Evaluating the Success of President Johnson’s War on Poverty: Revisiting the Historical Record Using an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure

Richard Burkhauser, Kevin Corinth, James Elwell and Jeff Larrimore

No 26532, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We evaluate progress in President Johnson's War on Poverty relative to the 20 percent baseline poverty rate he established for 1963. No existing poverty measure fully captures poverty reductions based on these standards. We fill this gap by developing an absolute Full-income Poverty Measure (FPM) whose thresholds are established to obtain this same 20 percent official poverty rate in 1963 while using a fuller measure of income and updating thresholds each year only for inflation. While the official poverty rate fell from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 10.5 percent in 2019, our absolute FPM rate fell from 19.5 to 1.6 percent. This reflects increases in full income throughout the distribution, with real median income more than doubling between 1963 and 2019, together with the expansion of government transfers and tax benefits not fully captured by the official measure. It is also broadly consistent with the expectations of President Johnson and his Council of Economic Advisers, including Robert Lampman who predicted in 1971 that poverty based on these absolute standards would be eliminated by 1980. However, we also show that reductions in relative poverty since 1963 have been far more modest, falling from 19.5 to 16.0 percent in 2019.

JEL-codes: D31 H24 I32 J3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
Note: LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published as Burkhauser, Richard V., Kevin Corinth, James Elwell, and Jeff Larrimore. 2024. “Evaluating the Success of the War on Poverty Since 1963 Using an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure” Journal of Political Economy, Vol 132 (1): 1-47.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26532.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26532

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26532

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().