Poor Poverty Statistics
Brian Doherty | November 21, 2008, 8:41pm
An article at AEI's web site by Nicholas Eberstadt was a big nostalgia experience for me, as I recall that conservative and libertarian mags were full of this sort of debunking of poverty rate figures during the Reagan '80s/decade of greed when I first started reading them. Apparently, certain anomalies in how we measure official poverty that seem to make things sound worse than they are continue to abound, as Eberstadt explains.
Official U.S. government poverty measures show that the proportion of Americans living in poverty has actually increased some since the early 1970s:
To go by the OPR, then, America, through three decades of both Democratic and Republican administrations, has utterly failed to improve the material lot of the more vulnerable elements of society--to raise them above the income line where, according to the author of the federal poverty measure, "everyday living implied choosing between an adequate diet of the most economical sort and some other necessity, because there was not money enough to have both."
Eberstadt thinks there is much to doubt about this, though.
Since 1973, the behavior of the OPR looks increasingly aberrant when compared to other indices widely thought to bear on the risk of poverty in a modern urbanized society. In 1973, nearly 40 percent of adults over the age of twenty-five lacked a high school degree; by 2001, the figure was under 16 percent. Or consider trends in means-tested benefit programs--food stamps, housing subsidies, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other programs that benefit the poor. Between the 1973 and 2001 fiscal years, spending on those programs more than tripled from $163 billion to $507 billion (in 2004 dollars) and increased by over 130 percent in real, per-capita terms.
Eberstadt goes on to show data indicating that expenditures by those under the poverty line are a more accurate measure of their actual deprivation than their reported income, and that "there is good evidence that, for the lowest fifth of Americans on the income ladder, reported expenditures are almost twice their incomes." When it comes to food, housing, transportation, health care, and home appliances, data indicates great improvements in overall American well-being that seem to belie stagnant or increasing poverty in the sense of absolute deprivation.
Eberstadt also notes that
the average net worth of households in the bottom fifth has actually grown in the last decade. Additionally, the gains in wealth have been broadly shared, with the portion of bottom fifth households reporting no assets whatever falling from 21 percent in 1989 to just 8 percent in 2004.
He ends with a call for better statistical well-being tracking based more on consumption than reported income, and some tentative praise for alternative poverty measures undertaken by New York's Mayor (for life?) Michael Bloomberg, though even that only offers a snapshot at a moment in time. Given what we know about the great churn in relative well-being among American families and households, and that Eberstadt thinks there is some reason to believe such volatility might be growing, it's mistaken to imagine that there's a large permanent underclass mired in misery being captured in official poverty stats.
J.G Ballard | November 22, 2008, 9:42am | #
The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race
Author's note. The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, raised many questions, not all of which were answered by the Report of the Warren Commission. It is suggested that a less conventional view of the events of that grim day may provide a more satisfactory explanation. Alfred Jarry's "The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race" gives us a useful lead.
Oswald was the starter.
From his window above the track he opened the race by firing the starting gun. It is believed that the first shot was not properly heard by all the drivers. In the following confusion, Oswald fired the gun two more times, but the race was already underway.
Kennedy got off to a bad start.
There was a governor in his car and its speed remained constant at about fifteen miles an hour. However, shortly afterwards, when the governor had been put out of action, the car accelerated rapidly, and continued at high speed along the remainder of the course.
The visiting teams. As befitting the inauguration of the first production car race through the streets of Dallas, both the President and the Vice-President participated. The Vice-President, Johnson, took up his position behind Kennedy on the starting line. The concealed rivalry between the two men was of keen interest to the crowd. Most of them supported the home driver, Johnson.
The starting point was the Texas Book Depository, where all bets were placed in the Presidential race. Kennedy was an unpopular contestant with the Dallas crowd, many of whom showed outright hostility. The deplorable incident familiar to us all is one example.
The course ran downhill from the Book Depository, below an overpass, then on to the Parkland Hospital and from there to Love Air Field. It is one of the most hazardous courses in downhill motor racing, second only to the Sarajevo track discontinued in 1914.
Kennedy went downhill rapidly. After the damage to the governor the car shot forward at high speed. An alarmed track official attempted to mount the car, which continued on its way cornering on two wheels.
Turns. Kennedy was disqualified at the hospital, after taking a turn for the worse. Johnson now continued the race in the lead, which he maintained to the finish.
The flag. To satisfy the participation of the President in the race Old Glory was used in place of the usual checkered square. Photographs of Johnson receiving his prize after winning the race reveal that he had decided to make the flag a memento of his victory.
Previously, Johnson had been forced to take a back seat, as his position on the starting line behind the President indicates. Indeed, his attempts to gain a quick lead on Kennedy during the false start were forestalled by a track steward, who pushed Johnson to the floor of his car.
In view of the confusion at the start of the race, which resulted in Kennedy, clearly expected to be the winner on past form, being forced to drop out at the hospital turn, it has been suggested that the hostile local crowd, eager to see a win by the home driver Johnson, deliberately set out to stop him completing the race. Another theory maintains that the police guarding the track were in collusion with the starter, Oswald. After he finally managed to give the send-off Oswald immediately left the race, and was subsequently apprehended by track officials.
Johnson had certainly not expected to win the race in this way. There were no pit stops.
Several puzzling aspects of the race remain. One is the presence of the President's wife in the car, an unusual practice for racing drivers. Kennedy, however, may have maintained that as he was in control of the ship of state he was therefore entitled to captain's privileges.
The Warren Commission. The rake-off on the book of the race. In their report, prompted by widespread complaints of foul play and other irregularities, the syndicate lay full blame on the starter, Oswald.
Without doubt, Oswald badly misfired. But one question still remains unanswered: Who loaded the starting gun?
J sub D | November 22, 2008, 4:16pm | #
CED aka MNG,
The bottom twenty percent will always exist. It will always be populated by the imprudent, the wastrels, the short sighted, the foolish, the mentally ill and the unlucky. And of course, their offspring.
You seem to believe that society owes them, or is morally obligated to provide them, a standard of living to ________________ level.
Society, as I pointed out above, will provide sufficient food, clothing and shelter. We also provide education opportunity and a tried and true roadmap to escape poverty for all but the mentally ill. Sadly, many chose to take a different path through life and remain mired in poverty.
As I also pointed out above, the biggest problem with being poor in a first world nation is your neighbors. The culture of poverty and dependence that wears you down, saps your will and convinces you that such behaviors are acceptable, even normal.
Transferring wealth will do nothing to address these underlying causes of poverty. Were we to give every family on the east side of Detroit $100K some few would escape poverty forever, yet most would be needing assistance again within two years.
As an ancient philosopher once said
For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always.
Please fill in the blank in my second paragraph, telling me after food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education opportunity and opportunity to work are provided, what should society do?
I'm afraid the safety net has turned into a hammock for far too many and it may be inevitable. . I'm no dreamer, there is no libertopia where these problems vanish. It is also apparent that LBJs war on poverty has met with resounding failure as these problems have not been alleviated after two generations.
The left, right and the very few intelligent one who don't live on that line need to consider the possibility that intractable, generational poverty is unsolvable.
CED | November 22, 2008, 5:31pm | #
"Society, as I pointed out above, will provide sufficient food, clothing and shelter. We also provide education opportunity and a tried and true roadmap to escape poverty for all but the mentally ill."
Do you think they should? I do, but I imagine many here think all that is "theft" and "socialism."
"It is also apparent that LBJs war on poverty has met with resounding failure as these problems have not been alleviated after two generations."
I'm not sure that follows. If you had a bacterial illness and wgot prescribed an anti-biotic and it did not do the trick that does not mean anti-biotics don't cure this sort of thing often or that we shouldn't try another, maybe stronger dose. And it certainly wouldn't mean, as many who claim the poverty must be created or fostered by Great Society programs since it hasn't been alleviated by them, that the anti-biotic created the illness.
"The bottom twenty percent will always exist. It will always be populated by the imprudent, the wastrels, the short sighted, the foolish, the mentally ill and the unlucky. And of course, their offspring."
