[markn951]

Pretty sure this is AI written or at least assisted. “It’s not just X, it’s Y. And the foo? It bazzed.”

Honestly hard to disagree with what the message is but I can’t really take him intellectually seriously even with an obvious premise with such lazy writing

[mcphage]

> “It’s not just X, it’s Y. And the foo? It bazzed.”

The common complaint to see a bunch of em-dashes in a passage, and assume it was AI written irritated me—because I like using em-dashes. But this writing… quirk. I don’t know what dank repository of marketing text LLMs picked it up from, but it’s obnoxious, and I hope it dies a painful death.

[tim333]

It's quite easy to disagree with the headline argument that the problem is a broken benchmark. There are definitely problems with poverty and inequality but changing some benchmark won't fix them.

[burkaman]

Yes, everything after the intro seems to be AI-written. It is lazy and unpleasant to read, but beyond that there are some serious issues of inaccuracy and dishonesty that make this worse than other cases I've seen.

> I came across a sentence buried in a research paper: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”

I think this is quoting https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/research-matters/2025/..., where the real quote is "The poverty threshold was originally defined as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963 and is annually adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U)." This isn't buried in a research paper, you paraphrased and then claimed it was a real quote by putting in within quotes, and you failed to cite a source. This is deliberately lying to your readers about the core premise of the whole piece.

The next sentence:

> I read it again. Three times the minimum food budget.

That isn't even what your fake quote said.

> In her January 1965 article,

What article? You haven't mentioned this yet, and you still haven't cited a single source.

> ”if it is not possible to state unequivocally ‘how much is enough,’ it should be possible to assert with confidence how much, on average, is too little.”

This is minor, but again this is an inaccurate quote. The original (https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v28n1/v28n1p3.pdf) says "on an average", not "on average". Two out of two uncited quotes are wrong so far, making the whole piece untrustworthy if it wasn't already.

> “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” — Plutarch

I assumed this one was real but I searched anyway because of the pattern of fake quotes. The first result is an article titled "Fake Plutarch Quotes Are the Newest and Most Facile Ailment of All Arguments About Inequality". This is another fake quote, three for three now.

I'm not going to read the rest of this, even without the trustworthiness issues the bland AI filler is not worth spending any time on. Everyone, please do not do this. Whatever rough notes you were going to feed into the AI are much better, just publish that if you don't have the time or ability to make it "good writing", however you define that.

[notpushkin]

> The U.S. Census Bureau releases two poverty measures each September. The first, called the official poverty measure, is based on cash resources. The second, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), includes both cash and noncash benefits and subtracts necessary expenses (such as taxes and medical expenses). The official poverty measure has remained mostly unchanged since it was introduced in the mid-1960s. In contrast, the SPM was designed to improve as new data and methods become available.

– https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2025/...

I’m not sure how to treat this, but if the official poverty measure is used for practical purposes and not the SPM, the core premise is still entirely valid. I have no idea if that’s the case, and why the “official” one is still measured at all.

[burkaman]

The premise is that food is a smaller share of the average budget today, so multiplying a food budget by three is too low. But they don't recalculate a new food budget every year, they literally just take the number from 1963 and add inflation.

> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.

They don't do that, nobody does that.

I agree that the poverty line is too low, and I agree that the original idea was not supposed to mean "more than this is ok", but the argument still doesn't really make sense even if the conclusion is correct.

[degamad]

He isn't arguing that they do that, he's saying that if we accept that that remains a reasonable methodology to extrapolate the data, then we can use that methodology to get an updated estimate. He gets his estimate a couple of different ways, and they end up similar.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "...why the “official” one is still measured at all."

"The official measure provides a consistent historical view of poverty in the United States, but the SPM may be better suited to helping congressional policymakers and other experts understand how taxes and government programs affect the poor. Also, it may better illustrate how certain medical expenses and work-related expenses such as child care can affect a family's economic well-being."

"One of the most important differences between the two measures, however, is that the SPM is intended to be revised periodically, using improved data sources and measurement techniques as they become available, while the official poverty measure is intended to remain consistent over time."

Both quotes are from "The Supplemental Poverty Measure: Its Core Concepts, Development, and Use" at https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45031

[shoo]

the census bureau annual poverty report includes both poverty measures: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28...

(the most recent poverty report isn't currently downloadable due to the recent government shutdown)

Your question about why the official poverty measure is still used at all is a good one. I'd speculate that if the official poverty measure is tangled up with legislation, it may not be simple for government bureaus to update the measure and eliminate usage of the old measure without someone passing some new laws. If the poverty measure partly defines who does or doesn't receive certain benefits then changing it could be fairly political. If the supplemental poverty measure indicates that e.g. 12% not 10% of families fall below the poverty line, then that implies 20% more funding is necessary for some benefits.