The United Nations has, once again, insisted that American levels of poverty are vast and demeaning to such a rich nation. The U.N. is, once again, misunderstanding the various statistics it is manipulating. The underlying truth is that the U.S. is more unequal than most other rich nations, and that’s really all that is being said.
This is actually a report by a Special Rapporteur, in this case Philip Alston. I discussed the errors in his draft report with you here. The final report is here. I’ve also been in direct contact with Alston and his reaction to those earlier criticisms was, in effect, gosh, yes, this is all difficult, isn’t it? That doesn’t excuse either the general reporting upon this nor the error at the heart of the report itself.
HuffPost tells us that the poor are becoming more destitute under Trump. That’s not really a possible finding in a report using data that only goes up to 2016. Reuters talks about extreme poverty, not something even measured in the various statistics presented. And then they tell us that there are 41 million in poverty, something that as I mentioned earlier just isn’t true. That’s the number who would be in poverty before the things we do to raise people up out of poverty (welfare programs).
In one sense, the report is better than the draft that we saw those months back. Alston does seem to have taken the basic criticism: U.S. poverty statistics, uniquely among the rich nations, measure those who need help, not those who have received it and are still poor. We do not include the effects of Medicaid, SNAP, EITC, Section 8 housing, and so on in reducing poverty when we talk of those in poverty. That’s comes out to about a trillion dollars that we just ignore. As I say, Alston does at least nod to the fact that this spending does reduce poverty. Thus the numbers indicated by the official poverty measure aren’t entirely accurate for our purposes, measuring the lived incidence of poverty, rather than what there would be without what we already do.
Sadly, he then goes on to make a different mistake, which is to point to the supplemental poverty measure and claim that this proves there is still that massive poverty. The supplemental measure is indeed better than the “official” measure in one respect, in that it includes the effects of much of what government does to reduce poverty, that trillion bucks or so. However, it’s also based on an entirely different definition of poverty. It doesn’t provide some objective level of living standard that is poverty, as the official measure does, but relies upon an entirely relative number.
It’s related to median income, to a percentage of that median income. That is, it’s a measure of inequality, not a measure of poverty. Now, sure, you can worry about inequality if that’s what you wish to do. I can’t get worked up over the idea that others have more than I do as long as I have sufficient income and material for myself. Most Americans also don’t seem to worry very much about inequality, the general judgement being that as long as everyone has enough, how much more others have is of little interest.
Is America an unequal country? It most certainly is, as every country is. The U.S. is rather more unequal than most rich countries, and quite a bit less unequal than poorer places like China and Brazil. But inequality is not poverty, whatever the current fashion is for describing it so. And that’s really all this U.N. report does manage to show, that the U.S. contains inequality. So what?
For if Alston, or the U.N., or the others who complain about it, really thought we all cared very much about inequality then they’d say they were talking about inequality, not poverty, wouldn’t they? The very fact that they obfuscate and use odd definitions shows that they know we don’t agree. Sure we’ll help the poor, indeed we do so, to the tune of that trillion dollars. That some have more than others isn’t something that worries us very much.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
