Multidimensional Poverty in America

The Incidence and Intensity of Deprivation, 2008-2018

Roger White

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030459161
• Thema: Sozialwissenschaften
• Thema: Demographie

This book investigates and documents multidimensional poverty in the United States and identifies patterns and relationships that contribute to the development of a more complete understanding of the incidence and intensity of deprivation. The first part introduces multidimensional poverty and provides a rationale for viewing poverty through a lens of multiple deprivations. It discusses how the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) compares to more narrowly-focused, income-based poverty measures and emphasizes its usefulness and applicability for the formulation of related, welfare-enhancing public policies. The second part documents multidimensional poverty incidence, intensity, and corresponding MPI values at the aggregate level of detail, for various demographic cohorts, and across geographic locales. The book then presents results from an empirical analysis that identifies the determinants of multidimensional poverty incidence and of individual deprivation scores. The third part consists of three studies of multidimensional poverty, examining the effect of the Affordable Care Act on multidimensional poverty incidence and intensity, variation in multidimensional poverty across native- and foreign-born residents (and across immigrants' home countries) of the US, and variation in the respective indicators that contribute to multidimensional poverty across the life cycle. The book closes with two chapters. The first relays the findings of counterfactual exercises where certain deprivations are assumed to have been eliminated. The final chapter summarizes the work, draws inferences and arrives at conclusions, and discusses the corresponding public policy implications.

Part IIntroducing Multidimensional Poverty

© The Author(s) 2020

R. WhiteMultidimensional Poverty in Americahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45916-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Poverty and Deprivation in America

Roger White¹

(1)

Department of Economics, Whittier College, Whittier, CA, USA

Roger White

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

It is important to acknowledge at the outset that for nearly all of human existence extreme poverty has been the norm for the vast majority of the world’s population. Bourguignon and Morrisson (2002), for example, estimate that as recently as 1820 more than 89 percent of the global population lived in extreme poverty and that this value remained above 50 percent through the 1960s before finally falling to 48 percent in 1970.¹ It is also important to remember, with select historical exceptions acknowledged, that broad public programs to assist the poor are somewhat recent inventions, even in developed economies, and that significant reductions in poverty have only been witnessed in recent decades. Specifically, while we have observed further decreases in extreme poverty incidence over the past half-century, it is only now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, that the global extreme poverty rate has fallen below 20 percent (World Bank 2019).

Taking care to not conflate income poverty in the U.S. with the extreme poverty experienced in developing economies, as recently as 1949 an estimated 40.5 percent of the U.S. population was income poor (Ross et al. 1987).² Although the U.S. income poverty rate had declined to 22.2 percent in 1960 (U.S. Census 2020), President Lyndon Johnson announced the War on Poverty in 1964 when, during his State of the Union address, he declared: “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” (Johnson 1968, p. 114). At that time, 36.1 million residents of the U.S. (i.e., 19 percent of the country’s population) were income poor; that is, they lived on incomes that were less than the federal poverty threshold. By 1973, the U.S. income poverty rate (i.e., the nation’s Official Poverty Measure) had decreased to 11.1 percent, representing a reduction of more than one-third in the number of U.S. residents who were income poor—a decrease equal to 13.1 million people (U.S. Census 2020).³

While the War on Poverty showed significant initial progress, it is unfortunate that subsequent successes were not realized and that President Johnson’s stated aims have not been fully achieved.⁴ To wit, during the 45 years from 1974 through 2018, the U.S. income poverty rate remained largely unchanged, fluctuating from a low of 11.2 percent in 1974 to a high of 15.2 percent in 1983. In fact, in 2018, at a time when U.S. output and its unemployment rate were at or near record high and low levels, respectively, nearly one in every eight American residents (i.e., 11.8 percent of the population) lived below the income poverty threshold . This value is only slightly higher than the rate that was observed nearly five decades earlier in 1973; however, due to population growth , the number of income poor Americans increased, rising from 23 million individuals in 1973 to 38.1 million in 2018. Worse still, it is noteworthy that more Americans were income poor in 2018 than at the onset of the War on Poverty in 1964 Fig. 1.1 illustrates.⁵

Fig. 1.1

Official poverty rate and number living in poverty, 1959–2018. (Note: Constructed using data from the U.S. Census 2020)

In the figure, we see pronounced initial decreases in both the income poverty rate and the number of income poor U.S. residents. Both series exhibit marked decreases between 1959 and 1973. In the early-1980s, however, although the time path of each series largely mirrors that of the other, we see the series diverge. Specifically, from 1980 to 2018, the income poverty rate generally remained between 12 percent and 15 percent. The quite stable time path of the income poverty rate since 1980 is illustrated by the nearly horizontal line of best fit. However, coupling the largely unchanged income poverty rate with a steadily increasing population has resulted in a general upward trend in the number of income poor individuals. This trend is indicated in the figure by the upward-sloping line of best fit.⁶ In more stark and de...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Introducing Multidimensional Poverty
• Part II. America’s Multidimensionally Poor
• Part III. Three Studies of Multidimensional Poverty
• Part IV. Towards the Elimination of Multidimensional Poverty in America
• Back Matter