On the Subject of Important Definitions – OR – Why Politics and Categorization Don’t Mix
In Erin Knight’s post, she talks about how the Capitol is trying to figure out how to redefine homelessness. This reminds me of a similar issue that I have encountered year after year while working for Contra Costa County.
Back in about 1970, a bit of research was done to determine what the poverty level should be. They did a bunch of research, but eventually just decided that the thing to do was to simply take the cost of food for a given family size and then multiply it times three. Out of this math, we have the poverty level.
From this number, the government has adjusted every year for inflation, and with that, we arrive at the federal poverty levels for 2008.
Now, this would be pretty bad research, and were I the professor overseeing the high schoolers responsible for these measures, I would probably scold them for committing every bad research method ever. The federal government however has taken these measures, and based pretty much every aid program on them….for the past 30-40 years.
Brilliant.
In class, we have talked about how important it is to have specific and precise ways of categorizing things. Unfortunately, this thing happens to be humans, and unfortunately nobody wants to raise the poverty level while in office because that will mean that X number of people fell into poverty during their time.
When politics meets categorization, problems ensue.
Ryan Greenberg Said,
September 23, 2008 @ 3:28 pm
An article in the New Yorker, “Relatively Deprived: How Poor is Poor” from a couple years ago tackled exactly this definition. Here’s the genesis of the federal poverty line definition:
I don’t think the original definition was poorly defined. Something doesn’t have to be complex to work well and this seems like a relatively ingenious way to estimate how much money a person or family needs to subsist. The problem is that, since the calculation was defined by extrapolating an assumption from a dataset, it may not be correct as the dataset changes.
Michael Lissner Said,
September 23, 2008 @ 4:17 pm
I agree that some measures don’t need to be complicated to work, but when so much is on the line, we need to be very careful how we think about these things.
For example, since 1970, if the price of food has changed relative to the price of everything else, and our updates to the metrics haven’t accounted for this. We are still going by the 1/3 rule from 40 years ago.
Additionally, this one survey has been extrapolated and averaged such that people living in the bay area are defined by the same standard as those living in places where the cost of living is very low. My food, for example, may cost 10% more than yours, but if my rent is 300% greater, clearly we’re living in different levels of poverty.
My other gripe is that this measure uses family size as its only adjustment factor, but doesn’t differentiate between families with two parents (breadwinners) and one child (breadeater), and families with two children and one parent. Both are families of 3, even though they have drastically different living scenarios.
Combining these three factors, a family of three with two parents and one child living iin Idaho in 1970 iis measured the same as a family of two toddlers and one parent living in San Francisco in 2008 (plus or minus inflation). Not so good.
There are a few organizations that are trying to rework the definition, for example one organization is making “self-sufficiency standards”, but their work is expensive, and it hasn’t gained much traction thus far in government because of the political incentives not to adapt.
Ryan Greenberg Said,
September 25, 2008 @ 12:55 am
I agree that the entire population of the U.S. is too diverse a group to generalize and act against, and your four examples show how the current measure of the poverty line leaves some people out in the cold.
Another interesting point (from a 202 perspective) that appears in the aforelinked article by John Cassidy is how the definition of poverty changes over time. An often-made point is that poor people today have luxuries far beyond an Egyptian Pharaoh would have had years ago. Not having a color TV 30 years ago didn’t indicate much. Today not having a color TV means you’re relatively deprived:
The point of this is not to say that “poverty-stricken” people in America aren’t poor. In fact, Cassidy argues the opposite, citing research demonstrating that relative deprivation (not having as much as other people) confers many of the disadvantages of absolute deprivation (not having much).
One solution to this problem of classifying poverty is to adopt a relative measure of poverty (e.g. “less than half the median income of Americans”) instead of an absolute one (the bottom 5% of incomes). With a definition like that, you could actually eliminate poverty by reducing income inequality: you could have everyone make at least half the median income.
Michael Lissner Said,
September 25, 2008 @ 8:24 am
Sounds like a reasonable premise to me.
Another fun one is people per room per house.
INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog » More On Categories and Politics: We Aren’t As Divided As It May Seem Said,
September 28, 2008 @ 3:17 pm
[...] as other in the class have noted (Michael Manoochehri, Michael Lissner, Ryan Greenberg, et. al.), a more enumerative approach to categorizing issues would reveal some [...]