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.