Poverty post raises 'affordability' issue

On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, a wealth manager named Michael Green published a Substack post arguing that a $140,000 income is the new poverty level for a family of four in America, where the official poverty line is $32,150.

- MICHAEL HILTZIK

A $140,000 income is the new poverty level for a family of four, one post says. Above, San Francisco shoppers.

(DAVID PAUL MORRIS Bloomberg)

The post promptly went viral.

One would hope that economic commentators coast-to-coast mentioned Green as their “person I'm most thankful for” at their family gatherings that week, because he gave them something to masticate ever since. On the spectrum from left to right, countless pundits have rerun Green's numbers to deride or validate his argument.

“The whole thing doesn't pass the smell test,” asserted centrist economist Noah Smith in a very lengthy rebuttal. On the other side, Tom Levenson, who teaches science writing at MIT, gave us a Bluesky thread in which he noted that “$140,000 in many urban areas in the US is a family income that is at least precarious, and at worst, one or two missed paychecks from having to make rent or food choice.”

Green has asserted that the response to his post has been “massively favorable.” That isn't my impression, but leave it aside.

Here's my quick take: Green made a category error (and a rhetorical blunder) by hanging his argument on the concept of “poverty”; that's the claim that most of his critics focus on. His real argument, however, concerns the concept of affordability. Indeed, in a followup post he redefined his argument as applying to “the hidden precarity for many American families.”

We can stipulate that making $140,000 a poverty standard is absurd. Even in a high-cost economy such as California's, millions of families live comfortable lives on much less. (The median household income in Los Angeles County - meaning half of all households earn less and half earn more - is about $86,500.)