Claims that millions of Americans are mired in extreme poverty, barely surviving on $2 or $4 a day, are false, according to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The paper, released June 3, is by Bruce Meyer, Derek Wu, and Victoria Mooers of the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and by Carla Medalia of the U.S. Census Bureau. Some households that income surveys erroneously categorized as extremely poor actually had “net worth in the millions” of dollars, the authors found.
…The new NBER paper takes aim at a Nobel laureate in economics, Angus Deaton, who claimed that 5.3 million Americans in 2015 were living on less than $4 a day. It also criticizes work by a professor at Johns Hopkins, Kathryn Edin, and by a professor at the University of Michigan, H. Luke Shaefer. Edin and Shaefer are authors of a book, “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America,” that claimed about 3 million children lived in households with incomes of $2 a day or less.
“We find that 92% of the households categorized as extreme poor based on survey-reported cash income are misclassified,” Meyer and his coauthors write. “Many of the households included in survey-reported extreme poverty appear to be better off than the average American household based on numerous indicators of material well-being.”
Rather than millions of extremely poor American children, Meyer and his co-authors found the 285,000 households in “extreme poverty” were either single individuals or “households with multiple childless individuals.”
They write, “this result likes in stark contrast to the focus in academic and policy circles on the plight of extreme poor households with children.”
They write that “the errors in the income level exaggerate the level of extreme poverty.”
The new study, according to Reason, relies on “information from the 2011 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) as well as administrative tax and benefit program data” and found that
“of the 3.6 million [non-homeless] households with survey-reported cash income below $2/person/day,” the vast majority—92 percent—were “not in extreme poverty once we include in-kind transfers, replace survey reports of earnings and transfer receipt with administrative records, and account for the ownership of substantial assets.”
In fact, new research shows “more than half of all misclassified households have incomes … above the poverty line” entirely.
…The composition of extremely poor households also differs from common understandings of it: “Among the 285,000 households left in extreme poverty, 90% are made up of single individuals. Households with multiple childless individuals make up the other 10% of the extreme poor. Strikingly, after implementing all adjustments, [none of the SIPP surveyed] households with children have incomes below $2/person/day.”
I’ve talked about this $2-a-day claim before. The data supporting it seemed sketchy then. Appears even more so now.