$2 a day

Why does the NYT link internally for things like “Social Security” but not to the studies it is quoting?

Links are automatically generated from a dictionary of links.

On the study, I am amazed that it’s actually possible to survive on $2 a day in the US – simply from the point of view of getting enough calories and protein to keep yourself alive.

“Surprisingly difficult, suggestions welcome”

I remember reading some things a number of years ago by this person on that general area (research interests seem relevant)

http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/politics/people/awaddan

Although it’s more on the policy side than the economics.
I can’t say I’m too surprised by the £2 figure, wasn’t Gina Rinehart lobbying for something similar in Australia? And I can’t imagine life on welfare in any part of the south of Britain being much more lavish. (What is it £10 a day?) I think it’s to grasp how broke some people are at the minute

My brother was offered a job in 1994, in the midlands of the UK, for 1 pound an hour. He was living in Devon, and was expected to move across the country for it. I think he even had to scrabble to find some excuse not to, in order to avoid getting into trouble with social security (which I recall was 59 pounds an hour, 20% more than his wage at the job would have been). I guess a pound an hour in the UK in 1994 would be about 2.50 now (can’t be bothered with inflation calculations). So about $3 an hour?

@6,7: I can’t get your numbers to make sense. Maybe you meant to say 59 pounds a week? (But that would be ~50% more than the wage, unless it was a really long hours job.)

9: It would be difficult to plan for alleviating poverty otherwise, I’d think.

Surely you need both? If you’ve got A, who’s making $10 and getting another $60 in benefits, his poverty doesn’t need alleviating as much as B, who is making $25 and getting nothing in benefits. But if you measure pre-benefits, A looks much worse off than B.

I think it was probably intended as a response to my disbelief that anyone could physically survive in the US on $2 a day, by pointing out that they are actually getting some other stuff that isn’t counted.

@CB #13 – that is one of the big issues with poverty stats in places like sub-Saharan Africa. There are subsistance farmers living on $2 a day who can grow their own food and live in houses they made themselves from local forest materials et. al. , none of which gets counted in the $2 per day cash economy. Then there are urban slum-dwellers living on $2 per day (or less) who really have no resources other than that $2 per day. The quality of life difference between the two can be substantial.

As the other commentators have noticed, when you see the $2 a day income figure, or something similar, it is just capturing people who don’t live in the cash/ credit economy. For the U.S., this is news but the news is that there is an increasing amount of people who live by barter/ subsistence. This is not how the figure its usually spun.

Yeah, these people are poor, but its not like living on $2 a day in Manhattan.

Well, I have a few citations that might be appropriate that I looked at when researching for an article on whether there is any real world evidence for the culture of dependency so beloved by the American right.

I’m not sure if you were only looking for publicly accessible pieces but what I have follows:

The most appropriate is probably:

The State of the Social Safety Net in the Post-Welfare Reform Era [with Comments and
Discussion]Author(s): MARIANNE P. BITLER, HILARY W. HOYNES, CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, BRUCE D.MEYERSource: Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, (FALL 2010), pp. 71-147
From the abstract:”We find that use of food stamps and noncash safety net program participation have become signif- icantly more responsive to the economic cycle after welfare reform, rising more when unemployment increases. By contrast, we find no evidence that cash wel- fare for families with children is more responsive, and some evidence that it might be less so. We find some evidence that poverty increases more with increases in the unemployment rate after reform, and none that it increases less. We find no significant effects of reform on the cyclical responsiveness of food consumption, food insecurity, health insurance, household crowding, or health.”

Evaluating Welfare Reform in the United StatesAuthor(s): Rebecca M. Blank Source: Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 2002), pp. 1105-1166

The Anthropology of Welfare “Reform”: New Perspectives on U.S. Urban Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era
Author(s): Sandra Morgen and Jeff Maskovsky
Source: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 32 (2003), pp. 315-338
(I have to recommend something that suggests it is deconstructing the hegemonic discourse)

Welfare Transitions in the 1990s: The Economy, Welfare Policy, and the EITCAuthor(s): Jeffrey GroggerSource: Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 671-695

Hopefully this is on topic and will save you (or some poor grad student) some time slogging through J-stor.

The argument for welfare reform was that there were people getting cash payments who could and would find work, and be better off, if they were cut off, and that there would be no significant hardship because all of them could find work if they wanted to. Whether or not hardship increased under the same definition as before seems like a perfectly good measure to me. But I don’t need to tell you that.

On the study, I am amazed that it’s actually possible to survive on $2 a day in the US – simply from the point of view of getting enough calories and protein to keep yourself alive.

In rural counties around here, food stamps (SNAP, WIC) have been steadily replacing cash resources. We’ve been doing a fair job in this state at shaming and intimidating state politicians out of reducing access to or benefits from food stamps, in part because there are whole counties where over half the population relies on them. Thankfully “food for poor families” is enduringly popular here, at least. But the program needs to be expanded dramatically in order to provide what it aims to.

