Define poverty not by a historical food‑share rule but by a modern 'cost of participation' basket that explicitly counts housing (localized), childcare, healthcare (insured out‑of‑pocket), and transport needed to hold employment and raise children. The metric would be regionally scaled, transparent about tax treatment, and tied to program eligibility and labor‑market realities.
— Adopting a participation‑based poverty line would reallocate policy debates from symbolic national thresholds to concrete, place‑sensitive eligibility rules that change benefit design, minimum‑wage politics, and urban housing and childcare policy.
Alex Tabarrok
2025.12.02
30% relevant
Seeding children’s accounts with equity could alter measures of material wellbeing and the design of anti‑poverty programs; the Dells’ ZIP‑code targeting highlights how private interventions may interact with any poverty metric tied to participation costs.
Jerusalem Demsas
2025.12.02
72% relevant
The article critiques a viral recalculation of the U.S. poverty threshold and argues for keeping the measurement question grounded while prioritizing impactful giving; this connects directly to the existing idea that poverty lines should be defined around concrete participation costs (housing, childcare, transport) rather than archaic food‑share multipliers. The actor/claim tying them is Michael Green’s viral $140k recalculation and the author’s counter‑appeal to donate to GiveDirectly as a more useful alternative.
Tyler Cowen
2025.12.02
82% relevant
Cowen’s critique targets how we define poverty in the face of changing prices and demand; this directly connects to the existing idea to adopt a 'cost of participation' poverty line (regional, budget‑based measure) rather than a single dollar cutoff — both address measurement framing and policy consequences for eligibility and redistribution.
Noah Smith
2025.11.29
100% relevant
Mike Green’s $140k calculation (Free Press) and Noah Smith’s rebuttal provide the concrete dispute: Green’s updated basket and multiplier logic motivates a new metric; Smith’s critique highlights measurement pitfalls that such a metric would need to address.