Bernie Sanders exposes billionaires who are buying US government.

[Al B. Sure!]

If we're defining absolute poverty as inability to meet basic needs, then there isn't much danger of failing to take into account the effect of more advanced phones on purchasing power.

So if 2/3rds of income is spent on increasingly nice luxuries while 1/3rd is insufficient to satisfy basic needs, it's not an issue of whacked individual priorities?

[C0ckney]

shelter, utilities and clothing are nice luxuries?

[Al B. Sure!]

No you haven't.

JM

Umm... you're suggesting the demarcation for poverty should be increased as the standard of living of the median or rich rises.

[Al B. Sure!]

shelter and clothing are nice luxuries?

Both certainly can be.

[giblets]

So if 2/3rds of income is spent on increasingly nice luxuries while 1/3rd is insufficient to satisfy basic needs, it's not an issue of whacked individual priorities?

They aren't spending 2/3 on luxuries. They might have a cell phone and a color TV, but those things are not the majority of their income. Although I guess tobacco or alcohol or crack could be taking a pretty big bite.

[C0ckney]

so the fact that palaces exist mean that shelter is a luxury?

[Jon Miller]

Umm... you're suggesting the demarcation for poverty should be increased as the standard of living of the median or rich rises.

No.

JM

[Al B. Sure!]

Problems with the poverty measure:

Per capita income, unemployment, educational attainment, and anti-poverty spending are factors that would each be expected to
exert independent and important influence on the prevalence of poverty in a modern industrialized society — any modern
industrialized society. When trends for all four of these measures move conjointly in the direction favoring poverty reduction, there
would ordinarily be a strong expectation that the prevalence of measured poverty would decline as well (so long, of course, as
poverty was being measured against an absolute rather than a relative benchmark). Yet curiously, the official poverty rate for the
United States population was higher for 2001 (11.7 percent) than for 1973 (11.1 percent).

Needless to say, this is a discordant and counterintuitive result that demands explanation. Further examination, unfortunately,
reveals that the paradoxical relationship between the poverty rate and these other indicators of material deprivation in Table 1, while
perverse, is not at all anomalous. To the contrary: For the period since 1973, the U.S. poverty rate has ceased to correspond with
these other broad measures of poverty and progress in any common-sense fashion. Instead, the poverty rate seems to have become
possessed of a strange but deeply structural capriciousness: For while it continues to maintain a predictable relationship with these
other indicators, the relationship is by and large precisely the opposite of what one would normally expect for a poverty indicator.

The curious behavior of the official poverty rate in relation to these four other important measures bearing on material deprivation is
underscored by simple econometrics, through regression equations in which these other measures are utilized in an attempt to
“predict” the poverty rate for a 30-year period (1972–2002). Under ordinary circumstances, we would expect unemployment and
poverty to be positively associated (the higher the unemployment level, the higher the poverty level), while per capita income,
educational attainment, and anti-poverty spending should all correlate negatively with any absolute measure of poverty.

Between 1972 and 2002, however, the official poverty rate happens to correlate positively with increases in per capita income —
and the statistical association is a strong one. Indeed, controlling for changes in unemployment levels, a rise in real U.S. per capita
income of $1,000 (in 2002 dollars) would be predicted to push up the official poverty rate for the entire population by over half a
percentage point.

If we exclude per capita income from the tableau, the other three measures — unemployment, education, and anti-poverty spending
— can in tandem do a very good job of predicting changes in the poverty rate, together explaining over 90 percent of the variation
in the poverty rate during the period in question. But the relationships between the poverty rates and these other variables are
perverse: The poverty rate falls when unemployment rises; and when education or anti-poverty spending rise, the poverty rate rises
too.

And if we use all four measures to try to predict the poverty rate, the common-sense (i.e. negative) correlation between per capita
income and poverty at last emerges, and that relationship is statistically strong — yet strong relations between the poverty rate and
the other three measures also emerge, and all of those are perverse. Those relationships, in fact, imply that an eight-point jump in
the unemployment rate would reduce the official poverty rate by a point, while a ten point drop in the percentage of adults without
high school degrees would raise it by a point! No less striking: A nationwide increase in means-tested public spending of $1,000
per capita (in 2002 dollars) would be predicted to make the official poverty rate rise — by over three percentage points.

Clearly, something is badly amiss here. And unless someone can offer a plausible hypothesis for why U.S. data series on per capita
incomes, unemployment rates, adult educational attainment, and anti-poverty spending should be collectively flawed and deeply
biased for the post–1973 period, the simplest explanation for these jarring results would be that the officially measured poverty rate
happens to offer a highly misleading, or even dysfunctional, measure of material deprivation and has, moreover, been doing so for
some considerable period of time.

[Al B. Sure!]

so the fact that palaces exist mean that shelter is a luxury?

So the fact that poor people buy Jordans (or use palaces, to use your example) is irrelevant?

[Al B. Sure!]

No.

JM

O Rly? This wasn't you that posted this?

I think that poverty doesn't just mean food/shelter, but also means lacking access to things that allow one to become upper class.

JM

[giblets]

O Rly? This wasn't you that posted this?

"things allowing one to become upper class" = opportunities like education, I think.

[C0ckney]

do you have any evidence that the poor spend a significant proportion of their income on trainers? i rather doubt it. that's not to say that some poor people don't make what look like poor decisions with their money, but all the evidence that i have seen tell us that the poor, when considered as a group, spend their money on things we would consider necessities. rent, food, household bills, clothing et al.

x-post. in response to post 339

[Jon Miller]

If you can't go get an education because you are working at the mill/street/McDs to supply your families needs, you are not being allowed most of the opportunity space to improve your lot in life.

As an example.

JM

[giblets]

Problems with the poverty measure:

I don't know what you're quoting, but in the midst of our current economic mess there's been a spike in the poverty rate, exactly what anyone would expect.

[Jon Miller]

There is evidence that being poor causes bad decisions in general and financial ones in particular.

This is independent of everything else (they tested this for people who were really rich/from all sorts of backgrounds, I can try to look up the study later).

JM