this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
66 points (100.0% liked)
Hacker News
3046 readers
312 users here now
Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.
The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That would only be true if what people had to spend their money on stayed the same, and the author goes through great detail showing that the individual components of what people have to spend their money on to "exist" (i.e. a minimum cost of economic participation) have changed drastically in 60 years. Not only that, some of those pieces (child care, health care, higher education) have increased in cost breathtakingly faster than inflation. Sure, you could reduce that to a statement that "therefore the inflation metric is wrong," but the author goes on to show what a better, more representative metric would look like and tell us about the economy, and that's a good discussion mostly orthogonal to whether the inflation calculation is correct.
I think you're making the same mistake.
It does not depend at all on people's mandatory expenses remaining the same items, just that the inflation metric captures the increase in their expense overall.
Do you agree that the 3x food was roughly accurate in 1963? If you do, then it doesn't matter at all how the number was calculated. Because we're not re-doing the same calculation with modern numbers. We're instead just increasing that number by the inflation rate.
I agree that some of those things have increased much faster than inflation, but some things have increased much slower than inflation, and necessarily so, or the inflation metric itself would be much higher. Like food. Food has gotten a lot cheaper, which cancels out some of the increase in housing prices. Inflation overall gives a much better assessment of the increase in the cost of living than the author gives it credit for. It's certainly not perfect. It might be missing some overall rising costs by including the decline in prices for non-necessities. But that effect is much smaller than 5x that the author claims the metric is off by.
Edit: I'm not arguing that the poverty line calculation is good, or an accurate assessment of the minimum cost of living. I was just annoyed that the logic that the article was using to argue against it was flawed. (In addition to their use of incorrect quotes, averages instead of medians, etc. Averages in particular always is frustrating since income inequality is always also a big point people make, and that necessarily means that average cost of say rent or a home will be skewed high)
You've missed the point and doubled down on missing it. The 3x metric was right in 1963, but 3x food is still the same metric used to calculate the poverty line. Food has increased by inflation sure, but as the author says, food doesn't account for 3x the household budget, instead of 33% it's more like 7 percent. So the poverty line is way off.
The author then goes on to highlight issues with getting from the current poverty line which is mitigated by government subsidies, to that actual poverty line where you need to put in significant extra effort while seeing no actual gains until you reach it.
I think you're misunderstanding my argument. We're not applying the inflation of food to the previous metric. We're applying the overall inflation of all costs. Which is way higher than the food inflation. And includes much (but not all) of the increase in housing/etc costs that people have to pay. I think there's probably a lot to dive into about why CPI isn't measuring the true cost of living increases, but this article fails to get to that discussion because it misunderstands the calculations.
Inflation is a single percentage based on the total cost of living so applying it to the old poverty line calculation results in a poverty line that is still based on 3x the cost of food.
Inflation is a single percentage based on total cost of living: I agree. But I don't agree at all that your second point follows from your first? Imagine the original calculation was based on the cost people spent on bell bottom pants each year. And that happened to be accurate at the time (and therefore ended up with an original number similar to the food calculation). If we adjusted that number for inflation, would you say that the new number was still based on the cost of bell bottoms (even though the number would be equal to the one "based on food"). And if so, how can you say that the same number was "based on food" and "based on bell bottoms" at the same time?
I get you're saying that they adjust the 1963 cost for inflation. (vs tripling today's cost of food) I can't agree if that was enough in that time, because how would I know? But sure, let's say it was. It doesn't follow that adjusted for inflation it would be enough now.
As the author wrote, there seems to be significantly more inflation in other expenses than in food. Doing the math on what we think are reasonable expenses can show what a "real" poverty line is.
I think we agree. The poverty line wasn't "enough" in 1963 either, it was instead a line below which it wasn't possible to really live without assistance. I agree with the author of the article that the poverty line is misused as standing for what's "enough" when it doesn't represent that (edit: and I also agree that it doesn't seem to have tracked some of the actual increases in costs of living). I just took issue with their misrepresentation of the math of how it's calculated and what it means. I also think there's a more interesting conversation to be had about why the inflation metric (CPI) misses the perceived increase in costs of living, but this article did not discuss that. Yes it explained that various things had gotten more expensive, but not why those aren't being tracked by CPI (which includes housing costs, etc).