I partly agree, but what do you make of facts like this: that blacks have three times the poverty rate of whites? That there are 3 times as many imprudent wastrels and mentally ill black people? If the answer is what I think it is, a mix of discrimination, starting with disadvantage (being born into families with less wealth) and a subculture of poverty that more blacks are part of then the questions are, why is there more discrimination against blacks? why are more blacks a part of that subculture of poverty? why are more blacks born into poor families? And I think the answer is that oppressive government actions once made that subculture attractive and once established cultures are persistent, that government actions fostered the idea that blacks were inferior, and that government actions kept blacks from earning their full potential (all this is true for women too). So I think government is warranted in trying to make sure these conditions are ameliorated to some extent.
But I really don't support anything much beyond what you mention, basic necessities, educational opportunities and opportunities to work (by which I mean anti-discrimination laws). That's liberalism in a nutshell imo.
CED | November 23, 2008, 7:37pm | #
BDB-
Several major Civil Rights Act were part of what is commonly called LBJ's Great Society. I mean, he passed them chronologically right alonside most of the other programs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_society
I love it when people here call into question the gains made during the Great Society by attributing them to ending Jim Crow. WTF do they think ended Jim Crow? Markets? lol.
TAO
"Post hoc, ergo propter hoc."
I posted that to specifically answer J sub D's claim: "No it means the trillions spent on saocial programs since 1964 have had no discernable effects on entrenched poverty. The same groups are mired in it, the same families are mired in it."
And that's not true. Since we've been spending those trillions poverty has been lowered quite a lot for a lot of folks. Maybe something else did it, but it certainly is hard to argue that all the spending made matters worse or had no effect. Shit, something did!
"I will grant that from 1959 - 1970, the poverty rate among blacks went from 55% - 33%"
I guess you will "grant" this just like I "grant" that I cannot in fact fly...
"When do these programs end? What are the standards and when can they stop?"
They don't. And there is nothing wrong with that.
I don't think you've read or understood my answers above. It's about ensuring that we always have opportunity for people to break out of current conditions created by the past, conditions they had nothing to do with:
But I argue that a great deal of today's inequality results from past oppressions and from the bad decisions of some people's parents which give some people enormous advantages over others. We can't right those specific wrongs and past bad decisions, but a safety net and some measures that provide this roadmap out of poverty you speak of (educational opportunity, anti-discrimination laws) are warranted to combat these conditions so that the ancestors of the harmed and the stupid need not pay the price over and over."
J sub D | November 23, 2008, 9:28pm | #
CED aka MNG,
At somne point in time a people need to take responsibilty for their own decisions. Here's why.
The blacks whose behaviors that lead to a life of poverty living in the ghetto (a minority of black Americans) are not to blame because of their ancestors treatment by slaveholding, Jim Crow enacting, bigoted Americans.
Slaveholding, Jim Crow enacting, bigoted Americans are not to blamed because of their ancestors mistreatment by the residents of the northern states.
The northern state's citizens are not to be blamed due to their ancestors mistreatment by the British.
The British get a free pass because of their documented oppression by the Romans.
The Romans are equally blameless because this is a result of their oppression by the Greek city-states that ruled the Mediterranean prior to the establishment of the Roman Republic.
The Greeks are given a pass because of the oppression they suffered at the hands of the Persiam Empire.
The Persian Empire behaved the way it did due the the previous machinations of Mesopotamia.
The Mesopotamians are not really responsible for their behavior due the oppression of the Sumerians who preceded them in the Tigris Euphrates watershed.
Since the Sumerians possess the oldest written records, we don't know who is at fault for their fuckups.
As far back as I can trace it,
entrenched poverty in African American ghettos is the responsibility of the Sumerians. Future archeological discoveries may allow us to push the blame back further.
Nasikabatrachus | November 23, 2008, 11:06pm | #
You're missing the point. I'm not talking about specific reparations. I'm talking about ensuring some measure of opportunity NOW for those harmed either by past wrongs or even the bad decisions of their ancestors.
For one thing, there is no baseline against which to suggest that a child has been harmed by past wrongs or the bad decisions of their ancestors. It is a null comparison that means only what one wants it to mean. By the standards you're presenting here there is no way to judge whether such "opportunity providing" measures even would work because if someone doesn't take advantage of such opportunities you can claim that it's just further justification of these measures and even if they do do so and succeed one can still claim that they are "bearing costs" or "harmed" because there's no telling what they might have achieved had those things never happened. And for another even if someone's ancestors made "good" decisions one cannot prove that they were not harmed because one can still imagine an even better set of circumstances to be born with.
