We've a new report out from the Mailman School of Public Health telling us that in some urban parts of the US child poverty is up at the unbelievable rates of 40, even 50% or more. The problem with this claim is that it's simply not true. Apparently the researchers aren't quite au fait with how poverty is both defined and alleviated in the US. Which is, when you think about it, something of a problem for those who decide to present us with statistics about child poverty. Here's the press release:
Years after the end of the Great Recession, child poverty remains widespread in America's largest cities. A paper just released by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), a research center based at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, reports that nearly three children in five living in Detroit are poor, according to the most recent Census figures. This rate has grown by 10 percentage points since the onset of the Great Recession in 2007.
Here's the actual report:
Years after the end of the Great Recession, child poverty remains widespread in America's largest cities. Nearly three children in five living in Detroit are poor, according to the most recent Census figures, a rate that has grown by 10 percentage points since the onset of the Great Recession in 2007. Most children in Cleveland and Buffalo also live in poverty, as do nearly half the children in Fresno, Cincinnati, and Memphis. Other large cities topping the list for child poverty are Newark, Miami, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. Seven of the 10 cities with the highest child poverty rates have seen them climb by eight percentage points or more since 2007, led by Fresno, with an extraordinary 16 percentage point jump.
The problem with all of this is something that I've said many a time. But obviously it needs to be said yet again. There's a major and significant difference between the way that the United States measures poverty and the way that everyone else in the world does.
Everyone else (as well as using a relative poverty standard, usually below 60% of median earnings adjusted for family size) measures poverty after the effects of the tax and benefits systems on alleviating poverty. So, in my native UK if you're poor you might get some cash payments (say, unemployment pay), some tax credits, help with your housing costs (housing benefit we call it), reduced property taxes (council tax credit) and so on. Whether you are poor or not is defined as being whether you are still under that poverty level after the effects of all of those attempts to alleviate poverty.
In the US things are rather different. It's an absolute standard of income (set in the 1960s and upgraded only for inflation, not median incomes, since) but it counts only market income plus direct cash transfers to the poor before measuring against that standard. Thus, when we measure the US poor we do not include the EITC (equivalent of those UK tax credits, indeed our UK ones were copied from the US), we do not include Section 8 vouchers (housing benefit), Medicaid, we don't even include food stamps. Because the US measure of poverty simply doesn't include the effects of benefits in kind and through the tax system.
The US measure therefore isn't the number of children living in poverty. It's the number of children who would be in poverty if there wasn't this system of government alleviation of poverty. When we do actually take into account what is done to alleviate child poverty we find that it's really some 2-3% of US children who live in poverty. Yes, that low: the US welfare state is very much child orientated.
Is urban poverty likely to have risen in recent years? I'm sure it has. Is urban poverty likely to be worse than rural such? Could be, difficult to tell really. But there's no way at all that urban child poverty is up at the sorts of levels being reported here. Simply because they're using the numbers of people who would be in poverty before the various things we do to alleviate poverty.
It's horribly, horribly, misleading is about the politest thing we can say about this report.
