11 ms·

Poverty metrics were improving.

lumost 6y ago
These two seem at odds, are we defining poverty in such a way that it's decoupled from the expected living standard of the age?
- wpasc 6y ago
  If you define poverty as income related to costs of living and obtaining necessities for living, it should be entirely decoupled from income inequality. If the poorest 20% of americans had their incomes triple over night without a corresponding increase of the costs of living and Bezos becomes a trillionare, poverty would have decrease with income inequality worsening. If the richest Americans all saw 75% of their wealth and income evaporate overnight while the poorest 50% americans lost 10% wealth and income, income inequality would reduce but poverty would still increase. You might say that income inequality contributes to disparities in political influence which may cause more longterm poverty, but that link has far too many steps in it (political corruption for example) to say the two are now directly linked
  - lumost 6y ago
    I think that definition is susceptible to defining the "necessities for living" in ways that underestimate poverty. How do you define what's the standard of living? As of 2021 I'd imagine that several necessities for interacting with society such as internet access and potentially even mobile access would not be universally viewed as required to be above the poverty line. Similarly while home ownership is probably not required to be above poverty line, is stable access to housing required? What about having sufficient savings to survive/social support to survive the loss of a paycheck without missing rent?
    - d1zzy 6y ago
      Wait, is mobile data access a basic right now? I am living very comfortably but never got a mobile data plan. I find them too expensive for what they are. YMMV.
      - dx87 6y ago
        At least where I live in Maryland, being on "welfare" includes a cheap smart phone because a lot of jobs assume you have one for things like driving directions, getting signatures, taking pictures of receipts, etc.
      - girvo 6y ago
        Either mobile data access or internet access should be, yes. You need one of those to access the job market today (among other critical services). Smartphones have become so cheap that they are most people (especially those in lower socioeconomic brackets) only computing device, and having a phone number is also a prerequisite for society, so mobile data access is the common way to gain internet access for a large swathe of society. This is a global phenomenon too (and even more so in other countries).
      - lumost 6y ago
        Many jobs of the modern economy require both a car and a mobile data plan. Consider Uber Driver Instacart Shopper TaskRabbit Redfin sales agent DoorDasher If someone falls below the point where they can afford the requirements for typical jobs, then they may enter into a spiral where there is no path out of poverty. There was a great moment of irony in my early career where lacking a job post-college ('08 reccession) I was unable to pay my student loans. 6 months after graduating I received an offer from Sallie Mae to work as an engineer, however due to corporate policy a sallie mae will not employ anyone who is arrears on their student debt. At this point, owing approximately $2000 and only had $250 to my name which was required for rent, food, and the 18 year old ford escort that I needed to drive to work. I was able to arrange the money, but ultimately I was within a day of being put out of work for lack of ability to pay a debt. Had this occurred I likely would not have been able to work in software, and in all likelihood the bank may never have gotten their money back on the student loans.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  Exactly. Some people seem to refer to poverty as living with the standards of 2000 years ago. Of course we improved. That doesn't mean that relative poverty is getting worse and that other factors like free time have worsened if compared with centuries ago.
  - hrjfkgkgk 6y ago
    idk man poverty in the us is not as bad as in india but it sure is worse than east europe. there is a dude here stating inequality is not bad, perhaps they’d want to visit communist countries to see how wide the gap is between regular folks and the elite
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      Have you ever visited a gypsy village in eastern Slovakia or in the Balkans? You know, the huts that barely stand? Or some of the most notorious housing projects? That is a trip straight to the Middle Ages. Look at the following videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7WHKU_UoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7WHKU_UoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Men6iwpLjno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Men6iwpLjno Eastern Europe has some really bad places. IDK if USA is worse, but it would have to try.
      - pietrovismara 6y ago
        Those are gypsy and you can find the same exact type of camps/villages in Western Europe, no need to go to Eastern Europe. Their condition doesn't really depend on the poverty level of the country they live in, but other factors such as cultural and integration issues, not always caused by them. In short, not a really good example of poverty.
        inglor_cz 6y ago
