The economic stupidity of child poverty
It's not just morally repugnant to condemn children to poverty and lack of opportunity, it makes no economic sense either
It’s pointless even trying to use appeals to morality to convince Britain’s comfortably wealthy political class that it’s wrong to condemn a million more children to poverty in order to punish them for the choices of their parents.
Trying to get gilded elitists to grasp the moral objectionability of the eugenicist Tory two-child policy is basically wasted effort, because what’s morally right just doesn’t seem to come into their calculations at all.
You’ll never convince the likes of Keir Starmer or Rishi Sunak that party policy should be determined by what’s right and wrong, rather than what’s likely to win favour with their £billionaire party donors and Britain’s depraved capitalist media class.
It’d be as futile as trying to explain quantum physics to a pigeon.
The only possible way of trying to get through to these people is by talking a language that they actually understand: The language of money.
They need to be made to understand that policies that needlessly condemn children to lives of poverty and lack of opportunity are economically stupid.
The scale of the problem
After of 13 ruinous years of austerity, social security vandalism, wage stagnation, and policies that are actively designed to exacerbate child poverty, there are now 4.2 million British kids are growing up in poverty.
That’s 29% of all British children!
And the widespread trope that it’s possible for parents to work their way out of poverty is an abject lie, because seven in ten of these children in poverty live in households where at least one adult works.
As a result of the depraved Tory two-child policy almost 80% of children with more than two siblings will end up growing up in poverty, despite the majority of them having parents who work.
The economic stupidity
It’s well understood that hungry children struggle to concentrate in classrooms.
It’s well understood that poverty in childhood makes it much more likely that kids will be poor and suffer ill health in adulthood.
Thus it’s economically stupid to condemn children to poverty in order to avoid raising taxes on corporations and the very wealthy even a little bit, because it’s just storing up problems for the future.
If we want our children to grow up into healthy, skilled, productive, and successful workers, maintaining such high levels of child poverty is wildly counter-productive.
Refusing to invest now to ensure sufficient nourishment, healthy homes, and good opportunities for the maximum amount of our children represents destruction of Britain’s future economic prosperity.
The Westminster establishment class can save a few £billion in the present by condemning millions of kids to poverty, but at a much higher future cost in lost economic potential.
George can’t concentrate in school because he’s usually starving hungry, and he’s often absent from school through illness as a result of all the damp and black mould in the buy-to-let slum he lives in. He fails his exams, doesn’t go to university, doesn’t become an award-winning architect, and instead works in a series of low-pay, low-security jobs for his whole adult life.
Olivia loves music and dancing, but her parents can’t afford to provide her with musical instruments or music and dance lessons, and the academy profiteers who operate her school have shut down the music department, so she never becomes the platinum selling popstar she could have been. She never makes her £millions, and never pays £millions in taxes.
It’s really not difficult to understand that systematically destroying the potential of millions of individual children through child poverty ends up reducing the future economic prosperity of the whole country.
Short-termism
It’s easy to make the case that widespread child poverty is detrimental the the country’s future economic prospects. What’s much more difficult is convincing Westminster politicians to break themselves out of their austerity-addled mindset of short-termist penny pinching.
After 13 years of austerity cuts the country seems like it’s falling apart at the seams, and the result of all this penny-pinching is that the national debt has actually tripled!
It should be obvious to anyone that the austerity spending aversion doesn’t work, and that a different approach is needed, but the Westminster establishment class and swathes of Britain’s useless media are so hopelessly addicted to the austerity mindset that they can’t even conceive doing things differently.
If the payoff isn’t immediate, obvious, and easily quantifiable, they’ll treat any kind of government investment as being essentially "waste".
And until the austerity addicts are driven out of positions of power and influence, or made to comprehend the catastrophic errors of their ways, Britain is going to remain a stagnating low-investment economy.
An economy that refuses to invest in its own children, and refuses to to consider heavy investment in the drivers of future economic prosperity (education, infrastructure, quality public services, transport, public health, research and development, green technology …) as the way out of its austerity malaise.
You have to spend money to make money, and the best possible investment is making sure our kids - the workers of the future - have the best opportunities to thrive.
I get you argument but disagree with some of the points you make in support.
1. Child poverty is adult poverty is poverty - period.
2. People are not poor because of choices they make (or that their parents make). They are poor because having a large poor class is integral to capitalism - it can’t survive without it.
3. Economic arguments will not convince the ruling class. They know these arguments but poverty is integral to them keeping power so they will maintain it whatever the cost.
4. We have to stop pretending capitalists can be compassionate and that we can convince them to be good. Capitalism never has worked for the masses, isn’t working now, never will work for the masses, and was designed not to work for the masses. Ignore the capitalists, teach people about alternatives.
The ruling class don't care for a couple of reasons. Firstly, as irrational as it may seem given the perfectly reasonable case set out above, they do not consider the long-term. They are addicted to the accumulation of wealth; their bounded self control drives them ever onwards to pursue immediate gratification whatever the long-term cost. Their constant protestations of working class fecklessness (eg benefit cheats, something for nothing etc) is simple psychological projection. Daniel Kahnneman describes two levels of thinking: fast and slow. Slow thinking requires a conscious effort on our part to force our brain to engage in deliberative, reasoned thinking. Fast thinking on the other hand, is the instinctive, heuristic-based thinking our brain has been hard-wired for from the hundreds of millenia we existed as hunter-gatherer societies. The ruling class are trapped in a 'have it all now' heuristic. To create the equality and fairness described above would require a conscious act of a different way of thinking. They are not willing to do this for reasons of ego; to think of the needs of those they consider to be lesser humans than them would be to admit their design of economic and social relations has failed. A second reason is that by maintaining a permanent underclass in society, the ruling class have a surplus supply of labour. They use this to threaten and intimidate workers to discipline wage demands. In turn, this shifts the balance of wage-bargaining power to the owners of capital and ensures a disproportionate share of GDP is accumulated by the minority of citizens.