Nicholas Eberstadt has an excellent essay about the effects of the Great Society and the War on Poverty and its success over the past 50 years. Entirely contrary to what we’re usually told about it it has indeed succeeded, it has got as close as government work ever will to abolishing poverty. The problem is that we’re still using the wrong methods to measure that success. We are measuring the incomes of the poor, not their consumption possibilities, and we are also measuring those incomes without taking into account the things we do to raise those incomes. When we correct for those two failings we find that there really isn’t any poverty to speak of in the US. We should therefore conclude that the war has been won.
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