ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a new measure of poverty for the United States, one which rests on a family’s capacity for generating income, rather than the actual money income of that family. It introduces the concept of “poverty” and its current measurement, and explores some of the criticisms of this official measure. The chapter describes trends in net income stream (NEC) poverty for the entire United States (US) population and for demographic subgroups and compares these trends to trends in the official poverty measure. It examines the composition of the NEC poor population and shows the changes in this composition to trends in the composition of the officially poor population. The chapter discusses what underlying trends in the US economy could have accounted for the observed trends in NEC poverty and their differences from trends in official poverty and provides some concluding remarks and policy implications.