Looking at the latest statistics on U.S. poverty, this piece discusses what critics characterize as the vast failures of government programs to change the basic poverty rate. The author references Martha Bailey and Sheldon Danziger’s [*Legacies of the War on Poverty*](https://www.russellsage.org/publications/legacies-war-poverty) in describing better ways to measure poverty and to interpret official poverty statistics.

More about Bailey and Danziger’s book cited in Nation story on interpreting the new Census data on poverty >