Tag: relative poverty
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Why Our Poverty Measure Misleads
RealClearMarkets: Why Our Poverty Measure Misleads Robert Samuelson … Despite poverty's messiness, we've tended to measure progress against it by a single statistic, the federal poverty line. It was originally designed in the early 1960s by Mollie Orshansky, an analyst at the Social Security Administration, and became part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. She…
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“Are the rich a form of pollution?” Greg Mankiw
I had two posts this past week that dealt with the issue of relative poverty. Economist Greg Mankiw has a great post on this topic, Are the rich a form of pollution?" I recall once hearing Larry Summers ask students a provocative question to spark discussion: If there were some policy that would make the…
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Theology and Economics: The Question of Relative Poverty
Two posts ago, I wrote: Relative poverty is based on a statistical distribution. Theoretically, we could place the amount of wealth each person or family has on a continuum. Then we decide that people who are below some percentage cutoff line on the continuum (5%? 10%? 20%?) are in poverty. The only way poverty is…
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Theology and Economics: Two Kinds of Poverty
Yesterday I wrote: Prosperity is about the amount of wealth and resources that can be generated and sustained over a lengthy period. Prosperity comes from the dynamic interplay between a set of human resources, values, and social institutions. Coming from a biblical understanding that God wants all God's people to participate in creation stewardship and…