Joe Strummer, “One More Time” from the album Sandinista (The Clash 1980)
Almost immediately upon convening under Mayor Bloomberg’s direction, The Center for Economic Opportunity, an initiative representing a decisive coming together of government agencies and partners around the complex problems associated with helping people to to pull themselves out of poverty, declared the very same thing as Joe Strummer in 1980 (see above).
That is, that the poverty measures themselves tell us very little about the lives of the the poor, and how programs that are designed to help them, actually affect them, if at all.
Click here to read CEO’s working paper on the poverty measure.