Update on the War on Poverty

We evaluate progress in the War on Poverty, as President Johnson defined it, which established a 20 percent baseline poverty rate and adopted an absolute standard. While the official poverty rate fell from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 10.5 percent in 2019, our absolute Full-income Poverty Measure, which uses a fuller income measures and updates poverty thresholds only for inflation, fell from 19.5 to 1.6 percent. However, we also show that relative poverty reductions have been modest.  Additionally, government dependence increased over this time, with the share of working-age adults receiving under half their income from market sources more than doubling.

That is from a newly published Richard V. Burkhauser, Kevin Corinth, James Elwell, and Jeff Larrimore piece in the JPE.  Here are ungated versions of the paper.