this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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Like some people said on HN, the premise of this is based on a misunderstanding of how the poverty line is calculated. They don't take each year's grocery expenses and multiply by 3. Instead they take the same 1963 figure and adjust it each year for inflation generally. This means if was an accurate estimate then and the inflation calculation is correct, then it should remain roughly accurate
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)
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).