It’s always headline-worthy to say that some absurdly high number of Americans are living in poverty — that the richest country in history still has desperately poor people in vast numbers. It’s shocking to see … and it’s mostly bogus:
We get told they do often enough I know, the latest example being this:
About 15% of Americans live in poverty, so why is no one talking about it?
It isn’t true.
In a nation where, according to the US Census Bureau’s poverty statistics released last month, 46.5 million people (roughly 15%) of the nation’s population lives in poverty,
Sorry, but their repeating it does not make it true.
The correct formulation is that 15% of Americans would be living in poverty if it were not for the things that are done to alleviate poverty.
There are two things that make this correction really rather important. The first being that everyone else measures poverty after all the things that are done to alleviate it. Thus any comparison across countries is going to leave the US looking very bad indeed: for others are talking about the residual poverty left after trying to do something about it and the US is talking about the poverty before alleviation. Very different things I hope you’ll agree.
There are reasons why this meme won’t go away (aside from it being a handy eye-catching headline to attract readers for newspapers and websites), including the fact that many civil servants are employed in federal, state, and local organizations to work on programs intended to alleviate poverty. If they are too successful, their caseload goes down and so will their budget and headcount. Any bureaucracy has a prime directive quite separate from their original reason for existing — organizations have primal motivations for surviving and growing. Their incentive is thus merely to ease the problem, not to solve it, or else they’re working to put themselves out of business.