        I am a Czech, I know gypsies well, I had several classmates from all sorts of gypsy families - from very well integrated to the ghetto standard. I would argue that multigenerational poverty in contemporary West has always something to do with cultural and integration issues. Plenty of refugees who came with a small bags of personal items have built middle class lives in a generation, even though they were foreign, did not know the language and faced crude racism from primitives.
- eloff 6y ago
  Inequality is not a bad thing. It's actually necessary to have inequality of outcomes otherwise you have no incentives for improvement. An example of a society with very low inequality is old-school communism where most people are equally poor - it's clearly not a good thing. What is bad is extreme inequality where a lot of people are in poverty. I think most people would agree that poverty is a bad thing that we should try to reduce. It's quite possible for poverty to decrease and inequality to increase at the same time. The old "a rising tide lifts all boats" analogy. It just means everyone is doing better but the wealthy are seeing more relative gains. If the whole pie is growing, it's easy to see how everyone could get more pie even if it's not distributed equally. edit If you disagree please state why. Drive by downvotes do not convince me that I'm mistaken, they just lower my opinion of the average HN user.
  - hrjfkgkgk 6y ago
    umm inequality was enormous in communism, not sire what you on about. but hey let the poor rot.
    - eloff 6y ago
      That was a very small ruling class exploiting pretty much the entire population. That's very low levels of inequality.
      - lumost 6y ago
        Typically that would be viewed as high inequality. If the ruling class of .1% controls 99.9% of the wealth then the "average wealth" and the "median wealth" will be extremely different aka wealth inequality.
        eloff 6y ago
        That would be high inequality, yes. However, if the ruling class of 0.1% has 10% of the overall wealth, then that would be very low inequality. I would expect that to have been closer to the truth under the old USSR or the old Cuba, see the graph at: https://voxeu.org/sites/default/files/image/FromMay2014/novokmentfig6.png https://voxeu.org/sites/default/files/image/FromMay2014/novo... taken from: https://voxeu.org/article/inequality-and-property-russia-1905-2016 https://voxeu.org/article/inequality-and-property-russia-190...
- dnissley 6y ago
  I think it makes sense for them to be decoupled on some level, but maybe not totally. The danger on one side is falling into a sort of hedonic treadmill issue where the poverty level defines a standard of living that is so generous that it ceases to be a measurement of hardship. The danger on the other side is fixing the poverty level at some static level that doesn't take into consideration inflation and other changes to the environment that people actually live their lives in.
- slumdev 6y ago
  They're not at odds. It is possible for the people at the bottom to have better housing, better food, better education, and better health, while the people at the top still enjoy a vastly disproportionately greater increase in income and wealth. With disproportionate gains and different spending priorities, you won't see consistent inflation across all kinds of goods. Because the inflation is concentrated at the top, the people at the bottom won't get priced out of the things they need. They're not getting priced out of anything they couldn't have afforded 20 years ago. A nice house that cost $100k in 1999 costs $200k today. A fabulous house that cost $500k in 1999 costs $5,000k today.
  - cammikebrown 6y ago
    I think it depends where you live. My parents bought a home in 1988 for $100k and sold it six years later for $120k. Zillow says it’s worth $590k now. They bought their next home in 1994 for $180k, and it’s now appraised at $650k. This is Sacramento, CA. By the way, they pay about $3k/year in property taxes, while a new homeowner pays about triple that. If property taxes weren’t kept so artificially low for long time homeowners, I don’t think property prices would have gone up so much.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
dv_dt 6y ago
2017/18 levels were just recovering back to 1970s levels before covid and after the 2008 crisis. Extreme poverty has been much higher than the 70's... https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-united-states https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...
vagrantJin 6y ago
I like the bureaucratic way you put this like it means anything. Especially since poverty is arbitrarily defined.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  If we define the federal poverty threshold as having an annual income of less than $1 poverty metrics will improve drastically. Heck, we might even be able to solve it!
  - tharne 6y ago
    It seems like the left is already doing that, just in the opposite direction. Poverty has continued to decrease in the U.S. so we longer talk about it much, instead we focus on "income inequality" because it serves a particular political philosophy. If "income inequality" is a major issue regardless of how well people are doing, then there will always be a reason to intervene in the economy and redistribute wealth, since any society with any sort of market economy will always see an uneven distribution of wealth.

