AS MY colleague notes, the latest Census Bureau numbers on income, poverty rates and health coverage paint a bleak picture of deteriorating material conditions for many Americans. There is no doubt that it's bad out there, and that people are seriously suffering. Still, I never take poverty data at face value because the definition of the "poverty line" is laden with a number of intellectually arbitrary methodological assumptions. There is simply no cut-and-dry metaphysical fact of the matter about the percentage of Americans living in poverty. It is a matter of definition, and the quality of the measure is a function of the credibility of the method of definition. Thus, a spirit of sceptical nominalism is called for, which is why I think the lede to this Washington Post story falls short of exemplary journalistic objectivity. The Census Bureau's definition of "poverty" is about as informative as the Justice Department's latest definition of "enemy combatant". It's not to be taken for granted.

Tim Worstall usefully explains why the poverty measure is somewhat misleading. As Mr Worstall notes, the poverty line is set at three times the food bill of a typical family in the early 1960s, adjusted for inflation. It is possible to complain about the adequacy of this way of fixing the poverty line, but let's leave it alone. The larger problem comes in determining what does and does not count as household income for the purpose of determining if a family crosses or falls short of the line. Market income counts, of course, as do cash transfers from the government. But other forms of government assistance don't count. As Mr Worstall writes:

We don't include free medical care, or maybe help with the rent of an apartment or house. We don't include any help that comes through the tax system nor do we include any vouchers: like Food Stamps for example.

The methodological arbitrariness of the poverty measure becomes evident when one considers that American poverty-alleviation policy has shifted away from the kinds of government assistance that are counted and toward the kinds that aren't. This leads to a number of oddities. Perhaps most significantly, America's largest poverty alleviation programme is now the Earned Income Tax Credit, but it's effects in alleviating poverty are simply ignored when calculating the poverty rate. Mr Worstall adds:

[T]he John Edwards plan for poverty reduction, more Section 8 vouchers, more Medicaid and more EITC, would have alleviated a lot of poverty: and changed the numbers under the poverty line by not one single person at all. Because, today, we are no longer counting those who are in poverty after we've helped them. Today we are counting the number who are in poverty before we've helped them.

Again, none of this is to deny that the number of Americans suffering poverty, more commensensically construed, has lately increased. I imagine it has. But it would be rather more useful were the Census Bureau to take into account the whole gamut of poverty-alleviation programmes when determining who is and is not living in poverty. Then, we would be able to assess just how effective these programmes really are in saving American families from poverty.

Now, I've noticed that those in favour of greater downward distribution tend to defend measures that artificially inflate the poverty rate. The idea seems to be that a higher official poverty rate makes redistributive assistance seem more urgently necessary. However, I'm not so sure this is wise. When word gets around that the books are cooked, many folks simply stop paying attention. And rather than making more redistribution seem necessary, our current method of measurement can make the redistributive programmes we do have seem puzzlingly ineffective. Why devote more resources to programmes that don't work? Wouldn't it be more persuasively powerful to have at hand poverty statistics that, by properly taking into account the full range of poverty alleviation policies, make it possible to say how many millions are in in fact saved from poverty by public assistance, and how many more would be similarly saved were we to increase the generosity of these programmes even further?