Poverty and Development

Lately, the news media has been buzzing with stories about measuring poverty, and that’s a good thing because it’s a long time coming that the federal government does something about measuring poverty more accurately. Most of the news has been about Mayor Bloomberg’s new poverty levels for New York City. Bloomberg raised the poverty level for a family of four in New York City from $20,444 to $26,138. Anybody who has spent some time in New York City, in fact, it’s not even necessary to have spent time there, knows that $26,138 for a family of four still leaves a lot of families out who otherwise could be described as poor. Nevertheless, we should applaud the mayor for his effort to raise poverty levels closer to reality. It’s an important step forward.

My hope is that Bloomberg’s effort will spur the federal government to revisit how it measures poverty. It’s worth noting that the government has done this once, charging the National Academy of Sciences with coming up with a more accurate measure of poverty, which it did, but the government then rejected the Academy’s findings. The Academy’s formula would have raised the number of people in poverty. Presently, the federal poverty measure is so outdated if not worthless, it’s at least worth describing as ridiculous. So as not to belabor this point of my discussion, I’ll refer you to a chapter in the 2008 hunger report, appropriately titled, Poverty: Mismeasured, Misunderstood. What makes all this not a laughing matter is that basically all public benefits are calibrated based on poverty levels: the nutrition programs, health and housing benefits, energy assistance, welfare, etc. etc.

Recently there’s been some other news around measuring poverty, but you may not have recognized it as such. Last week, a group of researchers associated with the Social Science Research Council published the first American Human Development Report. The point of the report isn’t to rewrite the way poverty is measured, but you see right away that what the researchers are really after is a fresh way of thinking about who gets left out of U.S. society. The findings in this report are not new, the researchers have relied entirely on existing data, but it is the way the data is packaged and messaged that make it worth our consideration.

“Human development,” reads a passage from the report, “is defined as the process of enlarging people’s freedoms and opportunities and improving their well-being.” This of course is more complicated than drawing a line at a certain income level. The report measures development in terms of health and education indicators as well as income. For my taste, that is still too narrow a definition. They might have included several other development indicators, for example, food security, asset accumulation, the environment, gender equity. These do make it into the report but have a secondary status that I feel is shortsighted. For now, an expansive definition is not the point. The concept of human development pushes us in the right direction. Just raising the income level like Mayor Bloomberg has done will never get us much closer to closing the poverty gap because poverty is about so much more than income. This human development approach is far more enlightened, and this report is a hopeful sign of the kind of paradigm shift we need to forthrightly address poverty in the U.S.