Today’s top news story is the Unicef report (summary) that marks the UK as bottom of 21 developed countries regarding children’s “well-being.” This is certainly something to worry about and I have no argument with the findings; I have no intention of being an apologist for the poor state we find ourselves in. I am sure that they have done the analysis carefully and I would not expect any bias coming from Unicef. Nor do I criticise the report for not considering the problems, many of them are described in the report, in fact it goes on at great length about the shortcomings of the data and methods; but not in the media summaries.
A difficulty I highlight is with one of the metrics, that of poverty, part of the Material Well-being category. This is defined as the percentage of children living in homes with equivalent incomes below 50% of the national median. Now this is a useful measure to see how well your welfare reforms are going, but is meaningless when comparing countries with different income ranges and different costs of living. In a country with low incomes and high cost of living then the households in this category are going to be very poor indeed. But reverse the situation and they will be quite comfortable even though they are less well off than their immediate neighbours. Countries with a good score in this respect reflect a greater equality but not necessarily a better standard of living. I see that on page 6 they acknowledge this criticism.
Another interesting question arises when you look at the number of children living in these homes. It would be revealing to know why there are more children in these below 50% median households. Are the poor in Britain having relatively more children than in, say, Denmark which is at the top of the table? If so, why? I think a flaw in this measure is that there are too many variables and not enough is known (or reported) about the relationship between them.
A second criticism is that a lot of the measures are obtained by asking the children. This will give a good subjective view of their well-being, how well they feel about themselves, but does not give an objective view of how well off they are, even in more subjective areas such as happiness. A content child (or perhaps especially a content child) will find small things to be unhappy about and the report will be swayed by how articulate they are about expressing them. There is a note in the appendix (p47) that this data may not be good for the UK and Belgium but I can’t find the section it refers back to.
A third criticism is that this may be a report on irrelevant detail. What I mean is that we may all be doing very well or very badly and this report just shows the ripples on an otherwise good or bad performance overall. You need to watch the scales on the graphs; as is common to emphasise a point, many of the percentage scales do not run from 0-100 and can exaggerate the discrepancy. It would be good to see how some of these measurements compare with undeveloped and developing countries. That may indicate how much more effort we need to put into helping those children rather than ironing out the minor differences between children in our own society.
Even though the report is 50 pages long it is well worth reading, maybe just dip into some sections. My conclusion is that this is a very valuable report, but it asks very many more questions than it answers.
Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries (PDF 1.5MB)
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