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For well over a century, with ever-expanding scale and scope, the United States government has been generating statistics that might illuminate the plight of society’s poorest and most

Wendt Scholar Nicholas Eberstadt

vulnerable elements. From the beginning, the express objective of such efforts has always been to abet purposeful action to protect the weak, better the condition of the needy, and progressively enhance the general weal. First unveiled in early 1965, shortly after the launch of the Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty,” the poverty rate is a measure identifying households with incomes falling below an official “poverty threshold” (levels based on that household’s size and composition, devised to be fixed and unchanging over time). Just months after its debut, the War on Poverty’s new Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) designated the measure as its unofficial “working definition” of poverty. By August 1969, the Bureau of the Budget had stipulated that the poverty thresholds used in calculating American poverty rates would constitute the federal government’s official statistical definition for poverty. It has remained so ever since.

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI.