In exploring the themes of “My Life is a Lie” and “It Works, If You Work It,” I found both pieces to be profoundly insightful. Their perspectives on poverty and the challenges within it are compelling and have prompted me to share them with friends and family, as well as include them in my RSS reader. The discussions surrounding the poverty line’s formula, particularly its description as a “crisis threshold” or “measuring starvation,” offer a new level of understanding, illuminating an often misunderstood reality for many well-meaning individuals.
In the segment titled “The Real Math of Survival,” Green revisits the concept of a “Living Wage.” To verify his calculations, I compared them with MIT’s Living Wage Calculator (https://livingwage.mit.edu) for several familiar locales, yielding the following estimates for a family of two adults and two children in 2025:
Salt Lake City, UT: $117,312
Jackson, MS: $98,051
Boston, MA: $164,944
Ithaca, NY: $132,954
Austin, TX: $115,565
San Diego, CA: $148,595
NYC Metro: $145,683
These figures align closely with Green’s analysis, although Salt Lake City, Austin, and NYC appear slightly underestimated. The methodology employed by MIT resembles Green’s reasoning but is executed with greater rigor (https://livingwage.mit.edu/pages/methodology). Their website offers comprehensive insights on living wages, minimum wages, and poverty wage levels for various household configurations, alongside detailed breakdowns of spending on childcare, food, healthcare, housing, transportation, and more. These calculations support Green’s conclusions effectively.
Rebranding the “Poverty Line” as the “Starvation Line” and renaming “Living Wage” to something akin to the “(Functional) Poverty Threshold Wage” carries significant rhetorical weight. It accurately captures the imagery and implications of these terms.
The concept of the “Functional Poverty Threshold” further underscores the alarming levels of inequality in the U.S. By inputting the aforementioned figures into https://dqydj.com/income-by-state/, we can estimate where the FPT positions a household in terms of statewide income percentiles (though this calculation is somewhat imperfect). The results are:
Salt Lake City, UT: 57%
Jackson, MS: 74%
Boston, MA: 66%
Ithaca, NY: 66%
Austin, TX: 65%
San Diego, CA: 66%
NYC Metro: 69%
With approximately two-thirds of households earning below the Living Wage/FPT line, the situation is distressing yet seems accurate.
Generation Z has faced mockery in business media for allegedly desiring a $600K salary to feel “successful.” For a single-income household with two children, this figure represents 4-6 times the living wage/FPT level. Historically, CEOs earned 10-15 times the average employee’s salary; thus, Gen Z’s demands would only place them midway to the boss’s earnings—currently positioned in the 98th-99th percentile within a much less equitable society. This perspective could be more justifiable than often portrayed.
Reframing poverty and deprivation in terms of time—an approach found in “It Works, If You Work It”—offers a transformative viewpoint. This method reveals the fallacy behind the notion that the impoverished can merely “work harder” (perhaps as Gig Economy entrepreneurs) to escape their plight, a frequently perpetuated misconception among the indifferent or uninformed.
The Living Wage Calculator is based on the assumption of 2,080 working hours per year—40 hours weekly for 52 weeks, with no time off. For instance, in Boston, the minimum wage is $15/hour, while the living wage for a family of four is set at $39.65/hour. Families earning minimum wage would need both parents to work 105 hours weekly to reach the FPT, leaving just nine hours each day for other essential activities. In Salt Lake City, the poverty wage stands at $7.73, slightly above the minimum wage of $7.25. Families earning this wage would require both parents to work 146 hours weekly, allowing only around three hours a day for sleep and other daily necessities. This scenario is physiologically unfeasible, exemplifying Lambert’s second law of neoliberalism: Go Die.
