Presidential address: How to improve poverty measurement in the United States

This paper discusses the reasons why the current official U.S. poverty measure is outdated and nonresponsive to many anti‐poverty initiatives. A variety of efforts to update and improve the statistic have failed, for political, technical, and institutional reasons. Meanwhile, the European Union is taking a very different approach to poverty measurement. The paper ends with four recommended steps that would allow the U.S. to improve its measurement of poverty and economic need.