friendless manic depressives? Would our adolescents really be better off cultivating acne in Holland or Sweden, or queuing for Clearasil in Poland? While no one would deny our tragic levels of child poverty, the devastating teenage pregnancy rate, and not least the recent child-shootings in south London, common sense dictates that this cannot be the whole story.

The Unicef report has already come in for criticism for ignoring younger children, and using out-of-date data, as well as (shame on them) seizing upon lone parenthood as a surefire barometer of social degeneracy (thereby branding huge numbers of children as 'failures' before they even begin). Unicef also chose to employ a bizarre 'relative poverty' grading system that conveniently ignored the fact that most of our children live the life of Master Brooklyn Beckham compared with children in less economically stable nations.

Neglected? Deprived? Those living below the poverty line are one thing, but the majority of UK adolescents are, if anything, spoiled brats. I would challenge anyone to fill a small car park with British 15-year-olds (from any social class) who don't own a mobile phone. It is also debatable whether our children are as 'disenfranchised' as depicted in the report. At one point, we're breathlessly informed that 'only 81 per cent of them really like school' (only?). But never mind that. When listening to British children talking about the spiritual wasteland that is their existence, those nice Unicef people with their clipboards failed to include the most crucial factor of all - the contrary bolshie nature of the people they were talking to; the fact that British teenagers have always loved nothing more than to pose, bitch, rebel, slag everything and everyone off, and blow endless anti-establishment raspberries.

Indeed, British teenagers are, have always been, by nature, rebellious, stroppy, and a lot less interested in being fair than they are in being interesting. Which to my mind is much less creepy and disturbing than the thought of all those sucky-up kids from Holland and Sweden (henceforth known as the apple-polishing nations) chirruping away about how much they respect their elders. Bearing this in mind, this was the only possible result for this study.

Unlike their Dutch or Swedish counterparts, British children were never going to answer such questions as 'Are your contemporaries kind and helpful?' with po-faced sincerity; to piously and publicly abhor the idea of sex, drugs, and other 'bad behaviour'; and pour anything other than molten scorn upon the status quo. Indeed, the vast majority of British adolescents are as they always were, as most of us were - vile, stroppy, preternaturally sarcastic ingrates, who would doubtless be labelled dangerous, disaffected sociopaths in any other European country. And this is supposed to be a bad thing?

Some of us would say (cautiously) that it isn't. While no one could seriously argue that youth in Britain have it better than everyone else (not after a week when children have been found gunned down in their bedrooms), there is evidence to suggest that things are not as bad as they seem in Britain, or quite as wonderful everywhere else. For one thing, if the true litmus test of a successful childhood is a happy adulthood then it seems strange that no one has factored in that Scandinavian adult suicide rates are double ours. (What happens to all those happy children who end up killing themselves?)

For another, it may be that it's the very restlessness of British youth, its inbuilt disaffection (or, to call it by its technical term, 'arsiness') that keeps our cultural heartbeat healthy and racing, as it continues to be, in terms of everything from pop to comedy, from art to fashion.

While no one is claiming that it is easy to be young in Britain, neither are our young easy. As any parent of a teenager could tell you, one is all too frequently torn between calling for a psychiatrist and screaming for an exorcist. Moreover, Oliver James's theories on 'affluenza' certainly ring true with what often comes across as an unattractively needy/greedy bunch. However, frightening as it sometimes gets, and Unicef reports aside, maybe we should accept British adolescence for what it is, has always been - a whirling out-of-control carousel. You can only watch and hope that your particular (stroppy, nihilistic, establishment hating, maddening, indispensable) Brit teenager manages to cling on for the ride.

the 60% of ave. income was only one indicator in the study; i really don't think that hypothetical stands up. but anyway a country with a wrecked economy and starving population wouldn't have been in the survey. it was about wealthier nations.

The difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Continental approaches to taxation and welfare are common knowledge, and I can't imagine that anyone seriously disputes that Brown has stuck to the Anglo-Saxon model. Obviously some of the measures he has introduced (eg the minimum wage) have intended or even achieved some redistributive effect, but this has been small-scale tinkering - the general thrust of his economic policy has been much more laissez-faire/liberal than the Continental model. Your concept of him as some kind of failed redistributionist strikes me as almost bizarrely wrong.

the differences between anglo-saxon and continental approaches are all 'tinkering' affairs in the grand scheme of things, and brown's tax credits -- a total fuck-up -- are not very anglo-saxon. he's a third way politician, but his rhetoric and that of his boosters has been well to the left of his real achivements. he would like to be seen as a redistributionist.

I dunno; I never hear about happyslapping here. Good thing brits don't have guns like us.

Unlike their Dutch or Swedish counterparts, British children were never going to answer such questions as 'Are your contemporaries kind and helpful?' with po-faced sincerity;

If so we can throw out pretty much all results in social psychology. Thank you layman journalist for telling those science wonks how to run an experiment.

lol ironing