Government
What If We Had Measured Poverty Differently for the Past 50 Years?
The Census' Supplemental Poverty Measure paints a different picture of the poor and the social safety net.
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan announced defeat at the hands of the "war on poverty"—a war his predecessor Lyndon Johnson had waged since 1967. In The Atlantic the year after, Nicholas Lemann explained why all anti-poverty programs need not be as "ill-fated" as the ones spearheaded over those decades.
But were they really as ill-fated as he observed? What about the government assistance programs that followed—how effective were they? The answer to those question lies in a new(ish) measure the Census Bureau uses to measure poverty.