[dahfizz]

> By growing inequality and pushing people into poverty

I am sick of hearing about poverty as a growing problem. It simply isn't.

Median income, and the lowest income quintile, have grown steadily. The percent of Americans living in poverty has been declining. Median wealth is still lower than it was before the 2008 crisis, but it was growing strongly before and has grown strongly since the Great Recession.

All trends are upwards. Do not confuse growing inequality with growing poverty. Some are getting richer faster than others, but statistically everyone is getting richer.

Is there a specific metric in mind when you say people are being pushed into poverty? Or is it something you have just heard elsewhere?

[dv_dt]

In the US, even before the 2008 the percentage poverty rate was higher than the 1970's. It was about to come down lower than the 1970's just before the pandemic hit. After the pandemic I presume we will be back to worse than the 1970's rate. But the poverty rate measure has been flat or worse for 50 years.

However, even though the overall rates were returning to flat before the pandemic - the percent of people below 50% of the poverty line in the US has been historically higher by 50% than it has been in history since the beginning of the measure.

https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...

If you're an HN reader, you have to realize that for the most part you are in an incredibly fortunate bubble of being in a job that is in demand in a financially supported sector of our economy - it is not that way for many Americans (or many other citizens of other nations).

[criticaljudge]

"Poverty rate" is usually defined of terms of earning less than the average income minus some %. It does not imply people actually being poor, in the way people imagine poverty (not being able to afford food, clothes, housing...).

Today even an "average poor" person can live better than a king 400 years ago.

[DataWorker]

Homelessness is obviously increasing though it’s difficult to measure with precision. Homelessness is worse than poverty and homeless aren’t even counted in official poverty calculations. The census can’t sample them.

[mariojv]

If you are in the US, you may be observing a local trend rather than one representative of the whole country. It's very difficult to measure, but this site has an estimate: https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-...

It shows about a 12% drop in homeless people 2007-2019. The US population overall grew just under 10%, too, so the drop on a per capita basis is higher than that. I imagine 2020 led to a large increase again, though. I also can't vet their sources without registering so take it with a grain of salt.

[dahfizz]

As someone who doesn't live on the west coast and rarely interacts with homeless people, could you explain how this is "obvious" if there's no measure of it?

[ClumsyPilot]

Firstly, 12 years is the relevant time period, not 100 or 500 years ago.

Specifically in UK in-work poverty has been going up and up for the past ten years.