A long winded story about the official poverty measure and a brief moment of intense patriotism

Background:

             TLDR: The official poverty measure is confusing as hell

Upon Googling "Bernie Sanders", an interesting combination of words appeared:

"Forbes.com"
"Policies for Bernie Sanders"


The article was a rather facile examination of the relative merits of conditional vs. non-conditional cash transfers, as in food stamps vs. cash benefits. There are better articles about this subject such as this one in the Economist and this one on a Norwegian website. But what immediately caught my eye, and what takes up the bulk of the article, is a claim that the author, Tim Worstall, makes about the childhood poverty rate, namely that it is only 2-3%. Of all the metrics that you could use to argue that poverty in America isn't as bad as some people say it is, the childhood poverty rate is probably the least likely to convince someone who has access to the official statistics.

I confronted Tim about his lack of citations in the comment section. We went back and forth for a while, with me arguing that he had no data to backup his claim that the childhood poverty rate was 2-3% (it was officially 22% in 2013), and him arguing that he didn't need data, because he could tell the poverty rate by dividing the total welfare expenditures by the number of poor people, or some such BS. This is a classic, Heritage Foundation-level argument, which is ridiculous for a number of reasons, chief among them that it tells you nothing about how much we spend on certain sectors of the population, only how much we collectively spend on a large number of very different programs that target different groups of people. In the end he seemed to concede that he didn't know the poverty rate for children, but he was extremely resistant to the idea that he should have to provide a source for his numbers, instead preferring to "construct one".

Fast forward to a few days ago, when I stumbled upon an article in a blog, http://plancksconstant.org, that made the following claim:

"After spending more than 15 trillion dollars on the poor in America, we do not have less people in poverty, as a percentage, than before the War on Poverty started."

He showed that the official poverty rate, while falling from 19% in 1964 to 14.5% in 2013, actually shows a more or less even trend from the late 1960s, when the War on Poverty initiatives were fully implemented, and today.

This is more or less true: the poverty measure has stayed at an all time low of between 11 and 15 percent after the War on Poverty legislation. On the other hand it had been falling rapidly until the War on Poverty, at which point it leveled off. This apparent fact supports the narrative that welfare discourages people from finding jobs and improving themselves, and therefore hurts them. The implication is that if the War on Poverty hadn't happened, the poverty rate would have fallen faster and continued to fall for longer.

Though that narrative is entirely hypothetical, I was surprised that he was correct about the poverty measure, and that we had indeed apparently failed to bring people out of poverty since its inception. However, I was skeptical that this was a valid comparison. I first looked at the definition of the poverty measure, hoping to find that many programs were not included in it - which had been the Forbes' Tim Worstall's main idea - but found that, while they exclude "non cash benefits" the only programs they mention on the web page as being excluded are food stamps and subsidized housing. That was something at least, but it would only take away maybe 1-2% from the poverty rate, which would be a disappointing place to be at, in my opinion. Further, the website explicity mentioned that the measure does count as income "earnings, unemployment compensation, workers' compensation, Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, public assistance, veterans' payments, survivor benefits, pension or retirement income, interest, dividends, rents, royalties, income from estates, trusts, educational assistance, alimony, child support, assistance from outside the household, and other miscellaneous sources."


A new poverty measure of consumption 

In my wanderings through the interwebs in search of an account of why the poverty rate hadn't fallen, I stumbled upon another article by my old friend Mr. Worstall, written about a year earlier than the first. Consistent with his position in the aforementioned piece about childhood poverty, Worstall argues that the War on Poverty has had significant success, and that the poverty rate, in terms that are comparable to the 1964 poverty rate, was WAY lower than the official one, as low as 4.3 percent in the deepest depths of the recession! Amazingly though, in this article Worstall cites a source for essentially the same data that he refused to give a source for, when I asked, no, begged for one in our earlier interaction. Granted, it isn't about childhood poverty, and that is perhaps why he refused to give it up. I am left pondering what is says about a person if they are willing to argue at length with someone about something, while withholding sources relevant sources, instead using their own made up, phony sources...


Anyway, the source that he cited led me to a report by the Brookings Institution, which is a "centrist" think tank, in that it is cited by Republicans almost exactly as often as by Democrats. The report analyzes material wellbeing in a few different ways, and finds that, comparing the conditions in which "officially poor" Americans lived in 1964, less than 10% of Americans in 2010 lived in similar conditions of want. Even if you are not convinced of the validity of their "consumption level" measure, which attempts to measure consumption directly, and finds that poverty was never above 4.7%, even during the recession - even if you are not convinced of this, the poverty rate, when accounting for all sources of income, was 8.3% in 2010. The official one was more like 15.5%. That's a huge difference, and more importantly, the pattern that emerges from the data (look at around pg. 149-151) that the rate has been steadily falling over the past 50 years. The point is, assuming that the Brookings Institution's methods, and those of others, aren't totally off base (and they could be, I suppose), the country has made huge progress in fighting poverty in the last 50 years. Now, that is something to be happy about.

The most striking thing about this learning experience was a feeling of what I can only describe as patriotism when I realized that both political fringes don't want to acknowledge the apparent success our country has had. In contrast to political pettiness and the accompanying politics-induced lack of perspective, not to mention action, our much maligned political and economic system had functioned well enough to turn the will of the people into positive social change.

The far left doesn't want to acknowledge that the most of the poor today wouldn't be considered poor in 1964. Some leftists would, if pressed, particularly those who happened to be sociologists or demographers, but in general the left is perpetually focused on striving for more and there is an ignorance or indifference to past successes. What would you think about a person who refused to acknowledge their own success? Humble or unhinged? I suppose it's a matter of degree. The far right, for their part, doesn't want to acknowledge that the war on poverty has worked because doing so would acknowledge that some of the government expansion of the last 40 years has had good effects. Even if the "moderate" factions of our two political parties were to acknowledge these things, no one would pay attention. The media is perpetually focused only on the extremes of both parties, basically, Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan vs. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Why is it that the political discourse of centrism is such a poor seller? Is it because centrists lack conviction, and are therefore too quiet for their own good? Is it because they seem like cowardly fence-sitters? There are plenty of other possible reasons for its increasing unpopularity and the accompanying political gridlock.