Do people mind more about inequality than poverty? from Matt Ridley at his blog The Rational Optimist

Excerpt:

Here’s another question that I fancy the chimps would beat the people at: did poverty and inequality in Britain increase or decrease as a result of the recession? The answer is that both fell. Inequality has fallen to levels not seen since the mid 1990s, as it usually does during recessions, though it is still higher than it was in the 1970s. Meanwhile the Left’s favourite measure of poverty — those earning less than 60 per cent of the median income — has by definition gone down, because median income has gone down. Redefining poverty in this relative (and very inadequate) way has therefore rather backfired.

HKO

Income and wealth data has proven to be trickier to measure that is allowed for by partisan sound bites.

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