What It Means to be Poor

From time to time, I've had occasion to take the Market-Frankford "El" (an elevated train line in Philadelphia) from Center City to the line's final destination in West Philadelphia - 69th Street Station.  The El runs through some of the poorer neighborhoods in Philadelphia on that ride, and I've noted the mini-satellite dishes (undoubtedly for Direct TV or Dish Network) that pepper the roofs of row homes visible from the train.  They're all over the place out there.  I'm not foolish enough to think that means the occupants of those homes are rich or even comfortable, and I certainly don't begrudge anyone their dishes.  But it has made me wonder about what it means to be poor in the 21st century.  If even the poor can afford satellite TV, poverty can't be quite as uncomfortable as it was 50 or 100 years ago.

I've had similar thoughts about food, and clearly I'm not alone here.  Repeated surveys and studies make clear that poor people are more likely to be overweight than those in other economic classes.  Again, that doesn't mean it's good or easy to be poor; indeed, the limited food choices faced by the poor seem to contribute to this problem.  But, poverty used to imply struggling to "put food on the table."  Now, things seem different.

One of my favorite bloggers, Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, posted yesterday on a new study suggesting that we may be winning the war on poverty, at least more than we think:

[M]oving from traditional income-based measures of poverty to a consumption-based measure (which is arguably superior on both theoretical and practical grounds) and, crucially, accounting for bias in the cost of living adjustment leads to the conclusion that the poverty rate declined by more than 25 percentage points between 1960 and 2010, with 8.5 percentage points of that decline occurring since 1980.

Pethokoukis explores the work of Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan more than I will here.  The gist is that the poorest among us are living at a higher standard than income-based measures might suggest, at least in part because of the impact of tax subsidies and transfer payments.

The work of Meyer and Sullivan makes a point different from the one I drive at above, but I think the questions they seek to answer are similar to mine.  While the typical government/academic approach is to focus on wealth inequality and an arbitrary "poverty level," it might be more helpful to understand how the poor actually live, how that might be changing, and to what end government policy should try to improve their condition.  To the extent poverty in 2013 presents challenges different from those faced by the poor of 1963, we should acknowledge and address that - even if it means some uncomfortable discussions and some changes in approach.  That's tougher work for bureaucrats, but I can't say that angle concerns me much.