Measuring Poverty: The Official U.S. Measure and Material Hardship

Material hardship is a concept that is crucial to our understanding of inequality. I define it as: an inadequate consumption of goods or services that the public deems minimally necessary for decent human functioning. While quantitative poverty research purports to address this concept, it in fact does so only in part. Most discussions of poverty using the official poverty line say nothing about the material situation of the poor. This study rectifies this failing by making material hardship the centerpiece of the analysis. Data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) are used to compare hardship figures with official poverty statistics. Comparisons of the income poor with the hardship poor find that hardship is more prevalent than official poverty figures suggest. The groups who are the worst off according to income-poverty figures also do pretty poorly under hardship measures. But we also find that groups we generally think of as economically advantaged do suffer hardship at rates more similar to the traditionally disadvantaged groups. Non-senior adults, married-couple households, and workers all experience more hardship than official income rates lead us to believe. One important deviation involves seniors, who look much better off under hardship measures. Thus, the poor population that emerges under the hardship measures (younger, married, and working) looks closer to the U.S. mainstream than the official measure has led us to believe.