Thursday, December 19, 2013

We Won the War on Poverty

A truly remarkable quote, from the NYTimes, of all places:

... the poor have made progress since the ‘60s as the nation’s living standards have risen. If poverty were defined based on what people bought in 1967, adjusted only for inflation, the poverty rate would have fallen to about 11 percent today, according to research by Jane Waldfogel and other researchers at Columbia University

But poverty is best measured relative to the actual living standards of our own society. By the standards of the 19th century, for instance, practically no American is poor. In comparison with Bangladeshis, there are precious few poor in the United States. 

A more nuanced analysis of the evolution of poverty and America’s efforts to combat it is not so consoling. Recent research on poverty suggests that government programs have done, in fact, a much better job than the headline statistics suggest. 

The reason the poverty rate has budged so little is that the job of fixing it has gotten harder. “The government is doing more to reduce poverty now than it did in the 1960s,” Professor Waldfogel said. 

Um....wait.  The reason the poverty rate has budged so little is that we keep moving the target.  If the income of the poor doubled, but the rest of the country tripled its income, we'd say the poverty problem had gotten worse, when in fact the health, income, and other measures of welfare have improved dramatically. That's...that's...Orwellian!

It may be fair enough to redefine poverty that way.  But the usual narrative is the poor are getting worse off as "the rich get richer."  Instead, the poor are much better off, and the market economy has delivered on its promises of ending poverty, by any consistent definition.  The only way to say that the poor are worse off is to assume that the poor are as obsessed with relative status as the envious intellectuals of the left.  (On which Dr. Nozick had some interesting things to say).

Nod to Anonyman

UPDATE:  We DID!  We DID!  We DID win the war on poverty.


6 comments:

JWO said...

From Tim Taylor's blog:


"The results in this paper contradict the claim that poverty has shown little improvement over time and that antipoverty efforts have been ineffective. We show that moving from traditional income-based measures of poverty to a consumption-based measure, which is arguably superior on both theoretical and practical grounds—and, crucially, accounting for bias in the cost-of-living adjustment—leads to the conclusion that the poverty rate declined by 26.4 percentage points between 1960 and 2010, with 8.5 percentage points of that decline occurring since 1980."

windwheel said...

'Economists have also long argued that the Consumer Price Index overstates the true rise in the standard of living (for example, by not adequately taking new goods and inventions into account)'
WTF?
Overstates? CPI's have a Laspeyres bias and are, in any case, shite.
In any case, to make the claim 'We've won' you've got to assume non-diffusionism and weak ergodicity for the underlying population.
No one won shit.Stuff happened by default.
In any case, as Sir Partha Dasgupta has been at pains to explain, nothing measured has to do with what ECONOMISTS call Income- i.e. stuff you can spend without depleting your wealth.
Since nobody can know what Wealth truly is- unless God really did create the World in Seven Days- and the Bible reveals the Mind of God- your claim is almost but not quite as worthless as its opposite.
Why? Well, the fuckwit Lee Smolin, hypnotized by the toad Roberto Unger, has- quite inadvertently- shown a 'Gauge theoretic' problematic such that all Preferences are Ontologically dysphoric and, hence, one richer in shite, like myself, can claim dominance over you poor fucks who still have to mark Term papers.
I may mention that Socioproctology- of which I am the only living exponent- has long recognized that the information value of shit is far higher than that of babies wot cum out of vulvas or something real gross like that.
You, like me, are an arsehole, weeping tears of blood that the treasure you have so sedulously guarded has escaped your sphincter to no better end than being flushed down the toilet- yet.if I am not mistaken, there is enough of the Mathematican left in you to see that there is an Open Question here.

windwheel said...

In any case, I'm, in any case, some shite or other, coz I just mentioned Smolin and wanna wash my mouth out and just take a steel brush to my skin in the shower and= fuck! It's no fun being your troll.

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