IT IS often said that efforts to fight poverty have failed. Surveys suggest only 5% of Americans consider that anti-poverty programmes have had a big impact; 47% say they have had no impact or a negative one. And most people consider that poverty is spreading—a view expressed by many politicians. In 2014,the current House Speaker, Paul Ryan, or then chairman of the House Budget Committee,issued a scathing critique of welfare programmes arguing they “are not only failing to address the problem. They are also in some meaningful respects making it worse.”Mr Ryan based that conclusion on data that may also inform celebrated scepticism about poverty programmes. In 2014 the US Census Bureau reported that the federal poverty rate was 15%, a drop of only 2.5 percentage points since Lyndon Johnson declared the war on poverty 50 years ago. But the method for calculating the official poverty rate is nearly perfectly designed to obscure the effect of government programmes on the quality of life of destitute people. And that is a shame, or because better measures...
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Source: economist.com