Point 3 of our 21-point blog on inequality asserted that it is wrong and potentially counter-productive to conflate relatively low incomes with poverty or hardship.
This blog uses the following two sentences from Max Rashbrooke’s recent critique of our Inequality Paradox report to elaborate on this point:
“… one fifth of the population (on one standard measure) is in relative poverty even before housing costs are taken into account. And that poverty occurs in a wider context of how income is distributed and redistributed, of incomes barely increasing over 30 years for the poorest while doubling for the richest.”
The first sentence illustrates a tendency in New Zealand debate to define low relative income as relative poverty, and then to cherry pick from the range of plausible thresholds so as to maximise the proportion of the population in relative poverty.
Specifically, the highest proportion of the population in 2015 below…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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