19.9% of US children live in poverty

project-syndicate.org

1 point·dizzy··4 comments

Stiglitz has a political agenda so his definition of poverty is not what you might think (i.e. lack of food or shelter) but "relative poverty" - defined as income below 50% of median adjusted for family size (which are larger for poor families). It would be nice if he mentioned this...

Edit: Also this is based on (pre-tax?) income before transfers such as subsidized food, housing and healthcare which distorts comparisons (i.e. in the US, unlike almost every rich countries, only the poor get free or subsidized healthcare).

Isn't the whole world dealing with poverty with fair success? We'll have to redefine lots of terms I guess. Being poor is 'having less than average'. Being liberal is 'valuing civil liberties'. Being ignorant is 'having less than a BS'.

That isn't true. The data comes from the US Census Bureau. If you look at the report he linked, appendix B goes in to details.

The overall poverty rate given is approx 15%.

Was referring to the methodology in the UNICEF report Stiglitz linked[1].

While not a relative poverty measure the regular Census methodology you refer to has all the other weaknesses I mentioned but the biggest is it is based on a rather arbitrary level established in the 1960s then updated based on broad inflation. Not clear how relevant these thresholds are today - may be worse or better.

BTW - Census also has a relative poverty measure, known as the "supplemental poverty measure".

[1] http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc10_eng.pdf

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