Columnist at the Washington Post Lies About Poverty…Again

I have a special page called Poverty Hucksters, which features people or institutions (such as the Obama Administration, Steven Greenhouse, and the United Nations) that have deliberately lied about poverty.

No person has ever been featured more than one time, but that changes today because Eduardo Porter outed himself as a poverty huckster while at the New York Times back in 2018.

Now, he’s done it again. Here’s a chart from his recent column in the Washington Post, augmented by my question about whether his numbers are accurate.

Simply stated, Porter’s chart is dishonest nonsense because it is not measuring poverty.

I’m not joking. If you read the fine print, what the chart really shows is the percentage of the population with less than half the median income.

Yet this conveniently ignores an all-important issue, which is whether a nation has a high median income (like the United States) or a low median income (like some of the nations in the chart that supposedly have much less poverty).

I debunked this dodgy methodology back in 2017.

…it’s total nonsense. …it’s a measure of income distribution. …Think about what this means. A country where everyone is impoverished will have zero or close-to-zero poverty because everyone is at the median income. But as I’ve explained before, a very wealthy society can have lots of “poverty” if some people are a lot richer than others. And since the United States is much richer than other nations, this means an American household with $35,000 of income can be poor, even though they wouldn’t count as poor if they earned that much elsewhere.

And here’s some of what I wrote in 2019.

It is indeed strange that so many folks on the left have decided to use an artificial and misleading definition of poverty. One that depends on the distribution of income rather than any specific measure of poverty. Which is insanely dishonest. It means that everyone’s income could double and the supposed rate of poverty would stay the same. Or a country could execute all the rich people and the alleged rate of poverty would decline.

Here’s a chart I shared back in 2020.

It shows that poor people in the United States would be middle class (or above!) in many European countries.

And since the U.S. has been growing much faster than Europe in recent years, an updated version of this chart would be even more dramatic.

I want to close by pointing out some remarkable, but surely accidental, passages from Porter’s column.

He openly admits America is far richer than most other developed nations

The United States is by many measures the most powerful, prosperous nation on earth, sitting on the frontier of innovation and consistently outpacing its peers in terms of economic growth over recent decades. …despite being poorer and further from the technological frontier, America’s social-democratic peers…spend more effort and taxpayer money… This raises the question: What’s the point of being the most powerful, affluent nation on earth?

Yet instead of arguing for other nations to be more like the United States (lower taxes, smaller welfare state, etc), the whole point of his column is to argue that America should copy the countries that have lower levels of income.

Amazing. And this isn’t the first time he’s urged a successful nation to copy less-successful countries.

One final point: It’s possible that Porter is not being explicitly dishonest in his column. He may have blindly looked at OECD numbers and simply regurgitated them, without bothering to look at the methodology.

P.S. Speaking of the OECD, any analysis of dishonest poverty data should include criticism of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That international bureaucracy is infamous for generating the dodgy data (see here, here, here, and here) that get cited by people like Porter.

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Image credit: Steven Depolo | CC BY 2.0.