Replies

"The study said that child poverty - defined as the percentage of children living in homes with incomes below 50 per cent of the national median - remains above the 15 per cent mark in Britain, the US and Ireland, as well as Spain, Portugal and Italy."

This is such a stupid use of numbers. How about absolute material welfare? According to this measure, if the whole country is just above the subsistence level, with 30% of the people starving, they could still be "better off" than the U.S. if the percentage of children living in homes with incomes less than 50% of the national median was less than 15% (maybe because those children had all died of starvation.

The whole thing looks to be constructed to make more capitalistic societies look bad. The whole idea that a wide spectrum of wealth in a society is bad is idiotic, a stupid idea dreamed up by failing socialists.

Time to audit UNICEF's books.
Probably a rice-voucher-cash-for-positive-child-reviews scandal brewing.

some UNICEF staffer had been drinking hard when they wrote this.

This is how mere numbers can mess up the true facts. You made excellent points, especially the remark about child mortality in other countries. If you read this story and decide to move based on their info, then you'd be heading for Venezuela before you'd come here (yeah, right).

That skewed ratio occurred to me as well. What about countries where a greater number of people are wealthy, like Kuwait? Would someone be considered living in poverty if they couldn't afford two luxury yachts?