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Applied Economics Theses
A new approach to measuring poverty in the united states: a household's ability to consume, department chair.
Theodore F. Byrley, Ph.D., Chair and Associate Professor of Economics & Finance
David Ashelman , Buffalo State College Follow
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Applied Economics, M.A.
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Frederick Floss, Ph.D., Professor of Economics & Finance
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Curtis Haynes Jr., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Economics & Finance
The definition of poverty is a social construct. As such, quantitatively measuring poverty is problematic, and creates ineffective poverty-alleviation policy. This thesis examines the historical measure of poverty in the United States, compares U.S. poverty measurements to Great Britain and Canada, and then proposes a new way to measure poverty. Instead of measuring income as the defining factor of poverty, the new poverty measurement suggested eliminates income factors and focuses on a household’s ability to consume in a non-comparative manner. When quantifying a household’s ability to consume, implications arise in economic policy for anti-poverty programs, defining the middle class, minimum wage, and progressive taxation, which are discussed.
Recommended Citation
Ashelman, David, "A New Approach to Measuring Poverty in the United States: A Household's Ability to Consume" (2015). Applied Economics Theses . 11. https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/economics_theses/11
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Poverty Measurement Methods — An Overview
- J. Boltvinik
- Published 1999
Tables from this paper
53 Citations
Multidimensional child poverty: from complex weighting to simple representation, the income and consumption approach to unidimensional poverty measurement, locating the poor: spatially disaggregated poverty maps for sri lanka, measurements and determinants of multifaceted poverty in south africa, transformational growth and poverty: an evolutionary approach for inter-country and inter-temporal comparisons of poverty incidence, the definition of child poverty: a discussion of concepts and measurements, dynamics and definition of poverty in the colombian andes : participative vs . objective approaches, a monte carlo study of some empirical methods to find the optimal poverty line in multidimensional poverty measurement, the impact of social grants on poverty reduction in south africa, poverty measurement and analysis using non-monetary approach : the case of tanzania., 62 references, poverty measurement and alternative indicators of development, the definition and measurement of poverty, on measuring poverty, an econometric approach to the measurement of poverty, descriptions of inequality : the swedish approach to welfare research, poverty and income distribution in latin america: the story of the 1980s, poverty, a study of town life, the conceptual basis of measures of household welfare and their implied survey data requirements, poverty and the welfare state., #ounting the poor: another look at the poverty profile.
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Watching crowds of people hustle along Massachusetts Avenue from her window seat in MIT’s student center, Dominika Ďurovčíková has just one wish.
“What I would really like to do is convince a city to shut down their lights completely, apart from hospitals or whatever else needs them, just for an hour,” she says. “Let people see the Milky Way, or the stars. It influences you. You realize there’s something more than your everyday struggles.”
Even with a lifetime of gazing into the cosmos under her belt — with the last few years spent pursuing a PhD with professors Anna-Christina Eilers and Robert Simcoe at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research — she still believes in the power of looking up at the night sky with the naked eye.
Most of the time, however, she’s using tools a lot more powerful than that. The James Webb Space Telescope has begun providing rich data from bodies at the very edge of the universe, exactly where she wants to be looking. With data from the JSWT and the ground-based Magellan telescopes in Chile, Ďurovčíková is on the hunt for distant quasars — ancient, supermassive black holes that emit intense amounts of light — and the farther away they are, the more information they provide about the very early universe.
“These objects are really, really bright, and that means that they’re really useful for studying the universe from very far away,” she says. “They’re like beacons from the past that you can still see, and they can tell you something about the universe at that stage. It’s almost like archaeology.”
Her recent research has focused on what’s known as the Epoch of Reionization. It’s the period of time when the radiation from quasars, stars, galaxies and other light-emitting bodies were able to penetrate through the dark clouds of hydrogen atoms left over from the Big Bang, and shine their light through space.
“Reionization was a phase transition where all the stuff around galaxies suddenly became transparent,” she says. “Finally, we could see light that was otherwise absorbed by neutral hydrogen.”
One of her goals is to help discover what caused the reionization process to start in the first place. While the astrophysical community has determined a loose time frame, there are many unanswered questions surrounding the Epoch of Reionization, and she hopes her quasar research can help solve some of them.
“The grand hope is that if you know the timing of reionization, that can inform you about the sources that caused it in the first place,” she says. “We’re not quite there, but looking at quasars could be a way to do it.”
Time and distance on a cosmic scale
The quasars that Ďurovčíková has been most interested in are classified as “high-redshift.” Redshift is a measure of how much a wave’s frequency has decreased, and in an astrophysical context, it can be used to determine how long a wave of light has been traveling and how far away its source is, while accounting for the expansion of the universe.
