3 ms·

Notable quotes: > “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.” > If you keep Orshansk

Notable quotes: > “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.” > If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three. > It becomes sixteen. I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here, but broadly speaking, it seems extremely likely that the number is no longer "three", and thus the conclusion that the "poverty line" is broken seems quite likely.

marcosdumay 11mo ago
> I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here The share of goods in people expenses is something governments have been tracking extremely well since the end of the inter-wars period (losing some quality during WWII). As far as economical measurements go, those are among the best you'll get on the real economy (monetary measurements tend to be more precise).
burkaman 11mo ago
The conclusion seems likely but this logic doesn't make sense. They don't recalculate a food budget every year and multiply it by three, they take that original 1963 number and add inflation. I think this is dumb, but it's dumb in a completely different way than the article is saying.
deleted 11mo ago
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tbrownaw 11mo ago
> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share This is not accurate. There was no such principle. There was an extrapolation technique to use well-measured numbers to calculate a desired but not measured number. This is not a principle about how things should be calculated, it is a tool for dealing with missing features in a dataset.
dragonwriter 11mo ago
> I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here, but broadly speaking, it seems extremely likely that the number is no longer "three" If we assume that general inflation captures the right basket of goods, and that (3 × minimum food) was correct in 1963, then what is actually done (adjusting the result in 1963 by inflation) is correct as well. That is not what you would get if you computed the minimum food budget now and multiplied by 3; the shifting of the food share of the budget is captured in the CPI.

marcosdumay 11mo ago

> I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here The share of goods in people expenses is something governments have been tracking extremely well since the end of the inter-wars period (losing some quality during WWII). As far as economical measurements go, those are among the best you'll get on the real economy (monetary measurements tend to be more precise).

burkaman 11mo ago

The conclusion seems likely but this logic doesn't make sense. They don't recalculate a food budget every year and multiply it by three, they take that original 1963 number and add inflation. I think this is dumb, but it's dumb in a completely different way than the article is saying.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

tbrownaw 11mo ago

> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share This is not accurate. There was no such principle. There was an extrapolation technique to use well-measured numbers to calculate a desired but not measured number. This is not a principle about how things should be calculated, it is a tool for dealing with missing features in a dataset.

dragonwriter 11mo ago

> I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here, but broadly speaking, it seems extremely likely that the number is no longer "three" If we assume that general inflation captures the right basket of goods, and that (3 × minimum food) was correct in 1963, then what is actually done (adjusting the result in 1963 by inflation) is correct as well. That is not what you would get if you computed the minimum food budget now and multiplied by 3; the shifting of the food share of the budget is captured in the CPI.