Collective Action includes political, economic, sociological, and other experts who do not

themselves live in poverty and have designed many of the programs meant to alleviate poverty.
This raises the question as to whether these experts have different interests or are accurate and
sincere when it comes to understanding poverty and its consequences. Politicians and the
general public hold inaccurate stereotypes of the poor as unthinking, unambitious, irresponsible,
and potentially dangerous social misfits, according to Leslie Dunbar.

A white West Virginian, Leslie Dunbar did not have the fame of civil-rights leaders like Dr. King,
but he managed to combine liberalism with racial equality by pushing the Southern Regional
Council, an Atlanta civic and business organization that is politically moderate and biracial, to
be more aggressive in its civil rights campaign. The Southern Oral History Program Collection at
the University of North Carolina used Mr. Dunbar's interview from 1978 as a guide to what they
hoped would be a great historical mind-shift (Sulivan D.,2013).

There is still a long way to go before women gain in terms of power, wealth, and opportunity,
and this is mirrored in the United States as well. Accordingly, official poverty levels in the
United States are derived from a strict definition of poverty. For instance, in 2012, the
government considered a family of four with a household income of less than $23,283 poor.
Thus, 46 million people in the United States lived in poverty, or approximately one in seven
citizens. In 2012, the poverty rate was 15 percent, and almost twice as many people were poor as
in 1970. As the median family income has increased faster than the poverty cutoff, the gap
between the poor and the nonpoor has been growing. In 1960, the poverty cutoff income was 54
percent of the median household income, but it has risen to 46 percent.
There are larger proportions of African American and Hispanic
Americans in poverty than Whites. However, there are greater
numbers of Whites in poverty, according to John Creamer et al, in
Poverty in the United States 2021. what are the processes that
might explain poverty for these different communities regionally?
How do the processes that worsen poverty explain contexts in
different countries? The SPM results in higher estimates of poverty than
the OPM for most population groups except those living in nonmetropolitan
counties and children (Fox, 2020; Jensen & Ely, 2017).1 The lower rates of
SPM poverty for nonmetropolitan counties are attributable to the geographic
adjustment within the measure (Pacas & Rothwell, 2020). This adjustment,
which is based on gross median rent, suggests that once we consider cost of
living, nonmetropolitan poverty is lower than metropolitan—the opposite of
what the OPM, and a large body of historical literature would suggest.
Unsurprisingly, there are researchers who have critiqued this approach,
arguing that solely adjusting for median rent may be inappropriate because it
overlooks other aspects of cost of living which may vary inversely with
median rent, key among these being the assumed higher costs of
transportation found in nonmetropolitan areas (Mueller et al., 2022).

Poverty measurement in the United States remains an issue of concern for

applied social scientists, policy makers, and the public. The Official Poverty
Measure (OPM) of the United States is often critiqued on several grounds.
These critiques include the measure’s (1) lack of construct validity, meaning
the measure does not capture what it purports to capture; (2) its low bar for
what constitutes poverty, meaning that there are many above the OPM
threshold struggling to make ends meet; (3) that it only counts pre-tax wages,
other sources of cash income, and cash-based government transfers as
income; and (4) that it does not adjust for cost of living (Brady, To remedy

these discrepancies, in the mid-1990s, a National Academy of Sciences panel

developed a set of recommendations that were ultimately used by the US
Census Bureau to create the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM; Hutto et
al., 2011; Iceland, 2005; Short, 2011; Warren et al., 2020). The SPM, as
detailed below, aimed to remedy many of the methodological and conceptual
concerns raised over time about the OPM. One key improvement is that the
SPM adjusts for cost of living across the United States. However, the validity
of the adopted adjustment remains in question (Mueller et al., n.d.).