This story from the New York Times efficiently lays out this startlingly distressing news “Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade’“. True, it doesn’t have much to do with content of the two courses I’m teaching, though we have been talking about the economics of inequality in our Latin America seminar.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, over 15 per cent of the population lives in poverty — and the median income level has dropped to its 1996 value. The culprit, of course, is unemployment.

The US has furthermore historically used a poverty line that is incredibly conservative by international standards — that is, many people that would be counted as poor in other rich industrial democracies have incomes higher than the stingy US poverty line. In that sense, it’s much worse than 15 per cent. Read this summary of a recent OECD report entitled Growing Unequal to see how US poverty stacks up against that observed in other OECD economies. If poverty is measured as one half of median household income (as the OECD study does), only Turkey and Mexico have higher poverty rates than the US. And that was before this recent bad news from the Census Bureau.