We Won the War on Poverty

A truly remarkable quote, from the NYTimes, of all places:

... the poor have made progress since the ‘60s as the nation’s living standards have risen. If poverty were defined based on what people bought in 1967, adjusted only for inflation, the poverty rate would have fallen to about 11 percent today, according to research by Jane Waldfogel and other researchers at Columbia University. 

But poverty is best measured relative to the actual living standards of our own society. By the standards of the 19th century, for instance, practically no American is poor. In comparison with Bangladeshis, there are precious few poor in the United States. 

A more nuanced analysis of the evolution of poverty and America’s efforts to combat it is not so consoling. Recent research on poverty suggests that government programs have done, in fact, a much better job than the headline statistics suggest. 

The reason the poverty rate has budged so little is that the job of fixing it has gotten harder. “The government is doing more to reduce poverty now than it did in the 1960s,” Professor Waldfogel said. 

Um....wait.  The reason the poverty rate has budged so little is that we keep moving the target.  If the income of the poor doubled, but the rest of the country tripled its income, we'd say the poverty problem had gotten worse, when in fact the health, income, and other measures of welfare have improved dramatically. That's...that's...Orwellian!

It may be fair enough to redefine poverty that way.  But the usual narrative is the poor are getting worse off as "the rich get richer."  Instead, the poor are much better off, and the market economy has delivered on its promises of ending poverty, by any consistent definition.  The only way to say that the poor are worse off is to assume that the poor are as obsessed with relative status as the envious intellectuals of the left.  (On which Dr. Nozick had some interesting things to say).

Nod to Anonyman

UPDATE:  We DID!  We DID!  We DID win the war on poverty.