Nobody dreams of falling into poverty in the future. But for too many, poverty is a doom-filled nightmare that all too often comes true. To help people who don't have a realistic sense of just how financially vulnerable they are, sociologists Thomas Hirschl and Mark Rank of Cornell and Washington University respectively, have come up with the poverty probability calculator.
As the Washington Post reports, the calculator predicts the probability of falling into poverty based on age, education, race and marital status for five, 10 and 15 years into the future. The results are pretty sobering. For the more numerically inclined, Hirschl and Rank’s findings offer some interesting results.
Using more than 40 years of income data for 5,000 households and based on dozens of interviews conducted for their book Chasing the American Dream, the sociologists were able to break down their poverty calculator into four criteria that Hirschl notes “are the strongest predictors of economic distress.” Poverty is defined according to the official poverty level, with "near poverty" being income that’s up to 50 percent above that level.
[For more of this story, written by Robin Scher, go to http://www.alternet.org/econom...-are-falling-poverty]
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