No, poverty isn’t rising – but I can’t persuade anyone to believe it

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. It is a truism, a banality, the tritest of observations. And it is utter nonsense. I can’t think of any field of policy where there is a greater distance between perception and reality. When Jeremy Corbyn rails against “rising poverty” at the Despatch Box, we nod along: two thirds of us accept his premise, according to the polls. Yet there is no credible measure by which poverty is getting worse.

This is obviously true if we define poverty in absolute terms. Today’s luxuries become tomorrow’s necessities. In the Seventies, poverty meant lack of access to indoor plumbing or a television. Today, those things are near universal. What is

the earliest kind of heating you can remember from childhood? There you go.

So let’s assume that, when he says “poverty”, Jezza actually means “inequality”. Most activists now define poverty as an income below 60 per cent of that of the middle household – a measure that gives Britain a higher “poverty” rate than Bangladesh. Even if we accept this definition, though, there is simply no way to sustain the claim that poverty is on the rise.

According to the standard metric, the Gini coefficient, we are a more equal society now than a decade ago. If we take more elemental measures, such as calorie intake, literacy and infant mortality, we are more equal than we have ever been. The richest 1 per cent in the UK own a lower proportion of our national wealth than the richest 1 per cent in Denmark do.

Many people, presented with these figures, immediately start casting around for a way to disbelieve them. The facts don’t match their intuitions. Poverty, they will assert, must be rising. What about food banks?

Well, what about them? They are a wonderful initiative, run by generous people, but they are not a measure of anything: Britain has fewer food banks per head than Germany, but more than Somalia.

What about low-paid work, then? Again, what about it? The Resolution Foundation revealed last week that the proportion of people in low-paid work is lower than it has been in 39 years. Again, that is a relative definition. If we use today’s prices, average hourly wages for the poorest decile have risen, over the past 40 years, from £3.40 to £6.80.

A century and a half has passed since Karl Marx argued that a widening wealth gap – “immiseration”, as he called it – was inescapable in a capitalist society. It was piffle then and it is piffle now. But it appeals to an instinctive sense buried deep within us.

We are tribal creatures, designed for pre-agrarian societies in which wealth was sparse and limited. There were only so many axes or fish-hooks to go around. If you had more, I probably had fewer. The idea that we can all simultaneously be getting richer feels wrong.

We also suffer from what psychologists call “prevalenceinduced concept change”. When something becomes rarer, we notice it more. We know, on one level, that the poorest of us is better off than a Victorian duke. Our food is fresher, our water cleaner, our doctors better qualified, our teachers more knowledgeable. But as cases of real poverty become rarer, they become more shocking. We notice them more, and so conclude that poverty is on the rise.

Which leads to the real difficulty, viz that no one likes to admit that poverty is falling. Twice, in recent weeks, I have been involved in television exchanges along these lines:

“Poverty is at a record high.”

“No, it’s really not. It’s falling on literally every credible measure we have.”

“Heartless Tory! Tell that to someone at a food bank!”

I genuinely haven’t been able to find a way around the problem. Intuition trumps statistics, and there is no way of saying “poverty is falling” that doesn’t come across to a chunk of your audience as “I don’t think there is any problem”.

And so we carry on, locked in our grievances. FOLLOW Daniel Hannan on Twitter @DanielJHannan; at telegraph.co.uk/opinion