Doomerism: And the definition of “poverty”
Doomerists loved this claim of Michael Green that you need around $147,000 per year in income to not live in “poverty”!
“But what if it were really $140,000? Late last month, the investor and Substack writer Michael Green advanced this attention-grabbing claim, which implies that a majority of Americans are living in poverty today.” ….
“Under modest examination, Green’s empirical claims fall apart. But they bespeak a troubling trend among the commentariat—and even some scholars—of exaggerating the extent of poverty in America. Social-justice discourse, whether about environmentalism, racism, sexism, or poverty, has a tendency to advance maximalist claims as a sign of maximal concern. The intention is usually to express solidarity with the oppressed. But collapsing the distinction between the actual poor and the lower-middle class obscures more than it helps. And talking about poverty as intractable or unfixable is a kind of demotivational speaking.”