Paul Spicker wrote:
> The Cabinet Office has issued an illuminating report on poverty, /The
> state of the nation: poverty, worklessness and welfare dependency in the
> UK, / which can be found
> at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/410872/web-poverty-report.pdf
> (it's a one-megabute download). A picture is worth a thousand words,
> and the graphs on page 34 and 35 are models of their kind. Here's one
> by way of illustration:
>
> Perhaps the size of the last disk reflects an alarming increase in
> obesity among DLA claimants?
The DLA graph is v bad indeed. Someone call for Tim Harford!
> Quite apart from the creative use of graphics, the report's use of
> statistics might excite some comment:
>
> * there is no definition of what an "out of work" benefit is (it's
> not, it seems, the same as an "earnings replacement" benefit for
> people of working age, but it does seem to include JSA, IB and
> Income Support);
Defining "Out-of-work benefits" is JSA, IS, IB and ESA is reasonably
standard, but a footnote somewhere would have helped, yes.
> * the figures don't quite tally with figures for Great Britain on
> NOMIS - my guess is that they relate either to England or to
> England and Wales;
That would be very surprising. It is very common to analysis benefit
receipt at the GB level. What benefits are captured on NOMIS?
> * the claim that long term dependency is increasing is a little
> surprising when the numbers of claimants receiving JSA for over 2
> years fell from from 141,000 long-term claimants on JSA in 1999 to
> 25,000 in 2009, and
Long-term dependency is usually measured across a range of benefits, not
just JSA. But where does the report say that long-term dependency has
increased? I thought it was merely asserting (eg p34) that long-term
dependency was too high (according to its own perception of what is high
or low)?
> * I'm not sure that it is "strong evidence" of an intergenerational
> cycle of disadvantage to claim that 27% of children of multiply
> disadvantaged parents (deprived on six counts) have at
> least disadvantages of their own. That seems to me to imply
> that 73% don't, that by the third generation the
> expected continuity will be 27% of 27%, which is 7.3%, and that
> even if we can't be confident of that calculation, by the fourth
> generation the dilution of the cohort will leave the
> pattern indistinguishable from the rest of the population. Which,
> of course, is pretty much what long-term cohort studies have told
> us before.
Yes, that looks like remarkable evidence of a lack of an
intergenerational cycle of disadvantage.
Mike
>
>
> Paul Spicker
>
>
>
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--
Mike Brewer
Programme Director, Direct Tax and Welfare
Institute for Fiscal Studies, www.ifs.org.uk, 020 72914800
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