PSYC 5571 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Poverty Threshold
Document Summary
Median income in 2014 for an elderly person was ,000. As people age, income decreases: not surprising, people stop working. When couples turn into singles, the husband is more likely to have died: if you lose the man and the man typically makes more, your income goes down a lot. Lower quintile elderly depend so much more on social security. Over time, the elderly have been relying more and more on earnings, pretty flat on. Poverty line is a good measure of poverty, although it isn"t the most sophisticated measure and doesn"t take into account that different places have different costs of living. Poverty among the elderly used to be a huge problem: over half used to be in poverty they think. 1960 our poverty measures were invented- the first real number was 1/3 of the elderly in poverty. In order to measure poverty, need to know 2 things: what is the poverty threshold, income.
