Ross Douthat recently made this observation:
1.) The modern welfare state has succeeded in substantially cutting our country’s poverty rate. This is a point that both right and left sometimes obscure, the right because it complicates a simple “we fought poverty, and poverty won” narrative about the Great Society, the left because it complicates claims that Reagan or Gingrich gutted welfare spending and crushed the fortunes of the poor. But the basic evidence seems very convincing: Whether it’s Scott Winship analyzing the numbers from the center-right or Harvard’s Christopher Jencks doing the same from the center-left, you can see dramatic reductions in the poverty rate since the 1960s, with various public programs, means-tested and otherwise, pretty clearly playing a substantial role.
I agree with much of what Winship and Jencks had to say, but I do have one important reservation about this sort of claim. There’s a tendency to assume that the effect of anti-poverty spending can be measured by looking at the difference between market income and market income plus government aid. I’m going to argue that this is a very serious conceptual error, even if their conclusions end up being correct in the end.
Imagine someone who makes $8000 in 1960, working as a maid in a hotel. Ten years later the War on Poverty has been launched, and this lady now earns zero market income. She instead receives $10,000 in various government benefits. (I’m using 2015 dollars for simplicity; of course incomes and prices were far lower back then.) In the meantime, the wages of autoworkers rose from $40,000 to $60,000/year. If that were the data you had to work with, and that lady’s situation was typical of the poor, how would you evaluate the War on Poverty?
Taking the optimistic view, one could argue that this lady was kept out of abject poverty by the government aid. Without that aid, her income would have been zero. On the other hand if she was representative of the poor, you could say that the 25% rise in her income plus benefits was less than the 50% increase seen by middle class autoworkers. Here’s where the tricky counterfactuals come in. What would have been the 1970 income of the former maid if those welfare programs had never been established?
Here I’d like to switch from income to consumption. Economic theory says income is not the right measure of well-being, we need to look at consumption. Some of my critics insist the distinction is not that important for the poor, because they can’t afford to save anything. I’m not sure that’s true (it’s certainly not true in China, or among illegal Chinese immigrants to America) but I’ll grant that assumption if you’ll agree that consumption is the standard measure of well-being used in economics. So lets say income equals consumption of the poor.
Do you see the problem? If we return to our no War on Poverty counterfactual, and assume no government benefits and no effect of incentives on work effort, then everyone with no market income would have had zero consumption. Which is obviously impossible. I’ve oversimplified in all sorts of ways. People can get by for a while with aid from relatives. And there was some welfare even before the War on Poverty. Nonetheless, I think it’s pretty hard to take seriously the claim that the market income in 1970, or 2015, is the market income that would occur without welfare programs. We know how poor people (and mildly disabled people) behaved in the 1950s, and it was not the same way they behave today.
The bottom line is that the data alone cannot disprove the claim that (absent the war on poverty) that maid would have continued to work in a hotel and have earned $12,000 in 1970, receiving the same 50% wage increase as the autoworker. Yes poverty fell between 1960 and 1970, but that’s because America was getting richer. (Obviously the reduction in poverty with the elderly due to Social Security is another story, where my contrarian argument is much weaker.)
Given all this uncertainly, I might be inclined to take a fairly agnostic stance, and simply look at how the bottom 20% are doing. Did their economic wellbeing rise faster or slower than for the average American? If faster, that provides some (weak) indirect evidence against the hypothetical counterfactual I provided above.
Surprisingly, despite my methodological reservations, I actually end up agreeing with Douthat, Winship and Jencks; the War on Poverty probably helped reduce poverty (although by far less than Douthat, Winship and Jencks claim). But I get there in a rather surprising way, which may not please progressives. I believe that the Piketty obsession with inequality is way overdone, and that America’s poor have seen their living standards rise faster than the American middle class. (The top 1% have done very well, but they are so few in number that they hardly matter.) So inequality is becoming less of a problem for the 99%. That suggests to me that the War on Poverty may have been a limited success. However, much greater progress would have occurred if more emphasis had been put on programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which encourage work, and also more effort on avoiding the marriage penalty built into many programs (including the EITC.)
My fear is that progressives will wrongly conclude that inequality is getting worse despite the war on poverty, and advocate counterproductive policies such as higher minimum wages and taxation of capital income. We should improve the War on Poverty, not launch populist policies based on bogus economic theories.
PS. If I am wrong, and the living standards of the poor have improved by less than the middle class, then I’d reverse position on the War on Poverty. In that case I’d very strongly doubt claims that it was even a limited success.
READER COMMENTS
Shane L
May 6 2015 at 12:35pm
My impression is that many on the left and right despair of the status quo, identifying themselves as the outsiders and underdogs. Perhaps since media coverage tends to be downbeat, emphasising negative stories, both groups want to identify the other with the preponderance of bad news we often hear about modern life.
