4 basic rules to help you avoid poverty
Fraser Nelson published a fascinating article about key factors of people who prosper. Those who observe them are highly unlikely to end up in poverty. Those who break them are unlikely to avoid it.
He asked Helen Jackson, a data analyst to delve into the British Cohort Study, which keeps track of 17,200 children born in April 1970. They looked at those who had avoided poverty and came up with the four rules.
The first rule is to finish school especially in an economy bustling with the world’s workers. Don’t drop out at 16.
The next rule is to avoid teenage parenthood – a rule that matters to women, but not really to men.
The third rule is to avoid long-term unemployment before your mid-20s. No one can help being made redundant. But taking another job, even lower-paying or part-time, is far better than signing on. Unemployment can become self-reinforcing after a certain period. Those who stay active stand the best chance when the recovery comes.
But the fourth and final rule is rather different: to find love. Or, more specifically, end up in a long-term relationship. This doesn’t mean getting married. What matters is the ability to stick together. And when it comes to fighting poverty, this matters even more than finishing school.
As Fraser says, "For those who kept all four rules, the chance of falling into poverty by the age of 34 was just 13 per cent. For those who broke all four rules, it was 78 per cent. Obeying each rule significantly reduces the chance of poverty.
"On the first three rules, things are looking up. Teenage pregnancy rates have fallen by about a third over the last five years; school dropout rates have halved. Unemployment is being tackled. Is Britain is entering a period of social repair?
"But what about love?
"Whichever way you look at it, the surest way of tackling poverty is through education, work and love. And as someone once said, the greatest of these is love."
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Geoff Knott, 02/03/2016