“The higher the redshift, the closer to the beginning of the universe you get,” Ďurovčíková explains.
Research has shown that reionization began roughly 150 million years after the Big Bang, and approximately 850 million years after that, the dark hydrogen clouds that made up the “intergalactic medium,” or IGM, were fully ionized.
For her most recent paper, Ďurovčíková examined a set of 18 quasars whose light began traveling between approximately 770 million and 950 million years after the Big Bang. She and her collaborators, including scientists from four different countries, sorted the quasars into three “bins” based on distance, to compare the amount of neutral hydrogen in the IGM at different epochs. These amounts helped refine the timing of reionization and confirmed that data from quasars are consistent with data from other types of bodies.
“The story we have so far,” Ďurovčíková says, “is that at some point by redshift 5 or 6, the stuff in between galaxies was overall ionized. However, it’s not clear what type of star or what type of galaxy is more responsible for this global phase transition, which affected the whole universe.”
A closely related facet of her research — and one she’s planning on exploring further as she composes her thesis — is on how these quasars came to be in the first place. They’re so old, and so massive, that they challenge the current conceptions of how old the universe is. The light they generate comes from the immense gravitational force they exert on the plasma they absorb, and if they were already large enough to do that billions of years ago, just how long ago did they start forming?
“These black holes seem to be too massive to be grown in the time that their spectra seem to indicate,” she says. “Is there something in our way that’s obscuring the rest of the growth? We’re looking at different methods to measure their lifetime.”
Eyes towards the stars, feet grounded on Earth
In the meantime, Ďurovčíková is also working to encourage the next generation of astrophysicists. She says she was fortunate to have encouraging parents and mentors who showed her academic and career paths she hadn’t even considered, and she co-founded a nonprofit organization called Encouraging Women Across All Borders to do the same for students across the globe.
“In your life, you will see a lot of doors,” she says. “There’s doors that you’ll see are open, and there’s doors you’ll see are closed. The biggest tragedy, though, is that there are so many doors that you don’t even know exist.”
She knows the feeling all too well. Growing up in Slovakia meant the primary options were attending university in either Bratislava, the capital, or Prague, in the neighboring Czech Republic. Her love of math and physics inspired her to enroll in the International Baccalaureate program, however, and it was in that program that she met a teacher, named Eva Žitná, who “planted the seeds” that eventually sent her to Oxford for a four-year master’s program.
“Just being in the IB program environment started to open up these possibilities I had not considered before,” she says. “Both my parents and I started talking to Žitná about how this could be an interesting possibility, and somehow one thing led to another.”
While she takes great pleasure in guiding students along the same path she once took, equally as rewarding for her are the moments when she can see people realizing just how big the universe is. As a co-director of the MIT Astrogazers, she has witnessed many such moments. She remembers handing out eclipse glasses at the Cambridge Science Festival in preparation for last October’s partial solar eclipse, and recalls kids and adults alike with their necks craned upward, sharing the same look of wonder on their faces.
“The reason I care is because we all get caught up in small things in life very easily,” she says. “The traffic sucks. The T isn’t working. Then, you look up at the sky and you realize there’s something much more beautiful and much bigger than all these little things.”
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IMAGES
COMMENTS
This thesis examines the role of poverty in the United States and how it has impacted social and economic systems. It explores how U.S. poverty measurements developed in the 1960s may not be accurately measuring poverty now, and the ways in which these measures could be improved upon. This work also reviews literature on health and educational inequities stemming from socioeconomic class, and ...
of poverty. 1.2 Why measure poverty . Why measure poverty? Perhaps the strongest justification is that provided by Ravallion (1998), who argued that "a credible measure of poverty can be a powerful instrument for focusing the attention of policy makers on the living conditions of the poor." Poverty data can inform policies intended to reduce ...
MULTIDIMENSIONAL POVERTY MEASUREMENT FROM A RELATIVE DEPRIVATION APPROACH: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND MEXICO ... The main purpose of this thesis is to find the best way to measure poverty to inform social policy. ii . iii Dedication and Acknowledgements
Title: Poverty in the United States: An Analysis of its Measurement and the Long-Term Social and Economic Costs Advisor: Juan Carlos Lopez, PhD Degree Date: June 2020. Abstract . This thesis examines the role of poverty in the United States and how it has impacted social and economic systems. It explores how U.S. poverty measurements
At -4.58 average standard deviations, the United State's federal poverty threshold represents approximately the lowest 0.00007% of income distribution. This can be used as a measure of a household's ability to consume at the current poverty thresholds.
