Question:who could be poor?

Poverty is a variable…

Many people might think of poverty as absolute, the lack of certain basic amenities, but politicians measure it in relative terms. So we could see poverty fall during the recession.

Are you poor?

Well, it depends on the income of someone you’ve never met. Poverty can be a puzzle, or at least the way it’s measured. News this week, for example, was that UK pensioners suffer.

Intrigued?

Use our interactive graphic to find out who’s poor by moving the smiley faces around and watching the boundaries change.

First, see how the median line switches from one smiley to another as they’re moved. The median is always the person in the middle. It doesn’t matter to the median who’s on what income, only how many are on either side.

You’ll also see as you move the median smiley that the pink poverty zone grows or shrinks. Poverty is defined as below 60% of the median. So as median smiley’s income grows, so does the zone in which other smilies are labelled poor. Try moving the median smiley left to make it poorer. If the line swaps to someone else, move that too. You’ll see that even though the incomes of the poor haven’t changed, some stop being poor just because the median moves. Move the median in the other direction to make it richer and more people become poor even though their incomes don’t change. So one person’s poverty also depends on how well the person in the middle is doing. See if you can make no-one poor, then see how many you can make poor. Now try moving the rich and see what happens to poverty. Nothing at all. Some people think that because poverty is relative that it is the same as inequality. It isn’t. The richest can become richer and it has no effect at all on poverty.

This is not to comment on the experience of poverty or the rights and wrongs of who gets what, just to show how the system works. So here are some curiosities about poverty. It might improve during the recession, not because the poor get richer, and nor because the poor do, but because those who are on benefits could stay where they are but the median might fall.

Romanian pensioners can have much less money than UK pensioners but fewer of them be described as poor. That’s because they are closer to the median person in their country, not because they have more money. In fact, they are simply bunched together at what others would consider the bottom.

But who is this person in the middle? Can we have a national quest to find out, compered by Graham Norton, where we line up the whole population according to income, lowest to highest, and name the person bang in the centre?

So there are some questions.

1. Why not a fixed figure for poverty rather than one that changes as people become richer? Fixed at what? Fixed 50 years ago? Fixed at £2 a day – the international standard for absolute poverty? Anything fixed is soon left far behind by dramatic changes in the wealth of people as a whole. It’s argued that poverty is the lack what most people take for granted and so has to change as society changes.
2. Why does this calculation matter? It’s the calculation the government uses to measure its success in reducing poverty, including child poverty, for which it sets targets. It’s also used for country comparisons like the recent report that pensioner poverty in the UK was the fourth worst in the EU.
3. Why the median, not the mean? Because calculating the mean would include everyone, including the Chelsea football team’s stellar earners. Would it make sense to say that one person’s poverty depends on what John Terry earns? Using the mean would make it a measure of inequality.
4. Why 60% of the median and not 55 or 65? The line is to some extent arbitrary, but is now used internationally and seems to reflect a view that this is the point at which people struggle to share the ordinary expectations of the majority.
5. How do we know what people earn? The numbers that appear on the graphic as you first see it are the real numbers (approximately) as reported in the survey of Households Below Average Income. They show disposable income – that’s after tax and benefits, adjusted to take account of household composition – if there are more people in the household they need more money to enjoy the same standard of living as someone living alone. The survey is of 25,000 households annually.