It’s buried in the brief, but it looks like my local area’s microcosm is comparable to the national scenario: As figure 1 demonstrates, the number of households in extreme poverty shot up considerably between late 2008 and early 2011 when only cash income is considered. In contrast, when SNAP benefits are considered as equivalent to cash, the prevalence of extreme poverty remained virtually unchanged during the period after ARRA.

Worth noting the other big increase in SNAP benefits happened when welfare was butchered in the 90’s. The replacement of generalized benefits with food benefits is a decades-long trend.

As for rent, the other necessity, there’s a lot we tried to infer from interviewing the migrant student population. There are a lot of people living in their friend’s rented trailers, and a lot of people living in probably-condemnation-grade trailers that a farm owner planted in a corner of a lot to make some cash playing landlord. A few folks are apparently using food stamps to defray the cost of rent and other necessities, sometimes getting half the face value of the stamps in doing so. I don’t mean outright fraud, just fuzzy social living. You might live rent-free in a friend’s trailer and contribute to the groceries, without keeping track of whose food is whose. And there are a number of people who move around multiple times per year to find a new very low rent place willing to take a chance on them. (Generally you pay some upfront cost, try to get your Section 8 subsidy straightened out, fail to do so, make rent for a few months off whatever cash work you can get and move whenever you exhaust your landlord’s patience.)

Still, I remain about as mystified as you. How in the hell do people survive this level of awfulness? …

There is some pretty extreme poverty in the U.S. Maybe, not quite sub-Saharan Africa poor, but certainly poorer than anywhere in Western Europe. In many rural areas scattered across the country, subsistence farming (and drug abuse) keeps alive a hidden poverty that’s pretty intense. Beasts of the Southern Wild may be a more truthful portrayal than any abstract statistics.

The Yazoo delta of Mississippi has some of the poorest people anywhere in the so-called developed world, and government aid administered by a state government only Scrooge could love, is of little help.

But, I wonder just how many people, even in big cities, because of deliberately faulty bureaucratic design, end up living on $2/day. It is all fine and dandy to pontificate about how poverty should be measured after government aid programs, but from my personal experience as a volunteer trying to get help for some seriously jeopardized people, getting any aid at all can be a major, possibly insurmountable problem, for people, who are a bit adled by mental illness or drug abuse or just the stress of extreme poverty or abandonment by family, or who simply lack proof of residence or a mailing address.

People do fall out of the economy’s structure, and, given that government policy is to maintain a structure that has some room for, at most, only about 90% of the population, trying to help the 5% or so, for whom there’s no place, and never conceivably will be a place, is a hopeless task. Even if they manage to get help, thanks to the collaboration between neo-liberals and conservatives, that help comes with an expiration date, after which help becomes that much more difficult to obtain.

Anyway, that’s my long-winded way of saying that that $2/day figure doesn’t strike me as implausible, though, from a statistical analysis standpoint, it also represents the ragged edge of measurable.

Re the OP — the one-in-50-children living in households whose income is less than 2$/day per person (even counting food stamps as cash). At least where I live, a smallish can of Coke in a convenience store costs more than $1. Because as ajay indicates upthread, you can’t physically survive in many or most parts of the US on $2/day, those families will be having to eat at soup kitchens, feeding centers, etc., and/or relying on people giving them money (which, as gifts, presumably are not counted as income in the relevant studies) and/or on non-cash expedients (e.g. barter, growing some food) as suggested above. (Otherwise the children in these families would not be simply hungry; they would be unable to survive at all.)

Maybe not as good as some of the suggestions already made, but there are a few EPI publications which might be useful:

Max Sawicky’s “The End of Welfare? Consequences of Federal Devolution for the Nation”
http://www.epi.org/publication/books_endofwelfare/

Bernstein and Chapman’s report “Falling Through the Safety Net”
http://www.epi.org/publication/issuebriefs_ib191/

H. Boushey on transition to work
http://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_123/
http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/briefingpapers_hardships

Mishel and Shmitt
http://www.epi.org/publication/epi_virlib_briefingpapers_1995_cuttingw/

Bernstein
http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/ib116

As another indication that some people in the US are very, very poor, since 1990 the life expectancy of white women without a high school diploma has decreased five years. This decline rivals the catastrophic seven-year drop for Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
life-expectancy-for-less-educated-whites-in-us-is-shrinking
Curiously enough, the life expectancy of black women without a high school diploma has not decreased and now matches white women. Perhaps 73-74 years represents a new First World minimum standard.

CBPP has a bunch of stuff on welfare reform:

http://www.cbpp.org/research/index.cfm?fa=topic&id=42

MDRC has done an enormous amount of research on welfare reform. See: http://www.mdrc.org/subarea_index_8.html

And: http://www.mdrc.org/project_8_11.html

Unfortunately Public/Private Ventures went out of business this summer. I think they had also done some work on welfare reform (more on low-wage workers generally) but I can’t find their archives and am not at the office at the moment, so can’t check my own.

