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Hardship in America: The Real Story of Working Families. By Heather Boushey, Chauna Brocht and Bethney Gundersen, and Jared Bernstein. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2001.114 pp. $12.95. ISBN 0-944-82695-4.
The most widely cited and influential measures of economic deprivation in the United States are the U.S. Census Bureau poverty thresholds. But a wide range of researchers have long argued the national poverty line is a poor indicator of whether, and to what extent, Americans experience deprivation.
Critics of the official poverty line measures have included a growing group of researchers who have constructed measures of "basic needs" or "basic family budget" thresholds. These are detailed examinations that report, for a range of specific communities, what it actually takes to purchase a decent living standard in terms of food sufficiency, housing, transportation, and childcare. These studies have become increasingly important in the policy arena, particularly as an outgrowth of the living wage movement that has spread throughout the U.S. since the mid-1990s, because they provide benchmarks as to what would constitute a living wage in given communities.
In Hardship in America, Heather Boushey, Chauna Brocht, Bethney Gunderson and Jared Bernstein (BBGB) have produced a highly useful work that advances this basic needs framework. The authors make four important contributions. First, they develop a coherent approach to establishing basic family budget thresholds; second, they generate detailed calculations of these thresholds for six family types in more than 400 separate communities; third, they present a new approach toward measuring the level of economic hardship faced by low-income families; and finally, they offer a new perspective on the problems of economic deprivation in the U.S.
Given these important contributions, one still needs to exercise caution not to impose on this small book a burden it cannot adequately carry. In particular, some living wage advocates have drawn upon calculations in this book and similar studies as the sole basis on which to set living wage rates for their communities. A series of difficult problems can result from proceeding in this manner, and these problems need to be addressed carefully.
The authors state that "basic family budgets measure the income a family requires to afford basic needs for a safe and decent standard of living [7]." They are attempting...