{"id":14750,"date":"2014-01-13T12:27:30","date_gmt":"2014-01-13T17:27:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/%year%\/%monthnum%\/%day%\/whos-poor-in-america-50-years-into-the-war-on-poverty-a-data-portrait\/"},"modified":"2024-09-09T15:06:29","modified_gmt":"2024-09-09T19:06:29","slug":"whos-poor-in-america-50-years-into-the-war-on-poverty-a-data-portrait","status":"publish","type":"short-read","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/2014\/01\/13\/whos-poor-in-america-50-years-into-the-war-on-poverty-a-data-portrait\/","title":{"rendered":"Who\u2019s poor in America? 50 years into the \u2018War on Poverty,\u2019 a data portrait"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a>
President Lyndon Johnson\u2019s visit to Tom Fletcher\u2019s home in Kentucky was part of his tour of poverty stricken areas in the U.S. (Photo by Walter Bennett\/Time & Life Pictures\/Getty Images).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson used his first State of the Union address<\/a> to urge “all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.” The War on Poverty, as the set of social programs enacted in 1964-1965 came to  be called, was arguably the most ambitious domestic policy initiative since the Great Depression. But for decades, politicians and social scientists have argued<\/a> about whether Johnson’s antipoverty programs have lifted people out of destitution, trapped them in cycles of dependency, or both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Critics note that the official poverty rate, as calculated by the Census Bureau<\/a>, has fallen only modestly, from 19% in 1964 to 15% in 2012 (the most recent year available). But other analysts, citing shortcomings<\/a> in the official poverty measure, focus on a supplemental measure<\/a> (also produced by the Census Bureau) to argue that more progress has been made. A team of researchers from Columbia University<\/a>, for example, calculated an “anchored” supplemental measure — essentially the 2012 measure carried back through time and adjusted for historical inflation — and found that it fell from about 26% in 1967 to 16% in 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s inarguable, though, is that the demographics of America’s poor have shifted over the decades. Here’s a look at what has, and hasn’t, changed, based on the official measure. (Note: The reference years vary depending on data availability.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"poverty_age\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Today, most poor Americans are in their prime working years:<\/strong> In 2012, 57% of poor Americans were ages 18 to 64, versus 41.7% in 1959.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Far fewer elderly are poor:<\/strong> In 1966, 28.5% of Americans ages 65 and over were poor; by 2012 just 9.1% were. There were 1.2 million fewer elderly poor in 2012 than in 1966, despite the doubling of the total elderly population. Researchers<\/a> generally credit this steep drop to Social Security, particularly the expansion and inflation-indexing of benefits during the 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But childhood poverty persists: <\/strong>Poverty among children younger than 18 began dropping even before the War on Poverty. From 27.3% in 1959, childhood poverty fell to 23% in 1964 and to 14% by 1969. Since then, however, the childhood poverty rate has risen, fallen and, since the 2007-08 financial crisis, risen again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today’s poor families are structured differently:<\/strong> In 1973, the first year for which data are available, more than half (51.4%) of poor families were headed by a married couple; 45.4% were headed by women. In 2012, just over half (50.3%) of poor families were female-headed, while 38.9% were headed by married couples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"poverty_regions\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Poverty is more evenly distributed, though still heaviest in the South: In 1969, 45.9% of poor Americans lived in the South, a region that accounted for 31% of the U.S. population at the time. At 17.9%, the South’s poverty rate was far above other regions. In 2012, the South was home to 37.3% of all Americans and 41.1% of the nation’s poor people; though the South’s poverty rate, 16.5%, was the highest among the four Census-designated regions, it was only 3.2 percentage points above the lowest (the Midwest).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poverty among blacks has fallen sharply: <\/b>In 1966, two years after Johnson’s speech, four-in-ten (41.8%) of African-Americans were poor; blacks constituted nearly a third (31.1%) of all poor Americans. By 2012, poverty among African-Americans had fallen to 27.2% — still more than double the rate among whites (12.7%, 1.4 percentage points higher than in 1966).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But poverty has risen among Hispanics. <\/strong>Poverty data for Hispanics, who can be of any race, wasn’t collected until 1972. That year, 22.8% lived below the poverty threshold. In 2012, the share of Hispanics in poverty had risen to 25.6%. But the U.S. Hispanic population has quintupled over that time. As a result, more than half of the 22 million-person increase in official poverty between 1972 and 2012 was among Hispanics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The War on Poverty was arguably the most ambitious domestic policy initiative since the Great Depression. But the overall effectiveness of the War on Poverty remains hotly debated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":145,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"sub_headline":null,"sub_title":"","_prc_public_revisions":[],"_ppp_expiration_hours":0,"_ppp_enabled":false,"ai_generated_summary":"","apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"relatedPosts":[],"_prc_fork_parent":0,"_prc_fork_status":"","_prc_active_fork":0,"datacite_doi":"","datacite_doi_citation":"","_prc_seo_qr_attachment_id":0,"spoken_article_player_enabled":true,"displayBylines":true,"footnotes":"","prc_watchers":[]},"categories":[239,240],"bylines":[842],"collection":[],"datasets":[],"_post_visibility":[],"formats":[467],"_fund_pool":[],"languages":[],"regions-countries":[515],"research-teams":[],"workflow-status":[],"class_list":["post-14750","short-read","type-short-read","status-publish","hentry","category-economic-inequality","category-poverty","bylines-drew-desilver","formats-short-read","regions-countries-united-states"],"label":"Short Read","post_parent":0,"word_count":624,"canonical_url":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/2014\/01\/13\/whos-poor-in-america-50-years-into-the-war-on-poverty-a-data-portrait\/","art_direction":false,"_embeds":[],"watchers":[],"table_of_contents":[],"datacite_doi":"","prc_seo_data":{"title":"Who\u2019s poor in America? 50 years into the \u2018War on Poverty,\u2019 a data portrait","description":"The War on Poverty was arguably the most ambitious domestic policy initiative since the Great Depression. 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