South By North Strategies, Ltd.

A recent report by Shawn Fremstad of the Center for Economic and Policy Research lays out “a modern framework for measuring poverty and basic economic security.”

From the report’s executive summary:

The dominant framework for understanding and measuring poverty in the United States has become an ideologically conservative one. It conceptualizes poverty only in terms of having an extremely low level of annual income, and utilizes poverty thresholds that are adjusted only for inflation rather than for changes in overall living standards. As a result, the official poverty measure has effectively defined deprivation down over the last four decades, moving it further and further away from mainstream living standards over time, as well as from majority public opinion of the minimum amount needed to “get along” at a basic level. While the Supplemental Income Poverty Measure (SIPM) proposed by the Obama administration makes some important improvements to the current poverty measure, it appears likely to lock in this defining down of the poverty standard in a measure that would remain the focal measure of basic economic security. As a result, the SIPM would do little to re-center poverty measurement from its current marginal and conservative framework to a more modern and mainstream one.
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Despite these limitations, the SIPM could be, with several crucial modifications, part of a modern approach to measuring poverty and basic economic security, and certain of the SIPM’s technical improvements should be incorporated into such an approach. However, given the narrow and conservative nature of the SIPM, the federal government should not adopt it by itself without also adopting more accurate measures of low income (and not just “extremely” low income) and basic economic security.