in work poverty, international edition.

[madd0ct0r]

defining poverty as below 50% of median wage.

[Esquire]

I have a couple issues with the methodology displayed here - why use a percentage of median income to define poverty, instead of something derived from local cost-of-living; why use a 1950s-model nuclear family as the standard household instead of one where both parents work or one with only one child, etc?

That said, it's a chilling graph.

[madd0ct0r]

I actually missed that 1 earner per family detail. that makes it significantly less bad in my opinion.

[Simon_Jester]

The catch is, there are real and rather negative consequences to children of requiring that both parents work full time or nearly full time.

Moreover, many children are being raised by single parents. In which case a single parent with two children will have most of the same expenses as a nuclear family, but the single mother or father is going to have to work, say, 62 hours a week to support them.

[Me2005]

I have a couple issues with the methodology displayed here - why use a percentage of median income to define poverty, instead of something derived from local cost-of-living; why use a 1950s-model nuclear family as the standard household instead of one where both parents work or one with only one child, etc?

And pay is based on minimum wage earnings. Of course a 40-hour work week won't lift a family of 4 out of poverty if only one person is working and they're making minimum wage.

Really, all this graph is doing is comparing how high/low the (national) minimum wage is in various countries. Which would be better done by comparing the actual wage against the country's actual poverty line, and not this arbitrary and meaningless "50% of the median income."

[bilateralrope]

50% of the median household income seems like an intentionally misleading choice of statistic. If every household was a single income, 2 adults, 2 children household then exactly half of them would be below the median income. So all the graph would show there is the difference between the median income and the minimum wage.

Since households with multiple incomes exist, it's even less useful.