The New York Times runs a piece on the poverty rate by Jared Bernstein that correctly says the old measure of poverty is dated and inaccurate, but concludes that an accurate rate should be higher than the official data. A better study is done by Robert Rector of Heritage, as published in the Review of Social Economy (1999), which calls for replacing the idea of a “poverty rate” with a measure of overall material hardship. He concludes that this group is about one-quarter as large as the group identified by official poverty rate. He concludes: “We have not only triumphed over poverty as it was historically understood, but that triumph has been so great that we have difficulty remembering what it meant to be poor or even to be middle class in earlier generations.”