It's a big pile of meaninglessness.
To some degree every white person benefited. A white kid in 1800 had a possibility of voting, holding property, being elected to office, attending university, etc., in a way that pretty much every black kid did not.
So, not being harmed is the same as benefitting because someone else harmed someone else. Of course, in a way every white person in the US was also harmed by slavery to some degree, for without slavery things would indubitably have been more peaceful, more sane, and richer/more productive--showing again that it's all a big pile of meaninglessness.
But get this, if I'm correct then at worst I'm saying that some white people who indeed have not benefited in any way from the racial imbalances created and existing now would indeed have to suffer: having their ability to discriminate against blacks curtailed!
A "small price", you say. Certainly, if one does not resist. But a lack of discrimination can never be proven, so it must naturally move towards some sort of quota system. And if someone does not wish to comply? Court orders, fines. And if they don't comply with those? The police come to take you to jail. And if you don't comply with the police? You get killed, or knocked unconscious and are made a slave of the state in the prison (hotbeds of rape, by the by). Hence a simple, if irrational and ugly, desire to exercise one's freedom of association is met with violence, slavery, and possibly rape as well.
So by following CED's plan to ameliorate fundamentally unprovable harm (and benefit) to people with no baseline for comparison by people who are all long dead, we wind up with an entrenched bureaucracy with no incentive to end the problem it's set out to ameliorate (and know way to tell if it's doing that) and every incentive to keep vast reams of money moving through the system that they can tap, and a philosophy that tells people that any discrepancy between what they think they could be and what they are is an injustice that the whole world has an obligation to remedy.
Bad philosophy leads to bad worlds, and this just has "intergenerational clusterfrak" written all over it. How's about we say no to the violence of the state, accept the fact that we can't right all that is wrong with the cosmos, and try to make a society where these things don't happen to begin with.
CED | November 24, 2008, 7:44am | #
"Setting all that aside, why SHOULD (this is a morality and justice argument here) I pay for something my grandfather did?"
Why should anyone? Like the kid who is born into the poor grandfather's family? Or worse, why should the grandson of the one harmed have to pay more than the grandson of the harmer? What kind of moral miscreant are you to think that would be just?
TAO, you're still misunderstanding the basic point, you're not paying for the murder your grandfather did (if so you'd be locked up not forced not to discriminate and pay taxes), but your "right" to the ill gotten gains he got through the murder are questionable.
I'm also not sold that there is a "right" to discriminate in employment and such (TAO's "freedom of association based on skin color", what a nice euphemism!). But even if there is I argue: who should bear the burden of amerliorating the obviously still present effects of government discrimination against blacks, the ancestors of those harmed or the ancesters of those benefited? Note I'm not proposing affirmative action to help those harmed or "punish" anyone, I'm proposing that the very racism created by the harms and still existing be blunted by limiting the "freedom to discriminate." And btw, I'm not advocating that only whites be so limited, anti-discrimination laws protect every color from discrimination.
You guys seem to think that because someone has something he therefore has a right to it or deserves it. I think that's dubious to begin with.
"The Britons were fucking Christianized!"
Yeah, but the average Anglo-Saxon ancestor is not suffering from disporportionate deficets in wealth vis a vis the average Italian. I'm not saying all past wrongs need righting, only the PRESENT CONDITIONS of past wrongs, especially ones that can be addressed by measures that involve morally questionable "rights" like the right to discriminate to begin with. And the effects of white on black racial discrimination are obviously still with us while the Roman on Briton ones are not. So stop being silly.
Nasikabatrachus
You're missing the point too. Inequality is inevitable because there will be winners and losers in competition. That's a good thing overall. What's not a good thing is that people's kids get mired in the losing of their parents. It's not fair to the kid, it's not good for society (many talents may be buried under the bad conditions a kid is born into). So yes the opportunity-providing structure will be around as long as inequality is. It's there to blunt an inevitable mechanism. The race stuff in America just gives it that more (and how) moral weight (because the kid now is not just the victim of his father's bade decisions, but his father's victimization) and means the anti-discrimination laws are morally weightier than the "opportunity providing" structures, but I think both sell either way.
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