Extract from

“The War on Poverty: Was It Lost?”

by Christopher Jencks

Part I from The New York Review of Books, 2015.

James J. HeckmanUniversity of Chicago

AEA Continuing Education ProgramASSA Course: Microeconomics of Life Course Inequality

San Francisco, CA, January 5-7, 2016

Christopher Jencks The War on Poverty: Was It Lost?

Figure 1: Should you believe this chart? Official Poverty Rate for theUnited States 1959 to 2013

Source: Carmen DeNavas-Walt and Bernadette D. Proctor, “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013,” US CensusBureau, September 2014.

Christopher Jencks The War on Poverty: Was It Lost?

Figure 2: Approximate Reductions in the Official 2013 Poverty RateNeeded to Make It Comparable to the 1964 Rate

Christopher Jencks The War on Poverty: Was It Lost?

Poverty in America: Circa 2008

Table 1: Ownership of Selected Consumer Goods among Poor Households

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Housing Survey for the United States 2003 and 2005.(Broda and Weinstein, 2008)

Christopher Jencks The War on Poverty: Was It Lost?

Figure 3: Alternative Measures of the Poverty Rate, 1970–2006

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Poverty Thresholds, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/threshld.html andauthors’ calculations. (Broda and Weinstein, 2008)Notes: a. The official poverty rate uses the CPI-U to deflate prices; b. see figure 1-2 and the text for definitions of theC-CPI-U and the C-CPI-U-BW. Both measures assume constant substitution and quality bias throughout the period. Theestimates of the substitution bias are based on the 2000–6 period and those of the quality bias on the 1994–2003 period.

Christopher Jencks The War on Poverty: Was It Lost?