Hacker News

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).