Evaluating the Success of the War on Poverty since 1963 Using an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure (Richard V. Burkhauser, Kevin Corinth, James Elwell, and Jeff Larrimore, Journal of Political Economy)
We evaluate progress in the War on Poverty as President Lyndon B. Johnson defined it, which established a 20% baseline poverty rate and adopted an absolute standard. While the official poverty rate fell from 19.5% in 1963 to 10.5% in 2019, our absolute full-income poverty measure—which uses a fuller income measure and updates thresholds only for inflation—fell from 19.5% to 1.6%.