New York Times Economix: Is Poverty Up or Not? Nancy Folbre
It’s not easy to figure out from aggregate statistics what the business cycle does to any of us. The recession of 2008-9 officially ended in June 2009, though official unemployment today remains close to the level of 9.5 percent that it reached that month.
The effect of the recession on poverty rates — like everything else – depends on official definitions. And currently, as I pointed out in an earlier post, the Census Bureau defines poverty in several different ways, some of which are labeled “experimental.”
By the traditional non-experimental measure, poverty jumped to 14.3 percent in 2009 from 13.2 percent in 2008. This measure, however, does not include the value of in-kind benefits, such as food stamps (under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), tax benefits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, and some other government programs that received a special boost from the federal stimulus put into effect in 2009.
So this measure understates the positive impact of public policies intended to buffer the recession’s impact.
Good thing we have the experimental measures of poverty, which were designed, in part, to address this problem. Most of these measures indicate little if any change between 2008 and 2009, indicating that public antipoverty programs did their job pretty well. (An editorial in The New York Times recently celebrated this accomplishment.) ...
She goes on to show some other less happy nuances about how people are negatively impacted that don't show up in poverty measures, like losing health coverage.
... The technical issues may seem daunting, but remember this: prosperity is just as hard to define as poverty. The Great Recession has revealed flaws in many of our measures of economic well-being – including the concept of “recovery.”
Experiments should enable us to learn from failure, as well as from success. Unfortunately, I fear that many Americans are sinking toward poverty, even though we can’t agree on how, exactly, its depths should be defined.
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