Blog Post

AEIdeas

Source: Anchored Supplemental Poverty Measure, Columbia Poverty Center, https://www.povertycenter.columbia.edu/historical-spm-data-reg.

In a recent report, I called attention to the substantial decline in poverty among children in the United States over the past half century, which contradicts much of what the popular media and some elected officials like to say. As I noted, proper measurements show that US child poverty has fallen by at least 50 percent since the 1980s, and likely more.

The gap in child poverty rates by race and ethnicity is similarly misrepresented by scholars and commentators. In a 2019 article from the journal, Population Research and Policy Review, the author concluded that:

“There has been a modest narrowing of poverty differentials over time, as the non-Hispanic white poverty rate has inched up since the 1970s, while those of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are a little lower—although among all groups, there are considerable fluctuations in poverty with the economic cycle.”

The author based this conclusion on the official poverty measure, even though it vastly overstates poverty by not considering government benefits as income — a problem that has been documented extensively.

Others simply mischaracterize the data or fail to put the current disparities into historical context. A September 2019 blog post by Child Trends mistakenly concluded: “While poverty rates remained the same or decreased slightly from 2017 to 2018 for all racial and ethnic groups, the poverty gap between young Black and Hispanic children and their white peers under age 6 increased.” The authors concluded this despite the fact that the data they presented showed a decrease in the poverty gap between young black and white children from 2017 to 2018.

Around the same time, the Economic Policy Institute wrote: “African American and Hispanic children continued to face the highest poverty rates—28.5% of African Americans and 23.7% of Hispanics under age 18 lived below the poverty level in 2018.” Not mentioned was the steeper decline since 2013 for children in these categories compared to White children.

The truth is that, when properly measured, the poverty gap between children of different races in the US has decreased substantially in recent years, as research has shown since as early as 2016. Updated data from the Columbia Poverty Center reveal that the poverty gap between Black and White children decreased by 22.1 percentage points (58.1 percent) between 1970 and 2016.

Source: Anchored Supplemental Poverty Measure, Columbia Poverty Center, https://www.povertycenter.columbia.edu/historical-spm-data-reg.

Between white and Hispanic children, the poverty gap decreased by 16.2 percentage points (50.9 percent) during the same time period.

Source: Anchored Supplemental Poverty Measure, Columbia Poverty Center, https://www.povertycenter.columbia.edu/historical-spm-data-reg.

Addressing the poverty gap between children of different races in this country requires an accurate assessment of progress made over recent years. Not only are American children as a whole experiencing poverty at historically low rates, but black and Hispanic children are doing better than ever compared to their white counterparts. The racial-poverty gap is still too large, but ignoring these trends puts future progress for children at risk.