Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Poverty, by America" in English language version.
That is, Desmond's core premise, that expanding safety net programs haven't slashed poverty, is wrong. They have. You just need to measure poverty carefully. ... Desmond, in his essay, spends some time marveling that "federal investments in means-tested programs increased by 130 percent from 1980 to 2018," a fact he finds hard to square with the official poverty rate remaining flat. Surely that spending should have reduced poverty! The answer here is simple: It did reduce poverty. The escalation of government investment made a difference, no matter what reputable poverty data you look at, whether absolute or relative. The only data series where it doesn't make a difference is the official poverty measure, which literally does not consider most of this spending and acts like it does not exist. ... That's why there's also near-unanimous consensus among poverty researchers that the official poverty measure (OPM) in the United States is a disaster. ... I was frankly a little shocked to see Desmond cite it without qualification in his article.
