Journal Article Earnings Capacity and its Utilization Get access Irwin Garfinkel, Irwin Garfinkel University of Wisconsin-Madison Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Robert Haveman Robert Haveman University of Wisconsin-Madison Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 92, Issue 3, August 1978, Pages 375–385, https://doi.org/10.2307/1883149 Published: 01 August 1978

The Family Support Act of 1988 called for a scientific review of the official U.S. measure of poverty, reflecting a general dissatisfaction with the current measure, which has not been revised since the mid-1960's. A National Research Council (NRC) Panel of the National Academy of Sciences undertook that review and called for a new approach to poverty measurement.' The NRC Panel criticized the current Census Bureau methodology because the current measure of poverty has failed to reflect important economic trends or policies aimed to alleviate the condition it attempts to measure, economic poverty. This paper presents estimates of how the Panel's recommendations would alter the picture of the number and composition of the poor in the United States over the time period from 1979 to 1994, focusing on trends in poverty among children and the elderly. The current official series shows that the relative gap in poverty rates between children and the elderly has grown since 1979. We present evidence that the poverty gap between children and the elderly is narrowing, not widening, when the Panel's measure of family resources is employed.