These two seem at odds, are we defining poverty in such a way that it's decoupled from the expected living standard of the age?

wpasc 6y ago
If you define poverty as income related to costs of living and obtaining necessities for living, it should be entirely decoupled from income inequality. If the poorest 20% of americans had their incomes triple over night without a corresponding increase of the costs of living and Bezos becomes a trillionare, poverty would have decrease with income inequality worsening. If the richest Americans all saw 75% of their wealth and income evaporate overnight while the poorest 50% americans lost 10% wealth and income, income inequality would reduce but poverty would still increase. You might say that income inequality contributes to disparities in political influence which may cause more longterm poverty, but that link has far too many steps in it (political corruption for example) to say the two are now directly linked
- lumost 6y ago
  I think that definition is susceptible to defining the "necessities for living" in ways that underestimate poverty. How do you define what's the standard of living? As of 2021 I'd imagine that several necessities for interacting with society such as internet access and potentially even mobile access would not be universally viewed as required to be above the poverty line. Similarly while home ownership is probably not required to be above poverty line, is stable access to housing required? What about having sufficient savings to survive/social support to survive the loss of a paycheck without missing rent?
  - d1zzy 6y ago
    Wait, is mobile data access a basic right now? I am living very comfortably but never got a mobile data plan. I find them too expensive for what they are. YMMV.
    - dx87 6y ago
      At least where I live in Maryland, being on "welfare" includes a cheap smart phone because a lot of jobs assume you have one for things like driving directions, getting signatures, taking pictures of receipts, etc.
    - girvo 6y ago
      Either mobile data access or internet access should be, yes. You need one of those to access the job market today (among other critical services). Smartphones have become so cheap that they are most people (especially those in lower socioeconomic brackets) only computing device, and having a phone number is also a prerequisite for society, so mobile data access is the common way to gain internet access for a large swathe of society. This is a global phenomenon too (and even more so in other countries).
    - lumost 6y ago
      Many jobs of the modern economy require both a car and a mobile data plan. Consider Uber Driver Instacart Shopper TaskRabbit Redfin sales agent DoorDasher If someone falls below the point where they can afford the requirements for typical jobs, then they may enter into a spiral where there is no path out of poverty. There was a great moment of irony in my early career where lacking a job post-college ('08 reccession) I was unable to pay my student loans. 6 months after graduating I received an offer from Sallie Mae to work as an engineer, however due to corporate policy a sallie mae will not employ anyone who is arrears on their student debt. At this point, owing approximately $2000 and only had $250 to my name which was required for rent, food, and the 18 year old ford escort that I needed to drive to work. I was able to arrange the money, but ultimately I was within a day of being put out of work for lack of ability to pay a debt. Had this occurred I likely would not have been able to work in software, and in all likelihood the bank may never have gotten their money back on the student loans.
pietrovismara 6y ago
Exactly. Some people seem to refer to poverty as living with the standards of 2000 years ago. Of course we improved. That doesn't mean that relative poverty is getting worse and that other factors like free time have worsened if compared with centuries ago.
- hrjfkgkgk 6y ago
  idk man poverty in the us is not as bad as in india but it sure is worse than east europe. there is a dude here stating inequality is not bad, perhaps they’d want to visit communist countries to see how wide the gap is between regular folks and the elite
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    Have you ever visited a gypsy village in eastern Slovakia or in the Balkans? You know, the huts that barely stand? Or some of the most notorious housing projects? That is a trip straight to the Middle Ages. Look at the following videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7WHKU_UoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7WHKU_UoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Men6iwpLjno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Men6iwpLjno Eastern Europe has some really bad places. IDK if USA is worse, but it would have to try.
    - pietrovismara 6y ago
      Those are gypsy and you can find the same exact type of camps/villages in Western Europe, no need to go to Eastern Europe. Their condition doesn't really depend on the poverty level of the country they live in, but other factors such as cultural and integration issues, not always caused by them. In short, not a really good example of poverty.
      - inglor_cz 6y ago
