This raises two crucial questions: did the first “war” really fail? And what should we do today?

As for the first, when Lyndon Johnson called for an end to poverty on January 8, 1964, he continued the tradition of the New Deal and decades of American policy designed to provide all Americans with basic standards of living — housing, education, healthcare and jobs. Americans believed that an activist government could achieve those goals, hence the trillions of dollars directed at the War on Poverty.

Those trillions have over time reduced the official “poverty rate” from 19 percent to 15 percent. Many have concluded that such a minor shift wasn’t worth the massive expense. Johnson’s legacy was tarnished by the chaos unleashed by opposition to the Vietnam War and by the morass of the 1970s, and the Reagan revolution of the 1980s was predicated in part on aconviction that the government’s attempt to alleviate the plight of the poor was not only social engineering, but badly-done social engineering.

Yet poverty today is of a different order than poverty 50 or 100 years ago. During the Great Depression, millions of Americans were still without electricity or running water. By the 1960s that had changed, but many people still lacked basic healthcare, and the elderly were often at the mercy of their families. Today, there is still widespread poverty as defined by official income statistics, but the conditions of poverty are materially different, as Jordan Weissmann at The Atlantic has shown.

In part, that is because of the safety net we have since created. Many conservatives believe that we were better off in a world where private charity groups and religious organizations provided assistance, rather than government programs such as food stamps, welfare, unemployment benefits, Social Security and disability payments. But while that world did place much greater stock in self-reliance, it also left far more people at a huge disadvantage, struggling for life’s basic necessities. You could — and some do — argue that such a world produced heartier souls more able to cope with life’s vicissitudes. You could also argue—and should—that such a world was harsh and destructive to many in ways that humans for centuries have strived to ameliorate.

Today we have a massive social safety net, thanks to both the New Deal and the substantial expansion of federal and state programs beginning in the 1960s. These programs soon included housing as well. Many have seen more waste than not, and housing programs in particular did not fare well, as the scarred urban landscape of housing projects demonstrates.

But that safety net—much of which is not well-captured in the per capita income statistics that are used to assess the poverty rate—did create a set of expectations about the minimum level of necessities that all Americans deserve. That minimum—consisting of adequate shelter, food, heat and air conditioning, public education, and access to healthcare for the elderly—is a reality today.