Revealing a Hidden Cost: determining the public service cost of poverty in Ireland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Living life on a poverty income is common in Irish society. Between 2010-20, on average one in seven people lived on an income below the poverty line – approximately 720,000 individuals. By necessity living life on such a low-income imposes costs on these individuals and families. Making ends meet involves personal sacrifices, restricts options and limits opportunities; and for many it is not always possible to find ways to make ends meet. These individual costs of poverty are large scale and leave effects that last years and at times generations. Alongside these individual costs, poverty is responsible for other costs. In particular, the presence of poverty in a society triggers demands on the public purse. These costs derive from the identification of poverty as a determining factor in the need for, and demand for, a wide range of public services and policies ranging across almost all areas of public policy. Building on past literature from the UK, USA, Canada and New Zealand this study attempts to establish a heretofore absent benchmark for the recurring annual costs to the state of poverty in Ireland. In doing so it adopts a different approach to the existing literature, drawing from experiences in the economic evaluation literature, to determine a range of costs rather than just one figure. These range from a conservative ‘low estimate’ to an upper-limit ‘high estimate’ with a ‘main estimate’ reflecting the most probable annual cost. The analysis is based on a review of €27.9 billion of annual public service expenditure and highlight for all members of society, whether above or below the poverty line, the recurring public expenditure costs incurred by society as a result of poverty.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".