        I am a Czech, I know gypsies well, I had several classmates from all sorts of gypsy families - from very well integrated to the ghetto standard. I would argue that multigenerational poverty in contemporary West has always something to do with cultural and integration issues. Plenty of refugees who came with a small bags of personal items have built middle class lives in a generation, even though they were foreign, did not know the language and faced crude racism from primitives.
eloff 6y ago
Inequality is not a bad thing. It's actually necessary to have inequality of outcomes otherwise you have no incentives for improvement. An example of a society with very low inequality is old-school communism where most people are equally poor - it's clearly not a good thing. What is bad is extreme inequality where a lot of people are in poverty. I think most people would agree that poverty is a bad thing that we should try to reduce. It's quite possible for poverty to decrease and inequality to increase at the same time. The old "a rising tide lifts all boats" analogy. It just means everyone is doing better but the wealthy are seeing more relative gains. If the whole pie is growing, it's easy to see how everyone could get more pie even if it's not distributed equally. edit If you disagree please state why. Drive by downvotes do not convince me that I'm mistaken, they just lower my opinion of the average HN user.
- hrjfkgkgk 6y ago
  umm inequality was enormous in communism, not sire what you on about. but hey let the poor rot.
  - eloff 6y ago
    That was a very small ruling class exploiting pretty much the entire population. That's very low levels of inequality.
    - lumost 6y ago
      Typically that would be viewed as high inequality. If the ruling class of .1% controls 99.9% of the wealth then the "average wealth" and the "median wealth" will be extremely different aka wealth inequality.
      - eloff 6y ago
        That would be high inequality, yes. However, if the ruling class of 0.1% has 10% of the overall wealth, then that would be very low inequality. I would expect that to have been closer to the truth under the old USSR or the old Cuba, see the graph at: https://voxeu.org/sites/default/files/image/FromMay2014/novokmentfig6.png https://voxeu.org/sites/default/files/image/FromMay2014/novo... taken from: https://voxeu.org/article/inequality-and-property-russia-1905-2016 https://voxeu.org/article/inequality-and-property-russia-190...
dnissley 6y ago
I think it makes sense for them to be decoupled on some level, but maybe not totally. The danger on one side is falling into a sort of hedonic treadmill issue where the poverty level defines a standard of living that is so generous that it ceases to be a measurement of hardship. The danger on the other side is fixing the poverty level at some static level that doesn't take into consideration inflation and other changes to the environment that people actually live their lives in.
slumdev 6y ago
They're not at odds. It is possible for the people at the bottom to have better housing, better food, better education, and better health, while the people at the top still enjoy a vastly disproportionately greater increase in income and wealth. With disproportionate gains and different spending priorities, you won't see consistent inflation across all kinds of goods. Because the inflation is concentrated at the top, the people at the bottom won't get priced out of the things they need. They're not getting priced out of anything they couldn't have afforded 20 years ago. A nice house that cost $100k in 1999 costs $200k today. A fabulous house that cost $500k in 1999 costs $5,000k today.
- cammikebrown 6y ago
  I think it depends where you live. My parents bought a home in 1988 for $100k and sold it six years later for $120k. Zillow says it’s worth $590k now. They bought their next home in 1994 for $180k, and it’s now appraised at $650k. This is Sacramento, CA. By the way, they pay about $3k/year in property taxes, while a new homeowner pays about triple that. If property taxes weren’t kept so artificially low for long time homeowners, I don’t think property prices would have gone up so much.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

dv_dt 6y ago

2017/18 levels were just recovering back to 1970s levels before covid and after the 2008 crisis. Extreme poverty has been much higher than the 70's... https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-united-states https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...

vagrantJin 6y ago

I like the bureaucratic way you put this like it means anything. Especially since poverty is arbitrarily defined.

elliekelly 6y ago
If we define the federal poverty threshold as having an annual income of less than $1 poverty metrics will improve drastically. Heck, we might even be able to solve it!
- tharne 6y ago
  It seems like the left is already doing that, just in the opposite direction. Poverty has continued to decrease in the U.S. so we longer talk about it much, instead we focus on "income inequality" because it serves a particular political philosophy. If "income inequality" is a major issue regardless of how well people are doing, then there will always be a reason to intervene in the economy and redistribute wealth, since any society with any sort of market economy will always see an uneven distribution of wealth.