The European Union as a whole differs from America even in the way it measures poverty. Ever since Lyndon Johnson declared “war on poverty” in 1964, it chose to define poverty in absolute rather than relative terms. Based on the European litmus test of “less than 60% of median income”, America has a high level of poverty: the existence of a very large prosperous middle class — a good thing, one would have thought — makes that almost a statistical inevitability.
Britain is quite like America in this respect — but Poland isn’t. So, on the official EU measurements there is “more poverty” in this country than in Poland. That is what happens when you misdescribe inequality as poverty. As Professor Saunders mordantly observes: “The people in Britain who get defined as poor actually enjoy a standard of living far higher than most Poles. Polish workers move to Britain in search of a higher standard of living, but, according to the EU, they make themselves poorer when they do so.”
That’s not unthinkable: it’s unbelievable.
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