The paper provides an overview of definitions, measurements and applications of the concept of multidimensional poverty through a systematic review. The literature is classified according to three research questions: (1) what are the main definitions of multidimensional poverty?; (2) what methods are used to measure multidimensional poverty?; (3) what are the dimensions empirically measured ...
new poverty measure to look at regional differences in living standards within Australia. Geographical Resear ch 50: 411-420. Calvo, C. (2008) V ulnerability to multidimensional poverty: Peru ...
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2019 . 2 . 3 Constructing a Reliable and Valid Measure of Multidimensional Poverty ... Why a real, robust, multidimensional measure of poverty is needed "If measurement is arbitrary and irrational, it is impossible either to .
RQ2 What are the methods proposed to measure the multidimensional poverty concept? Poverty can be declined with respect to several dimensions: income, human rights, food, education, health to cite the most common. However, in empirical contexts it may be dicult to eectively measure all the dimensions as assumed in conceptual frameworks.
The definition of poverty is a social construct. As such, quantitatively measuring poverty is problematic, and creates ineffective poverty-alleviation policy. This thesis examines the historical measure of poverty in the United States, compares U.S. poverty measurements to Great Britain and Canada, and then proposes a new way to measure poverty.
If we look at the income inequality by population groups, the research showed a 16.8%. increase for the poorest 20% of households; a 31.5% increase for the middle 20% of the. households in Alabama; and a 71% increase for the richest 20% of the households in Alabama.
Poverty Measurement Methods — An Overview. J. Boltvinik. Published 1999. Economics. In this paper two aspects of poverty measurement are reviewed. First, some conceptual issues regarding the definition of poverty and its different dimensions are explored. Second, based on this discussion, a three-way classification of poverty measurement ...
Research Institute of Sri Lanka, Lunuwila, 61150, Sri Lanka. Email: [email protected]. Abstract. In spite of the fact that there is some lucidity within the field of poverty with respect to the ...
1. Introduction. Poverty "is one of the defining challenges of the 21st Century facing the world" (Gweshengwe et al., Citation 2020, p. 1).In 2019, about 1.3 billion people in 101 countries were living in poverty (United Nations Development Programme and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, Citation 2019).For this reason, the 2030 Global Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals ...
the understanding and measurement of poverty by engaging with people directly experiencing poverty, practitioners and academics. The longer-term goal is that the research should contribute to more sensitive policy design at national and international level and thereby to the eradication of poverty.
This thesis concludes that poverty measurement should be meaningful at the individual level, and to that aim, the Capabilities Approach provides a richer and more relevant evaluation of what poverty really means. Essays on Poverty and Wellbeing Sian E.M. O'Hare Not for citation without the author's permission iv ...
United States, 2008-2013. by Tobey Kass under the Direction of Professor Michael Robinson. A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Mount Holyoke College in partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors. Economics Department Mount Holyoke College South Hadley, MA 01075. May 2016.
Thesis submitted to the International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation in ... urban poverty measurement. How many urban poor are there and what is the urban poverty rate? Many measurements of urban poverty, including the official measurement of poverty in China are all ...
Over the last ten years or so, interest in multidimensional poverty measurement has been growing steadily. Since the pioneering works of Bourguignon and Chakravarty (2003) and Tsui (2002), a number of approaches have been proposed to measure or analyze deprivation in more than one dimension.
This is to certify that the thesis entitled "Rural Poverty in Mizoram: A Multidimensional Study" by Shri C. Lalnunmawia has been written under my guidance. ... 2.2 Studies on Meaning and Measurement of Poverty 31-33 2.3 Studies on Causes of Poverty 34-38 2.4 Studies on Rural- Urban Poverty 38-41 ...
POVERTY REDUCTION: A REGIONAL COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS AGYEMANG ERIC Bachelor of Arts, University of Ghana, 2010 A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies of the University of Lethbridge ... World Bank income based poverty measures to a more human based poverty measure. This led to the introduction of Human Poverty Indices (HPIs) which ...
On reviewing the poverty measurement in relative literatures, this thesis properly simulates the accessible data in Taiwan. Within the limitation of availability of secondary data, and the convenience of policy promotion, I adopt FCSU method from Citro and Michael, to position the budget for a family with two adults and two children.
As observed in Figure 7, the measurement strategies can be used to assess two different phenomena that are most of the times confused: energy vulnerability and poverty. Moreover, it is possible to distinguish between subjective and objective measurement strategies, on absolute or relative terms.
Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Picower Institute for Learning and Memory; Media Lab; ... Redshift is a measure of how much a wave's frequency has decreased, and in an astrophysical context, it can be used to determine how long a wave of light has been traveling and how far away its source is, while accounting for the expansion ...