How is Poverty Measured in the U.S.?
Poverty in the US is measured in terms of the federal poverty line. The poverty line is a threshold level. In other words, a level of income which you are either above (out of poverty) or below (in poverty). The poverty line varies for how many people are in a household. In 2018, the federal poverty line was $12,140 for an individual, $16,460 for a family of two, $20,780 for a family of three, and $25,100 for a family of four.
Where does the poverty line come from?
It sounds odd to say, but the poverty line is all about food.
First developed in 1965, just as the war on poverty was getting underway, the poverty line is based on the idea that at the time a typical family spent one third of its monthly budget on food. Mollie Orshansky, an economist working with the US Social Security Administration, used the US Department of Agriculture’s estimate of how much a minimum nutritional diet would cost in 1965, and then multiplied it by three to get the budget that a family would need in order to get by. Her goal was to find out the minimum a family would need to survive for a couple months in the case of an emergency. To this day, the poverty line is generated the same way: the USDA publishes the estimated cost of a minimally nutritional diet, then that is multiplied by three – and then we assume that families can live with this little income for years on end.
Click here to download Pushed to the Bottom: the Experience of Poverty in the U.S.
Even if you accept a monetary measure for poverty (more on that below), this approach has some real problems.
For starters, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the portion of a family’s budget spent on non-food items like housing has skyrocketed since the 1960’s. In 2016, Americans spent closer to 12% of their budget on food, rather than the 33% that the poverty threshold assumes [1]. This means that a family earning three times the cost of a minimal healthy diet today is only covering 36% of their monthly expenses, and as a result probably going hungry. Even a family earning twice the poverty line is probably not getting by. To get a real measure of how much a family needs to earn, you should multiply the cost of the minimal healthy diet by eight, not three.
The general absurdity of the national poverty guidelines is widely recognized. But changing them would have far-reaching political implications on social welfare programs, so there is little chance of improvement any time soon.
In the meantime, a growing movement has been looking beyond the very idea that income is the best way to understand poverty in the first place.
Poverty is multidimensional
This is all about the US poverty line – but it isn’t the only poverty line out there. The World Bank and United Nations measure poverty as $1.95 a day, for instance. This is what comes up when folks talk about the Sustainable Development Goals and ending global poverty and extreme poverty.
In recent years though, more and more researchers and policymakers have been realizing that poverty is about more than just income.
Take that World Bank measure of $1.95 for instance. Very few Americans live with less money than that (though some researchers would argue that a surprising number still do). Does that mean that someone sleeping on the streets on a cold winter night is not struggling with poverty? Poverty is about access to housing, food, healthcare, good schools, safe communities, and a living wage. Poverty is about rights, about participation, about discrimination. Poverty is multidimensional.
What are those different dimensions of poverty? This is the newest frontier in anti-poverty work today.
In 2017 and 2018, ATD Fourth World partnered with Oxford University to conduct a groundbreaking study in this vein: identifying the multidimensional aspects of poverty with the real experts on poverty, those who live it every day and who work alongside them.
Using a research approach called “Merging Knowledge,” we organized over 20 peer groups in six areas across the US, ranging from major metropolitan areas like New York and Oakland, to rural areas like Appalachia and the Navajo reservation outside Gallup, New Mexico.
The result is a new approach to understanding poverty by looking at nine key aspects of poverty:
Click here to download Pushed to the Bottom: the Experience of Poverty in the U.S.
