Relative poverty

I've always hated the term 'relative poverty.' It's false language and disingenuous. I was reminded of it by this rather good post on it - my favourite line - 'if Warren Buffet moved to London poverty would increase' - I think nicely skewers the point.

Some technical notes: The definition of relative poverty is 60% of median average income. The details are here. For a single adult, it means an income below £5,200 per annum excluding income tax, council tax and housing costs, (rents, mortgage interest, buildings insurance, water charges).

Now, the level of relative poverty may have kept me as a student (no, that's a lie, but I had a rather extravagant student life, and it could have done), and it's clearly not a lot of money, but it's not poverty to have a house, insurance, and a decent amount of spending money.

What they actually mean is of course inequality. Inequality is important, we can all have opinions on it, but it's not necessarily linked to poverty, so can we defend policy on relative poverty on inequality grounds please? And not raise the totem of poverty, which is overly emotive and just not true.

Personally, I am not very interested in inequality, rather in outcomes for the genuinely poor, which is why most of my donations go abroad. Anyway, this isn't even one of the things that annoys me most about government use of statistics and maths: that's the tax system, but I'll post on that later.