Overall, child mortality decreased significantly between 1960 and 2000.
Three-quarters of the reduction happened between 1960 and 1980, coincident with the introduction of the War on Poverty, which included programs like food stamps, housing assistance, and healthcare for the poor.
This seems misleading to me. If you look at a longer term chart you can see that most of the decline occured before 1960 and the programs you mentioned. The trend improved a bit in 1960 vs the prior ten years but remained worse than in the earlier period. Overall I would summarize it as ‘things improved over time, the low hanging fruit were picked first, and there are no clear inflection points’.
Additionally, I checked ten other countries (Canada, UK, AUstralia, Netherlands, Austria, Frnace, germany, Italy, Norway, Japan) and they all had a similar trend of faster declines in 1960-1980 and then slower; it’s possible they all enacted similar policies at the same time, but alternatively they all benefit from advances in medicine, technology and general GDP growth.
After doing this I also checked Brazil and Mexico because I think people often inappropriately only compare the US to Europe, but they were sufficiently higher it made the chart hard to read.
Why is poverty so intractable here if we’re spending so much to reduce it? Many benefits included in this $600B category of welfare are incredibly difficult to access, are conditioned on work or other life circumstances, and are significantly restricted.
This also seems misleading. Regardless of how difficult it was to access, my understanding is that this $600B number is an actual spending number. If you think it is puzzling that poverty hasn’t been solved with $600B, the fact that the number would have counterfactually been even higher absent some constraints isn’t an answer.
In the richest country in the world, 19.8M Americans attempt to cover food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and medicine every day with a single twenty dollar bill.[1]
This is not true. I’m very confused because in the footnote you note it’s not true and then… don’t correct it?
Wait a minute, the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) doesn’t account for government benefits! That’s true. Another poverty statistic is the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which accounts for variable living costs and factors government benefits into its estimate. In 2022, the percentage of people living in poverty according to the SPM was nearly 1 point higher than the OPM estimate, meaning citing the OPM here is not overstating the scale of poverty
Lets try to sort this out, reverse-engineering what you did:
You calculate 19.8m Americans based on multiplying 325,521,470 total population by 6.1%. Fair enough.
You calculate $20 by taking a $15,060 threshold and dividing by 365.25 and then by by two again to get those at half the ‘poverty line’, and then rounding down. Fair enough.
You assert that these people have to pay for food, shelter, clothing etc. with only this. But in doing so you ignore all the other sources of income which are excluded from this calculation. So the stated line is just false.
Your footnote acknowledges this, and then cites the supplementary poverty measure as a workaround.
It is true that the supplementary poverty measure (correctly, IMO) includes many other sources of real income for poor people.
But it then subtracts things like medical expenses and transportation costs!
So it’s still false to say that people have to cover all those expenses with that income, because that income is after those expenses.
Re: child mortality—My assessment of trends was based on the time period included in the researchers’ dataset. I appreciate your extended longitudinal assessment of the child mortality rate and the prompt to do additional research on the likely cause of the shared downward trend (introduction of social programs vs. improvements in medicine and technology). That the US has diverged in recent years from our wealthy peers and children and infants face a significantly higher risk of death here as a result is unchanged by this.
Re: counterfactually higher spending - $600B is actual money spent. With regards to money left on the table, my point is not that $660B would see us achieve the end of poverty in America. My point is that people in poverty are highly incentivized to avail themselves of all the resources available to them. Obtaining and maintaining access to these resources is often so difficult that money gets left on the table. They are unsuccessfully addressing poverty in many instances because of how they are designed, and the incomplete uptake of the program is one measure of that poor design. It could be that poverty could be solved with $300B/year if only the programs were structured more sensibly.
Re: deep poverty estimates—My goal with the $20 line was to help people conceive of how incredibly low the deep poverty line is and to contrast that with the high number of individuals who live below it. I hoped to clarify the methodological differences between the OPL and SPM through the footnote, but I accept the criticism that my phrasing was misleading or unclear. Citing the SPM, I could have instead said, “40.9M people in the US are unable to meet their basic needs, accounting for government transfers, variation in geography and family size, and estimates of costs of living.”
This seems misleading to me. If you look at a longer term chart you can see that most of the decline occured before 1960 and the programs you mentioned. The trend improved a bit in 1960 vs the prior ten years but remained worse than in the earlier period. Overall I would summarize it as ‘things improved over time, the low hanging fruit were picked first, and there are no clear inflection points’.
Additionally, I checked ten other countries (Canada, UK, AUstralia, Netherlands, Austria, Frnace, germany, Italy, Norway, Japan) and they all had a similar trend of faster declines in 1960-1980 and then slower; it’s possible they all enacted similar policies at the same time, but alternatively they all benefit from advances in medicine, technology and general GDP growth.
After doing this I also checked Brazil and Mexico because I think people often inappropriately only compare the US to Europe, but they were sufficiently higher it made the chart hard to read.
This also seems misleading. Regardless of how difficult it was to access, my understanding is that this $600B number is an actual spending number. If you think it is puzzling that poverty hasn’t been solved with $600B, the fact that the number would have counterfactually been even higher absent some constraints isn’t an answer.
This is not true. I’m very confused because in the footnote you note it’s not true and then… don’t correct it?
Lets try to sort this out, reverse-engineering what you did:
You calculate 19.8m Americans based on multiplying 325,521,470 total population by 6.1%. Fair enough.
You calculate $20 by taking a $15,060 threshold and dividing by 365.25 and then by by two again to get those at half the ‘poverty line’, and then rounding down. Fair enough.
You assert that these people have to pay for food, shelter, clothing etc. with only this. But in doing so you ignore all the other sources of income which are excluded from this calculation. So the stated line is just false.
Your footnote acknowledges this, and then cites the supplementary poverty measure as a workaround.
It is true that the supplementary poverty measure (correctly, IMO) includes many other sources of real income for poor people.
But it then subtracts things like medical expenses and transportation costs!
So it’s still false to say that people have to cover all those expenses with that income, because that income is after those expenses.
Thanks for reading and for sharing feedback.
Re: child mortality—My assessment of trends was based on the time period included in the researchers’ dataset. I appreciate your extended longitudinal assessment of the child mortality rate and the prompt to do additional research on the likely cause of the shared downward trend (introduction of social programs vs. improvements in medicine and technology). That the US has diverged in recent years from our wealthy peers and children and infants face a significantly higher risk of death here as a result is unchanged by this.
Re: counterfactually higher spending - $600B is actual money spent. With regards to money left on the table, my point is not that $660B would see us achieve the end of poverty in America. My point is that people in poverty are highly incentivized to avail themselves of all the resources available to them. Obtaining and maintaining access to these resources is often so difficult that money gets left on the table. They are unsuccessfully addressing poverty in many instances because of how they are designed, and the incomplete uptake of the program is one measure of that poor design. It could be that poverty could be solved with $300B/year if only the programs were structured more sensibly.
Re: deep poverty estimates—My goal with the $20 line was to help people conceive of how incredibly low the deep poverty line is and to contrast that with the high number of individuals who live below it. I hoped to clarify the methodological differences between the OPL and SPM through the footnote, but I accept the criticism that my phrasing was misleading or unclear. Citing the SPM, I could have instead said, “40.9M people in the US are unable to meet their basic needs, accounting for government transfers, variation in geography and family size, and estimates of costs of living.”