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libraries, and public playgrounds and parks has benefited everyone, but especially those with low incomes who cannot afford to pay for private education and private recreation clubs. These measures have helped raise the standard of living of the lowest economic classes of society. As Loyola University law professor William Quigley points out, ‘‘American poor people are rich beyond the wildest dreams of the poor in impover- ished countries, where one billion people survive on about a dollar a day.’’ How- ever, Quigley goes on to say, ