Source: QZ
Are measures of poverty still accurate today? Some experts don’t believe so.
The set of guidelines that is today used in the U.S. to determine whether someone is impoverished or not comes from a set of rules that was developed in the 1960s, according to QZ, which means that many of those standards perhaps don’t make sense several decades later, when the economy has changed and the cost of living has significantly increased.
Those standards also are not adjusted for the differences in cost of living from one city and town to the next, meaning the threshold for being considered “impoverished” is the same for someone living in California as it is for someone living in Chicago.
In 2011 the Census Bureau also started a new system called the Supplemental Poverty Measure, that considered other factors that could indicate poverty. Though an improvement, some experts say that the measure isn’t accurate and doesn’t reflect the difficulty of surviving in the 21st century across the country.
Read Full Story: QZ