At 04:44 PM 10/27/98 -0500, you wrote: > > By the way, how is poverty defined in the U.S (in general terms). It's often > useful to be able to compare our social programs to the U'S's e.g. > healthcare. It helps to deflate the Hollywood image. > > Back in the 1950s, Molly Orshansky and others figured out a standard diet > that would define a poverty life-style for a household. Because the poor > spent about 1/3 of their income on food at the time, the poverty cut-off in > terms of income was defined as 3 times the amount of money needed to pay for > that diet. Then that amount has been adjusted for changes in prices ever > since, with any household earning less than this cut-off being seen as > "poor." This is simple (ignoring adjustments for the size of households, > etc.) but I think it captures the way the US Bureau of Labor Statistics > measures the poverty cut-off. > > My friend Patricia Ruggles told me that the BLS was going to switch to a new > method for defining poverty, but I haven't heard anything about this actually > happening. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html