This makes it a bit tricky when economists stand way back and point out how much things have improved in recent decades as both sides are poorly placed to take credit for it. Just yesterday I was looking at this paper identifying falling global income inequality and predicting a continuing decline of such inequality into the future:
http://www.iie.com/publications/wp/wp15-7.pdf
The world is a mish-mash of free markets and interventions and I rarely see either left or right-wing commentators say it leans towards their preferred policies. I feel both left and right are therefore ill-placed to step up and say: “we’re winning, and it’s working”.
Philo
May 6 2015 at 12:59pm
“We know how poor people (and mildly disabled people) behaved in the 1950s, and it was not the same way they behave today.” You economists and conservatives are always concerning yourselves with incentives, including the incentives of poor people. What are really important are *the intentions of the superior people*, those who create government programs. *They* are the only *real agents*; everyone else is basically passive.
LK Beland
May 6 2015 at 2:10pm
This report shows the proportion of total consumption spent by each income quintile since 1984. (page 14)
It is remarkably stable.
http://www.morganstanleyfa.com/public/projectfiles/02386f9f-409c-4cc9-bc6b-13574637ec1d.pdf
Seth
May 6 2015 at 2:40pm
Thomas Sowell points out that poverty was declining for decades prior to when the War on Poverty began. Did that war cause a change in trend?
NZ
May 6 2015 at 3:50pm
This is the problem with not defining “Done”.
Defining “Done” is a standard practice in software development, and maybe in other fields too. The government obviously has strong incentives not to do this, but should they be forced to anyway?
JLV
May 6 2015 at 4:03pm
I agree that consumption is the metric we should be looking at. Its easy to say that, and hard to actually do good work on consumption inequality/poverty. This is a fact that is not always admitted by people who say “consumption is what matters anyway”. Note that the population of people who talk a lot about how consumption inequality is obviously superior and the population of researchers who do work on consumption inequality are close to disjoint sets.
In practice, I think that properly measuring the resources available for consumption (i.e. Haig-Simons income) is probably the best we can do. This looks something like the SPM definition of income (post-tax, post-transfer household income, adjusted for household size by an equivalence scale, and adding the fungible value of in-kind aid) perhaps with realized capital gains added.
Whihc roughly what Armour, Burkhauser and Larrimore (2014) track (NBER working paper version here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w19110.pdf). And Scott’s belief that the poor have seen faster increases in living standards under this metric are only true for the period from 1989-2000, a period in which market incomes of the bottom 20% grew faster than the middle quintiles as well.
Scott Sumner
May 6 2015 at 5:17pm
Shane, Good points.
Philo, I’m not sure what you mean by “passive.”
Thanks LK.
Seth, The decline may have slowed after the war got going, but the new figures being cited suggest that poverty kept declining.
Of course these are all guesstimates.
NZ. I’d like to see laws have sunset provisions.
JLV, I agree that consumption is hard to measure, and I freely admit that I am relying on casual empiricism. But I know of no better method in this area.
roystgnr
May 6 2015 at 5:41pm
I came in here to protest that consumption is an awful measure of well-being unless savings is included.
I go away having learned that the metric I was handwaving at was defined when my grandparents were kids. Thanks, JLV!
Trucha
May 6 2015 at 5:53pm
JLV and because of that difficulty of measurement that paper has all sorts of wealth/ income and average/median blending problems as well as more exaggerated timeframe problems (variation of results differ more than usual when choosing the time frame due to the blending issues)
Scott seems like ur using 3 diff measurements for WoP progress
First there is Economic wellbeing as relative between the poor and the middle class.
Then there is WoP impact as poverty reduction.
And finally there is loving standards of the poor improvement relative to the middle class.
I feel like all three are very different.
sam
May 6 2015 at 7:17pm
Consumption is a wonderful measure of defining poverty. Today’s poor consume so much that they are fat.
Death by malnutrition is now more common among middle-class anorexics than the poor, and death by infectious disease is now more common among vaccine-refusing yuppies than among the poor.
Material poverty has been definitively solved.
However, the welfare state has replaced the impoverished with an underclass. The solution appears worse than the problem.
NZ
May 6 2015 at 10:04pm
A sunset provision isn’t the same thing. That only says when a law ceases to have effect.
I’m talking about defining what “Done” means within the law, before enacting it, so that we can know when the law can be called successful.
Scott Sumner
May 7 2015 at 10:17am
Trucha, Yes, and that’s because there are different ways of thinking about the success of the WoP. I’m not sure which one is best.
NZ, If you withdraw a policy because it is “done” does the problem come right back?
NZ
May 7 2015 at 1:25pm
Scott,
There’s only one way to find out.
Thomas
May 8 2015 at 2:49am
There would be little danger in adopting mistaken policies like minimum wages if opponents consistently argued for correct policies like the EITC.
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