Mathmatica Policy Research has a large number of papers on welfare reform.
http://www.mathematica-mpr.com

Regarding the $2/day figure, it bears noting that there is in some cases a VERY large gap between policy and practice. In my state, reaching a welfare caseworker on the phone is near-impossible — you often have to call 15-20 times, their voicemail is often full or not set up, and they often don’t return calls.

Why this matters is that the system *also* requires an enormous (and ongoing) level of proof — pay stubs, doctor’s appointment slips, hourly wage records, etc. etc. If you are two working adults and you need childcare for your children, but one of you works in a hotel and the other in a restaurant, there may come a week when one of you is changing jobs and the other has his hours cut because it is a slow time.

As a result, you may have your child-care benefit cut because one spouse is “not working” and therefore must obviously be available to stay home with the kids. This may happen on a Thursday afternoon heading into a holiday weekend, meaning that you then have to scramble to figure out some kind of childcare for the following week, meantime asking your brand-new boss for time off so you can go in and argue with the case worker in person (due to aforementioned phone issues) to try to get the childcare benefit reinstated.

In the meantime you have a cash crunch and may not be able to afford food — or the time it takes to identify a food bank, confirm its hours of operation, travel there, and stand in line.

Alternatively, the system may simply fail to work — the transfer of your transportation benefit into your account may not happen, and it may take you 5-7 days to straighten it out. In the meantime, of course, you still have to get to work, so then you are spending your scarce cash money on tokens and not on food.

All of which is to say: It is completely plausible to me that there are people whose lives are sufficiently marginal that they regularly experience bouts or even long periods of exceptionally impoverished life.

Most of the discussion in this thread is on TANF, or Temporary Aid to Needy Families, but it bears noting that there are single adults with no children who are poor too. In my state, the governor this summer abolished General Assistance, aka cash for non-parents. This exceptionally modest $200/month payment was often used to tide people over during the several-years-long process of becoming eligible for federal Social Security Disability Income (SSDI).

When the payment was being abolished, welfare caseworkers were threatened with firing if they dared to answer distraught clients’ inquiries by suggesting they talk to their elected officials.

Most poor pople in the US aren’t in these dire straits, but we’re a country of 310 million people. Even a tiny fraction ends up being a lot of individual human beings.

Purple I think has it back to front. The $2 a day of the world bank was not a “have $2 cash extra in the pocket on top of having everything for free off the land”.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the gains from garbage bins, food courts, begging, prostitution, bashing someone after they make a withdrawal from an ATM are simply not there.

However, the first world has worked hard to ensure that there are rewards from joining the military. That is the nature of “aid”.

Lets remember the poor are more appropriately called the “undeserving poor” as the term is used by the well-off right amongst whom are included many who have never done an honest days work in their lives. And here be especially careful. Undeserving means not that they don’t deserve to be poor but that they don’t deserve our sympathy or assistance. No they do deserve to be poor. They made that choice so let’s leave them to it.

But these undeserving poor are guilty of so much more than simple poverty. No. If you listen to the right, they’re also the culprits behind the GFC. Yes. They conspired to hoodwink the financial community and that is the cause, the sole cause of the global world’s problems. Maybe the poor are also to blame for AGW and cancer?

I’ve got an article in press that enumerates the distinct and deep methodological problems in trying to evaluate the effects of welfare reform. Can’t seem to locate an e-mail, but drop me a note and I’ll send along a pre-print version.

“Most people living on 2$ a day in poor countries are living off the land, often land they own or in some type of commons, i.e squatters area. It is in no way comparable to living in the US for $2 a day, where you have to buy everything.”

No – that is not true. SOME people living on $2 a day in poor countries do have significant subsistance options from farming et al. However, there are also plenty of very poor people, perhaps the majority, living on $2 or less a day in urban slums that do not have access to land or any other subsistance options (unless you count picking through garbage piles), and must buy everything. They live in massive slums and barrios, on hillsides that collapse in floods, etc etc.

The big issue with subsistance vs non-subsistance is that there are very different solutions – for a community that does have substiantial subsistance resources, their well-being is largely dependant on the maintenance of resources of the commons – forests, fisheries, cropland, clean water, etc. However, many development strategies focus exclusively on trying to increase cash income, so that the forest on which communities depend for subsistance harvests become “natural resources” to be exploited through timber harvest, subsistance fisheries are replaced by industrial fisheries, subsitance farming replaced by cash-crops, etc.

“Indeed, if worse comes to worse many are even able to enlist. Those skills learned often of use in entrepreneurial criminal activity when they have finished their service.”

I am not sure if that has changed recently, but since the 1990s, the US military largely rejected recruits with any criminal or juvenile history. The transformation of the military into a professional, volunteer army also brought with it an end to the notion that it was an alternative to doing time. Which is a shame in some ways, because, cannon-fodder issues aside, it was once a way for kids to get out of a bad situation.

http://www.issuelab.org/organizations/publicprivate_ventures

Public/Private Ventures archives.

This is a good article about what it is like to live on less than $2 a day, or thereabouts, in the United States:

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2012/09/meanwhile-in-oklahoma.html