With Milei, poverty in Argentina reaches 73.3%

Unfortunately, poverty in Argentina can be seen everywhere: on the streets, in homes, in supermarkets, in factories, in stores, in hospitals, in schools.

There are many numbers that corroborate this ‘Bad Living’ in these eight months of Milei’s government. And they all agree on the same thing: the middle class almost doesn’t exist and the poor class is the majority.

If we analyze the data from the Permanent Household Survey of the First Quarter of 2024, we could almost say that the average income is very poorly representative of social reality. With such an unequal distribution, it is much more accurate to analyze the median value than the average. Why? Because there are almost no Argentine households with incomes close to the average, and because the average is not in the middle of the distribution, but shifted to the right, as can be seen in graph 1. There are 68% below this ‘average’ value and 32% above.

The most pertinent thing then would be to pay attention to the median value: 50% of Argentine households have a monthly per capita income of less than 198 thousand pesos.

This half of the country is poor. This half and a little more: poverty in Argentina affects 55% of society.

But this number is insufficient to measure real poverty, because this type of measurement ignores households whose income is very close to the threshold. In other words: if a family had 100 pesos more than the value of the total basic food basket (CBT), just 100 pesos more, it would no longer be considered poor according to the usual calculations. However, would it be correct to say that a family with a per capita income of 222,332 pesos per month is poor, but a family with a per capita income of 222,352 pesos per month is not?

The answer should require common sense: it is not correct.

It is therefore politically essential to know how many households are just above that threshold; plus some weights, but not much more.

Because these families are “almost poor”: they are on the edge, they are vulnerable and they do not belong in any way to the middle class.

In graph 2, we observe that there are 18.3% of ‘near-poor’ households that have incomes in the range of 1 to 1.5 CBT.

In short, if we are really concerned about poverty, we should consider the sum of the two, the “poor” plus the “nearly poor”. In other words: 73.3%.

Three quarters of Argentine society “live poorly”, but we are still talking about a middle-class country.

If we do not accept this diagnosis, that is, that Argentina today lives mostly in conditions of poverty, we will continue to insist on the error of proposing a political, social and economic project without anchoring it in reality.

This would be the same as wanting to talk to a daily life that does not exist. And that is why it is impossible to be effective when it comes to “Doing Politics”.

With information from Página 12