> The $1 is measured in international dollars. This means it buys the same amount of goods and services in any country as a US dollar does in the United States. It is often used alongside purchasing power parity (PPP) data. The “time” refers to a day of life for anyone, at any age and in any circumstance — not just the hours worked by someone with a job.

So IIUC this "average poverty" includes people living off social welfare? Otherwise, if it only included the working population, wouldn't we have

average poverty ≝ average yearly income¹ / year

and so it should be proportional to the average yearly income¹ metric mentioned in the article?

¹) Adjusted for purchasing power.

it feels counterintuitive to me that US "average poverty" dropped more than 50 percent in covid, while european stayed absolutely untouched.

I felt the same. But I think the reason is similar to how your fuel economy is absolutely destroyed by sitting still. When you average in a speed of zero the calculation goes haywire.

People in the US are so close to financial disaster that in order to avert disaster the US had to heavily subsidize those out of work. Many people got healthcare and unemployment benefits that would not have been otherwise available. This meant money for zero hours of work. When you average in $1/0 hours it does crazy things to the graph.

The reality is: During Covid the US rapidly adopted similar safety nets to EU countries and, in effect, aligned with their levels of poverty. Once the emergency measures ended we snapped back to our previous, precarious, poverty level.

Just my theory.

How much of that could be the lack of real social nets in the US compared to Europe?

In addition, anecdotally, everyone I know in the EU that had a job pre covid has a job today. I can't say the same thing about folks in the US.

That's not my experience in Finland. The unemployment rate passed 10% a few months ago. Youth unemployment is now over 20%.

The curious data point is that on this graph poverty seems to have strongly reduced during covid. Less poor.

Huge amounts of cash were given to many Americans during Covid.

Why does this surprise you? There were large, direct transfers to initially children, then everyone. This was the largest and most effective American anti-poverty program of all time.

Politicians are judged by these metrics, so they all get gamed.

They are not, sadly. Or rather, many voters care about many different things and the resulting metric is not that sensible.

It is not counterintuitive at all, unless you misunderstand the income levels of the poor. Sending everyone $1400 massively increased the income of the poorest Americans.

The metric in question measures how much time it takes to get $1 in income. When, given a fixed period of time, your income increases (in this case because the government started paying you more than your employer did), the time to get $1 goes down.

Incorrect.

https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/federal-tax-credits-i...

Sterck's article from The Conversation referenced in this article: https://theconversation.com/measuring-poverty-on-a-spectrum-...

This metric makes a lot of intuitive sense and reflects the consumer sentiment I hear from neighbors. "Working more for less" isn't a new complaint, but something that measures that is interesting.

I would be very interested to find out how those stats are related to things like, GINI or old pre-GDP economic measures of raw production.

It is not intuitive at all to me. From the article, I can see that there's some sort of penalty by having more billionaires in the country, and that somehow leads to "the time needed to earn $1 is 63 minutes in the US", which doesn't really line up with the fact that minimum wage per hour ranges from $7-$18 depending on the state.

The "old" way was to measure median net PPP per capita, which makes more sense to me:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Annual_m...

This time is a global average, including non working people or part time people.

This seems like a quite nice way to measure poverty.

I believe this is the paper https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A501e8eb8-3ce7-4ac0-9d09-...

Great intro that quickly explains the reasoning for the proposed new measure:

> Virtually everyone would agree that a 20-meter tree is twice as tall as a 10-meter tree. Conversely, everyone would agree that the 10-meter tree is twice as short as the 20-meter tree. There is no threshold or “shortness line” above or under which these relationships cease to hold: a 5-meter tree is twice as short as a 10-meter tree, a 1-meter tree is twice as short as a 2-meter tree, and so on. This reasoning remains valid when considering other multiples: a 1-meter tree is three times shorter than a 3-meter tree. To be sure, when assessing the height of a single tree, different people may disagree whether it is short or tall, as their judgment will depend on the benchmark they use for their assessment. However, when comparing two different trees, virtually everyone would make similar cardinal comparisons. In mathematical terms, shortness is the reciprocal of tallness. [...] In this paper, I apply the same logic to define a new poverty measure

Can you elaborate the obvious nonsense?

They compared purchasing power for an actual apples to apples comparison. Did you even read the article, or just look at the graph without context?

Some people have a gut reaction to take any bad news about America as slander or manipulated science; choosing to reject the truth as their dear leader tells them to.

A novel way of measuring poverty is something you should be really skeptical of!