Paul Krugman: Economic Opportunity Has Collapsed, So Poverty Endures

I wanted to say something about the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.

By 1980 or so, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, there was widespread consensus that it had failed. But, as the C.B.P.P. also concluded in an online article earlier this month, that doesn't stand up once you do the numbers right: poverty measures that take into account government aid - aid of the kind provided by the war on poverty! - do show a significant decline since the 1960s.

There's more sheer misery in America than there should be, but less than there was. Even so, progress against poverty has obviously been disappointing. But why? At this point in the argument, it's important to realize that American conservatives are stuck with a fossil narrative - a story about persistent poverty that may have had something to it three decades ago, but is all wrong now.