Even if absolute poverty and relative poverty are NEGATIVELY related? In developed countries?
(which is the case for 2000 data if you look at just continental Europe w/o EE)

since that has been declared verboten

It has? Anyway there’s no implied relationships between Gini coefficients, relative poverty and absolute poverty. If one of them changes in one way the others may do whatever they want. Furthermore, even if you’re looking at just the Gini and it goes up, you can’t really say that inequality has increased – the Lorenz curves could cross, unless you’re willing to make stronger assuumptions.
On top of that you can monkey around with the absolute and relative poverty measures by switching the threshold. So two absolute poverty measures can be negatively related. All this basically opens the door wide open to data manipulation in order to score ideological points and screams out for sensitivity analysis (which when you do, you get a big mess and no clear answer, but hey, that’s life)

I might hafta write something up about all this.

The specific points that I don’t understand are… – Doesn’t this imply that if we changed a society’s Gini coefficient while keeping family sizes constant, the relative poverty of its children would be unchanged? – Isn’t it difficult to interpret this stat without a measure of the family resources available to each child in multi-child households? – Doesn’t relative poverty lend itself to strange composition and decomposition effects? – Insofar as family size is partially determined by how much resources a family feels it can devote to raising children, won’t we partially be measuring the resources of below-median families?

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the metric. “Relative child poverty” is the percentage of children who in families with below median income, correct?

A possible explanation could be that in the Netherlands relatively few teenagers drive cars.

You can’t get your license until you’re 18, taking the exam is expensive, getting the lessons before you take the exam is very expensive, and finally cars are very expensive (high taxes and strict safety checks).

Then there’s the simple fact that Holland is very well suited for cycling, being both compact and flat. Parking, on the other hand, sucks. Also, public transport is pretty good.

Finally, all Dutch students (used to) have access to free public transport as part of their student grant. The program has been cut back so these days students have to choose between free transport on weekdays or on weekends.

Note, however that this relationship must be complex: after all, the UK has terrible (comparatively) relative poverty rates, and yet, except for Sweden, it is the safest of all countries for childhood injuries and accidents.

There is a paper (i don’t have the reference at the moment) but which carried out this research on the airline industry in the States. I could hunt it out if you want. I hope it’s accurate because I used it to develop a key argument in my last book.

When you see that it’s airlines (and in one country, moreover, a country where health and safety in the industry is fairly highly regulated) you can see why management is not such an issue. In a very high technology industry, generally speaking, the the more modern the technology, the safer it will be. Firms with high profits can afford to buy all these new gizmos and technologies: firms with low profits or which are running at a loss, cannot.

I am extrapolating wildly to apply this to households, but it might be an interesting topic of research.

It made a major difference in my life (grew up in NYC) that I could get anywhere I wanted in the city with little effort. (at that time it was also pretty safe to ride my bike through the streets). Must have driven my mom spare.