Exploring the poverty line and poverty guidelines: definitions, impact, history

How do we define poverty?
Who is poor?
What does poor mean when you live in New York City or Birmingham, Alabama?
Survive or thrive or well-being?.

For a measure on which so many of our social safety net depends, we calculate it in such an anachronistic way and our floor is so low that although more than 40 million Americans are considered poor, so many more millions are caught in-between destitution (below the poverty line) and borderline survival, that the measure clearly needs updating so that people can get the help they need.

Click on the links below to explore how the poverty line was created, how it is evolving, the impact it has on the lives of poor people, and what the future is.

NPR discusses the relevance/impact of the poverty line

How the Census measures poverty

The nomenclature of poverty

The development of the Orshansky Poverty Thresholds and their subsequent history as the official U.S. poverty measure

2012 Health and Human Services Poverty Guidelines

Fight for a higher floor for poverty. Write your congressman and say you want poverty guidelines and a poverty line that reflects the world of 2013 when housing is our biggest cost, not food.

Comments

Good intentions, exploitation and studying 'the poor'

I am an academic and thus I am required to do research and to write. As someone who studied sociology, social welfare, public health, international health, and economics I am plenty equipped to study poverty and the lives of poor people. And in my areas of study, these are the people of whom we ask questions, whether here or abroad.Were I to do a search of any library database using poverty as a keyword, I will get hundreds of hits for journal articles published in the past month alone. But I have decided that I will no longer study 'poverty' or 'the poor' because I find it exploitative in its convenience, somewhat useless in its findings and creates a conundrum in its recommendations: how to change poverty by changing the poor. We study how the poor shop, what they eat, what they drink, how fat they are, how (un)educated they are, how much health care they (don't) get, how they parent, and how a wide range of social, political and economic factors interact to inf

Family Planning Summit and the Voice of Poor Women

I decided to edit this piece to start with a video of Melinda Gates talking about her privilege to travel the world and meet women whose voices are not heard on the world stage and so she feels it is her obligation to speak on behalf of them. This gets at the heart of why I wrote this piece so I will let her speak in her own words before I speak mine in response: Melinda Gates interview on her work as family planning advocate I work in the development industry. Sometimes. I have worked in the family planning sector a long time. I have worked in safe motherhood a long time. And I have worked in AIDS. (That these are not integrated in the development sector is a topic for another post). I came to development through childhood experiences with development workers whose ideas were formed in some office far, far away using the most recent data and information on my Jamaican community. They were talented, mulitlingual and well-intentioned. But something about the experience left an ind

Goodbye Blogger, Hello Medium

Thank you for reading my posts on Provoking Policy. It has been a wonderful journey as a writer to be able to share my rants on issues that matter to me at various points in time. From now on, I will be writing on Medium as Ruth C. White, PhD . I have chosen Medium as a platform because it gives me more of an opportunity to read, write and share stories that matter.

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