Search and filter by content type, issue area, author, and keyword
November 30, 2023
Abstract We evaluate progress in the War on Poverty as President Lyndon B. Johnson defined it, which established a 20% baseline poverty rate and adopted an absolute standard. While the…
November 21, 2023
Thirty years ago, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) wrote a seminal essay titled “Defining Deviancy Down.” He argued that Americans had “become accustomed to alarming levels of crime…
November 14, 2023
Introduction “Given New York Today, Could Anyone Lead It?” So bemoaned a 1991 New York Times headline after decades of failure and futility.1 Crime was endemic, schools were failing, poverty…
November 9, 2023
This paper will be delivered at the Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management 2023 Fall Research Conference. Abstract The Child Support Enforcement (CSE) system has a broad scope and provides…
October 30, 2023
Abstract A recent National Academy of Sciences report recommends elevating the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) to the “nation’s headline poverty statistic.” I project how making the SPM the official poverty…
October 24, 2023
Chairman Smith, Chairman LaHood, Ranking Member Davis, and distinguished members of the Subcommittee on Work and Welfare, thank you for the opportunity to testify on poverty measurement. My name is…
October 24, 2023
Chairman Smith, Subcommittee Chairman LaHood, Ranking Member Davis, and distinguished members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify. I am Bruce Meyer, McCormick Foundation Professor at the…
October 17, 2023
COSM scholars and AEI affiliates include some of the nation’s foremost experts on poverty measurement. On October 17, COSM gathered several of these scholars to provide a primer on opportunity…
October 11, 2023
Earlier this year, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report recommended elevating the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) to the “nation’s headline poverty statistic,” and noted that the Office…
October 5, 2023
In this post I discuss the policy implications of declaring the Supplemental Poverty Measure the new official measure, an action that could be taken unilaterally by the Director of the…