Peter Bohmer writes: > I agree that the poverty rate underestimates poverty. However it is not true > that the food budget is multiplied by 3 to arive at the poverty level. This was > true in 1964 but the poverty level is determined each year by applying the > increase in the CPI to the previous level. Since food prices have been rising > less than the average increase in prices, the official poverty level is > probably four or more times the minimum food budget. I don't have the exact > figure in front of me. I was intrigued with this because my memory indicated a different conclusion. So I checked the labor econ. texts that I had laying about. My mind is still fuzzy on this issue, since none of them were very clear. I didn't continue on my search, partly because I have other things to do, and partly because I came to a surprising conclusion: a lot of textbooks don't talk about poverty at all! Ehrenberg's very neoclassical textbook defined it only in a footnote! Now this is not as bad as it sounds, because most of the books had long discussion of _inequality_ among wage-earners. In many ways, that's a good thing, because the concept of "poverty" suggests the common metaphysic of "us" vs. "the underclass." On the other hand, the explanations of increasing wage inequality are pretty weak. Speaking of "us" vs. the poor, consider the following quote from Howard Wachtel's labor econ. text (first ed.): "We all benefit from the existence of the poor, particularly the working poor." [1984: 201] (This is based on a radical analysis of how poverty preserves the existence of low-waged workforce to do personal service, etc.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html
