Download PDF by Nicholas Eberstadt: The Poverty of the Poverty Rate: Measure and Mismeasure of

By Nicholas Eberstadt

ISBN-10: 0844742465

ISBN-13: 9780844742465

Due to the fact its inception in 1965, America's professional poverty price (OPR) has been the only most vital statistic utilized by policymakers and anxious voters to judge luck or failure within the nation's ongoing fight opposed to fabric desire. yet in a severe new exam of this extensively degree, Nicholas Eberstadt fees that the OPR is, actually, 'a damaged compass'_a fallacious index producing more and more deceptive numbers approximately poverty within the usa. The OPR used to be initially meant to trace an absolute point of poverty through the years by way of evaluating a family's stated pretax source of revenue opposed to a corresponding poverty threshold. yet for the prior 3 a long time, the OPR has said traits which are jarringly inconsistent with different statistical signs of fabric deprivation. what's the reason behind this curious discrepancy? Eberstadt means that the OPR's so much significant issue is its implicit assumption that terrible households will spend not more than their suggested annual incomes_in different phrases, that their source of revenue degrees are a correct proxy for his or her intake degrees. within the a long time because the OPR was once unveiled, the disparity among said source of revenue and costs has steadily widened, making source of revenue an ever much less trustworthy predictor of intake patterns_and, hence, dwelling standards_for America's poorer households. within the Poverty of 'The Poverty Rate,' Eberstadt contends that the defects of the present poverty fee usually are not simply critical yet irremediable. Income-based measures can't supply a loyal portrait of intake styles or fabric health and wellbeing within the usa. principal notwithstanding the OPR has turn into to antipoverty coverage, this 'untrustworthy yardstick' will be discarded and changed by means of extra actual measures of deprivation.

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Extra resources for The Poverty of the Poverty Rate: Measure and Mismeasure of Material Deprivation in Modern America

Sample text

Before delving into these empirical data, however, we should first formally spell out the differences between measured consumer “expenditures” or “outlays” on the one hand and the economic concept of “consumption” on the other. Some readers may implicitly regard consumer expenditures as if they were a proxy for consumption levels. But for purposes of clarity, it is necessary to emphasize that “consumption” and “consumer expenditures” are not entirely interchangeable terms, and “consumer expenditures” differ from “consumer outlays” in some key respects, as well.

As we will see in the following pages, however, any such impression is fundamentally mistaken. When we compare trends in the official poverty rate and other statistical indicators bearing upon want and deprivation in modern America, two striking and peculiar findings immediately jump out. First, the official poverty rate today does not at all exhibit what one might describe as a “normal and customary relationship” with any of the other important macroeconomic or demographic “poverty proxies” one would ordinarily wish to examine; to the contrary, against the backdrop of those other indicators, the soundings from the OPR often appear erratic, if not positively perverse.

Table 3-1 illustrates the problem. It contrasts results for the years 1973 and 2001 for the OPR with several other indicators widely recognized as bearing directly upon the risk of poverty in any modern urbanized society. ) Consider the “general economic developments” that characterized the United States in the nearly three decades between 1973 and 2001, as shown by four indicators: per-capita income, unemployment, educational attainment, and official “antipoverty” outlays. From 1973 to 2001, per-capita income in the United States rose very significantly in real (inflation-adjusted) terms—by roughly 60 percent, according to estimates from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) series.

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