A Young Lady's Diary, and the Problems of the Poverty Rate

My diary subject, Sallie McNeill, turned out to be a short, tedious and ultimately tragic story. Poor thing wrote about the normal day-to-day of a wealthy slave-owning family in south Texas before, during, and just after the Civil War. The war didn't affect her much, although her brothers were on coastal defense (they both outlived her, actually). In choosing not to get married, Sallie opted for a very lonely and purposeless life of sewing, reading and complaining about herself and everyone else. Because of her gender, her options outside of marriage were very small, and she seemed to not have the energy to pursue anything on her own. She died in her early twenties in 1867, probably from yellow fever, having never lived anywhere near to her potential. But her musings do give us some idea of what plantation life was like back then, although her attitudes toward the slaves did make me cringe. She saw them as ignorant, inferior, child-like creatures who needed white folks to "take care of" them. Sallie's is a little window onto daily life in the antebellum South.

Today, I'm working on the last half of a short treatise on the problems with the official poverty rate, published by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Now, you can imagine what position the author takes, but you'd be wrong to overgeneralize that he doesn't think poverty exists or something. He actually has a pretty good statistical analysis argument that the official poverty rate does not accurately reflect material deprivation in America anymore. It was established in the early 1960s based entirely on reported income, and it doesn't seem to reflect some serious changes in consumption patterns since then that make the official rate way out of kilter with other indications of how folks are doing, like the unemployment rate, education level, expenditure vs. income, net wealth, noncash public assistance, etc. It actually looks like from his viewpoint, that despite the seeming stagnation of living standards according to the official poverty rate, folks at the lower end of the income scale are actually doing better than they ever have, and it looks to me like this may largely be due to public assistance they've received. So the official poverty rate says that government antipoverty programs are not helping, but all other indicators say that they probably are. Looks like the author may be right, and we may need a new measure for the poverty rate so we know how to form policy to help folks.

This coming week, I'm shifting over to a guide to military life for families and antique furniture from eastern Massachusetts. Should be an interesting week.....