A long-forgotten British trade unionist once made a remark that has stayed with me for over half a century: 'Five per cent unemployment doesn't mean that each of us is 5 per cent unemployed: it means that tens of thousands of people who want to work are 100 per cent unemployed.'
I was mulling over the simple - yet often overlooked - truth of that statement the other day when pondering the extent of poverty in our community and what it means to ordinary peoples' lives.
Figures have been released suggesting that around one person in seven in Hong Kong lived below the poverty line. Some families were cutting back from three meals a day to two, parents were going without to make sure their children had more of what food was available, but many children were still going to bed hungry.
One in seven does not mean that each of us is fasting for one day per week and eating well the other six days. It means that hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong people, including children, are going to bed hungry every night.
We don't need to spend too long arguing over exactly how many people that is. It is not unknown for pressure groups to exaggerate the extent of problems they are addressing to fight for more resources. And poverty is after all to some extent a relative phenomenon: when I was growing up, only the well-off could afford a telephone, which was always fixed line (there were no mobile phones in those days) and calls were kept to a minimum to limit the expense. Nowadays anyone without his own mobile could reasonably be considered deprived.
But even stripping these two factors out, the fact remains that a substantial number of our fellow citizens are hungry while living in a city of plenty and where a lot of people pay a small fortune for gym memberships and diet plans to fight flab. It is an intolerable situation and one the next chief executive is going to have to address.