Since its inception in 1965, America's federally established official poverty rate (OPR) has been the single most important statistic used by policymakers and concerned citizens to evaluate success or failure in the nation's efforts to alleviate poverty. In his newly released examination of this widely quoted measure, The Poverty of "The Poverty Rate": Measure and Mismeasure of Want in Modern America (AEI Press, 2008), political economist Nicholas Eberstadt finds that the OPR is, in reality, "a broken compass"--a flawed index generating increasingly misleading numbers about poverty in the United States.

Over three decades, the trends reported by the OPR have been jarringly inconsistent with other statistical indicators of material deprivation in the United States. In his book, Eberstadt demonstrates that the shortcomings of the current poverty rate are not only severe but irremediable and argues that this untrustworthy yardstick should be replaced by more accurate measures of poverty.

With the issue of need in America coming into renewed focus, the question of how to measure the performance of our nation's antipoverty policies is increasingly critical. Joining the author will be two noted experts on U.S. domestic policy--AEI's Michael Barone, coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics and author of Our Country, and William Galston, a domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. AEI's Douglas J. Besharov will moderate.