Poor Math

Poor Math

Is there a better way to measure poverty? Yes.

Posted Wednesday, December 31, 2008 - 4:57pm

While providing a useful blueprint for Congress, the New York City model also offers an instructive example for the new administration. Poverty scholars Rebecca Blank and Mark Greenberg, who advocate for revising the poverty measure along the New York/NAS lines, contend that the revamp would be low-cost and suggest that the executive creation of an independent statistical agency might be superior to legislative change. Although there are inherent political risks to action—recall the New York reformulation showed an increase in poverty—a deep recession, high unemployment, and significant increases in the number of people in need (no matter how we count) should trump partisan machinations. Thus far, Obama seems to share Bloomberg's results-oriented rhetoric. Adopting the New York-style approach to fighting poverty—or at least to measuring it—would bring long-overdue change for the poor.

 

(Ruler by George Doyle/Stockbyte/Getty Images; Yonge Street Mission, 1930, Wikipedia Commons Image)

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  • Georgia Levenson Keohane is a writer and consultant in the fields of social policy and philanthropy who often works with nonprofit organizations. She lives in New York City.
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Submitted by jeditoby on Mon, 01/05/2009 - 1:50pm.

A poor man's take

So...if I'm reading this right, NYC takes into account all the income from programs designed to help the poor (food stamps, Medicaid, etc.) to determine who is poor. Seems a bit recursive, especially if applied statistically. Just because a household qualifies for those programs doesn't mean they're enrolled in them--poverty isn't strictly a lack of material goods, it's also a lack of information about how to get those goods.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for a reevaluation of how we define poverty, and I'm not surprised that more people are "poor" than previously thought. I just want to have a better understanding of the methodology before we start rolling this out across the country.

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