---
title: "Who’s poor in America? 50 years into the ‘War on Poverty,’ a data portrait"
description: "The War on Poverty was arguably the most ambitious domestic policy initiative since the Great Depression. But the overall effectiveness of the War on Poverty remains hotly debated."
date: "2014-01-13"
authors:
  - name: "Drew DeSilver"
    job_title: "Senior Writer/Editor"
    link: "https://www.pewresearch.org/staff/drew-desilver/"
url: "https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/01/13/whos-poor-in-america-50-years-into-the-war-on-poverty-a-data-portrait/"
categories:
  - "Economic Inequality"
  - "Poverty"
---

# Who’s poor in America? 50 years into the ‘War on Poverty,’ a data portrait

[![](https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2014/01/LBJ_191.png?w=640)](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/01/13/whos-poor-in-america-50-years-into-the-war-on-poverty-a-data-portrait/lbj_191-png/)
*President Lyndon Johnson’s visit to Tom Fletcher’s home in Kentucky was part of his tour of poverty stricken areas in the U.S. (Photo by Walter Bennett/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images).*

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson used his [first State of the Union address](http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3382) to urge "all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States." The War on Poverty, as the set of social programs enacted in 1964-1965 came to be called, was arguably the most ambitious domestic policy initiative since the Great Depression. But for decades, politicians and social scientists have [argued](http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/great-society-agenda-led-to-great--and-lasting--philosophical-divide/2014/01/08/b082e5d0-786d-11e3-b1c5-739e63e9c9a7_story.html?wprss=rss_politics&wpisrc=nl_wonk) about whether Johnson's antipoverty programs have lifted people out of destitution, trapped them in cycles of dependency, or both.

Critics note that the official poverty rate, as calculated by the [Census Bureau](http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-245.pdf), has fallen only modestly, from 19% in 1964 to 15% in 2012 (the most recent year available). But other analysts, citing [shortcomings](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/why-you-should-forget-about-the-poverty-rate/282849/?wpisrc=nl_wonk) in the official poverty measure, focus on a [supplemental measure](http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-247.pdf) (also produced by the Census Bureau) to argue that more progress has been made. A team of researchers from [Columbia University](https://courseworks.columbia.edu/access/content/group/c5a1ef92-c03c-4d88-0018-ea43dd3cc5db/Working%20Papers%20for%20website/Anchored%20SPM.December7.pdf), for example, calculated an "anchored" supplemental measure -- essentially the 2012 measure carried back through time and adjusted for historical inflation -- and found that it fell from about 26% in 1967 to 16% in 2012.

What's inarguable, though, is that the demographics of America's poor have shifted over the decades. Here's a look at what has, and hasn't, changed, based on the official measure. (Note: The reference years vary depending on data availability.)

****

[![poverty_age](https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2014/01/poverty_age.png)](https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/01/poverty_age.png)

**Today, most poor Americans are in their prime working years:** In 2012, 57% of poor Americans were ages 18 to 64, versus 41.7% in 1959.

**Far fewer elderly are poor:** In 1966, 28.5% of Americans ages 65 and over were poor; by 2012 just 9.1% were. There were 1.2 million fewer elderly poor in 2012 than in 1966, despite the doubling of the total elderly population. [Researchers](http://www.nber.org/papers/w10466) generally credit this steep drop to Social Security, particularly the expansion and inflation-indexing of benefits during the 1970s.

**But childhood poverty persists: **Poverty among children younger than 18 began dropping even before the War on Poverty. From 27.3% in 1959, childhood poverty fell to 23% in 1964 and to 14% by 1969. Since then, however, the childhood poverty rate has risen, fallen and, since the 2007-08 financial crisis, risen again.

**Today's poor families are structured differently:** In 1973, the first year for which data are available, more than half (51.4%) of poor families were headed by a married couple; 45.4% were headed by women. In 2012, just over half (50.3%) of poor families were female-headed, while 38.9% were headed by married couples.

****

[![poverty_regions](https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2014/01/poverty_regions.png)](https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/01/poverty_regions.png)

Poverty is more evenly distributed, though still heaviest in the South: In 1969, 45.9% of poor Americans lived in the South, a region that accounted for 31% of the U.S. population at the time. At 17.9%, the South's poverty rate was far above other regions. In 2012, the South was home to 37.3% of all Americans and 41.1% of the nation's poor people; though the South's poverty rate, 16.5%, was the highest among the four Census-designated regions, it was only 3.2 percentage points above the lowest (the Midwest).

**Poverty among blacks has fallen sharply: **In 1966, two years after Johnson's speech, four-in-ten (41.8%) of African-Americans were poor; blacks constituted nearly a third (31.1%) of all poor Americans. By 2012, poverty among African-Americans had fallen to 27.2% -- still more than double the rate among whites (12.7%, 1.4 percentage points higher than in 1966).

**But poverty has risen among Hispanics. **Poverty data for Hispanics, who can be of any race, wasn't collected until 1972. That year, 22.8% lived below the poverty threshold. In 2012, the share of Hispanics in poverty had risen to 25.6%. But the U.S. Hispanic population has quintupled over that time. As a result, more than half of the 22 million-person increase in official poverty between 1972 and 2012 was among Hispanics.