Sunday, 9 June 2019

The Most Shocking Statistic About Poverty in America Was Probably Wrong All Along

quote [ "The debate has gone on for years in the pages of academic journals and white papers, with Edin and Shaefer countering detractors and refining their findings along the way. This week, though, a group of rival researchers released the most serious challenge to their work yet. Their paper uses newly available data to essentially double check and correct the government survey results Edin and Shaefer relied on. And, after all of their adjustments, $2-a-day poverty nearly disappears." ]

Seemed relevant to recent posts. This doesn't mean poverty isn't a problem, or that there isn't a gap between qualifying for welfare and no longer needing welfare that keeps people on welfare. It just means our understanding of our system has been incomplete.
[SFW] [people] [+2 Interesting]
[by snowfox@10:22pmGMT]

Comments

lilmookieesquire said @ 4:29am GMT on 10th Jun [Score:1 Underrated]
Studies like this are funded by tax free charitable breaks to universities to promote conservative agendas, which is why democrats need to fund education.
steele said @ 10:08am GMT on 10th Jun
Studies like this are funded by tax free charitable breaks to universities to promote conservative, neoliberal, third-way agendas, which is why democrats the public needs to fund education.

Ftfy💁‍♂️ Keep going. I'm still very turned on.😉
snowfox said @ 2:11pm GMT on 10th Jun
Did you read the article?
lilmookieesquire said @ 4:52pm GMT on 10th Jun
All the way through. This is related to the topic in the book Dark money about the structure of financing. There was a tax break offered on charitable donations and there was a consensus that this money should be spent on countering the liberal bias of universities. This often took the form of grants to departments that would fund studies like this and train conservative leadership.

I’m not saying this study is malicious or incorrect. I’m just saying it’s likely part of a conservative agenda to counter liberalism at universities.

The study is still basically supporting that the poor of America are horribly poor, but the study seems to be being used to undermine the $2 figure, which is fine, but the rift that “things aren’t so bad” isn’t a proper one to take away from it.

The issue isn’t the study as much as how it will be portrayed in conservative media as talking points on a slower news day- but that’s more like my personal issue with it.
snowfox said @ 5:44pm GMT on 10th Jun [Score:1 Good]
Ok, good explanation. My goal was to highlight that we know we have a serious poverty problem, but we are not good at quantifying it, which makes it hard to discuss and combat.

As far as the source of funding, I look at it this way: let's say Disney gives me a bunch of money to make art, and my art is contrary to Disney's values. Did Disney corrupt me? Or did I cleverly take their money and do something good with it?

The source of funding should be considered, but people take dirty money to do good things because it's destructive to the source of funding and because dirty money is often the only money, so we can't know for sure if the researchers had malicious intent without further investigating their expressed beliefs.

Other than my stated topic at the start of this comment, I had no agenda whatsoever with this post. I happened to see it while browsing Slate, thought it was interesting in parallel to the post about the cliff effect, so I posted it. Out of this, we got one good comment that started to explain the different ways we quantify this, and I hope that mechavolt does a post to get more into that subject.
lilmookieesquire said[1] @ 8:14am GMT on 11th Jun
Oh it’s totally fine. It’s just really neat reading about political strategy and seeing it play out. You (royal “you”/we) can hate the Koch brothers but their long term methodology has been... I’m not sure “effective” is the right word, but the effects certainly can’t be denied. I think, in a lot of ways, they are coping with the monster they’ve helped create. To that point, the Koch brothers are actually donating to democrats now (previously/historically only republicans). We will see where things take us. For better or worse I’m really interested in the results of the next election. It will have a tremendous impact on the judicial system that Mitch McDonald’s, the Dread Turtle (tm) has had an enormous (negative) impact upon. And by that, I mean conservative judges with lifetime appointments that don’t seem to reflect trending attitudes of Americans, but that’s literally what the judicial system is for, so, uh, good luck to all of us.

I’m not optimistic that America is being the best America that it can be, but I would like to see positive impacts like what happened with the ozone. I don’t care who is president as long as basic positive change happens (a guy can dream).
rylex said @ 8:47am GMT on 11th Jun
i heard the kochs are giving money to the dems to bait soros into giving money to the repubs
mechavolt said @ 12:18pm GMT on 10th Jun [Score:1 Interesting]
It's not that the data is bad. They just used it inappropriately. They used survey data to analyse a small population. That's going to throw some noise into your analysis. Is the SIPP more reliable than other surveys when it comes to misreporting? Yup. But it's also a relatively small sample size, when compared to say, the ACS. And as seen by looking at the admin records, even the SIPP is still susceptible to misreporting. When the Census Bureau itself estimates poverty statistics, they use Bayesian modelling with inputs from multiple surveys and admin records to help account for sample sizes and discrepancies between data sources.
snowfox said @ 11:01pm GMT on 9th Jun
From the article, making it clear this article isn't about there not being poverty, but about us having a hard time understanding and quantifying poverty...

"Meyer’s new paper is consistent with a different story, supported by other recent research: As the old cash welfare program disappeared, other parts of the safety net, most importantly food stamps, have stepped in and helped keep truly extreme poverty from growing. That should be a cautionary tale for conservatives who would like to reform other parts of the welfare state, like food stamps, by adding stricter limits and work requirements. The story here is that these parts provide essential help.

It’s also important to keep in mind a caveat about Meyer’s paper. Just because $2-a-day poverty might be a statistical artifact, that does not mean there aren’t a large number of families in truly dire circumstances in this country. Meyer and his team themselves write that while their “paper demonstrates that the rate of extreme poverty in the United States is substantially lower than what has been reported, we do not contend that there is little deprivation in the United States.” Their paper also may miss some of the worst cases of need; it excludes homeless people, for instance, who don’t show up in government surveys. Meanwhile, the Department of Education believes 1.35 million public school children lack homes.

In some ways, it even confirms that Edin and Shaefer were on the right track when they argued that families without cash ready at hand are prone to special suffering. Meyer still finds that the roughly 1 million households lifted out of extreme poverty by benefits like food stamps—a group that includes most parents reporting $2-a-day incomes—suffer material hardships at much, much higher rates than the normal poor. They’re more likely to miss a rent payment or a bill, to have their power or phone service cut off, or to have difficulty getting enough to eat. There are many people who get some help from the government but still say they don’t have enough cash to live on. The safety net doesn’t seem to be doing enough to catch all of them—even if their suffering isn’t captured neatly in a viral stat."

The point is that we don't have good data and analysis on poverty. We know we have it. We have all seen it. But we don't know nearly enough about it. That is my takeaway from this article about this new study.
steele said @ 10:52pm GMT on 9th Jun [Score:-1 Flamebait]
filtered comment under your threshold
rylex said @ 11:39pm GMT on 9th Jun
i laughed so hard I puked

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