Understanding the levels and trends in deep and extreme poverty in the United States is of great interest to both policymakers and researchers. Social safety net programs are designed in part to prevent such extreme deprivation, and evidence that individuals and families slip through the cracks informs debates on how to improve social policy.
To measure deep and extreme poverty, Brady and Parolin (in an article published in this issue of Demography) use data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) to estimate the fraction of individuals in the United States that live in households with income below 20% of median income (about $7,300 in 2016), which they call deep poverty, and below 10% (about $3,600 in 2016), which they call extreme poverty. They estimated that 5.2 to 7.2 million Americans (1.6% and 2.2%) were in deep poverty and 2.6 to 3.7 million (0.8% and 1.2%) were in...
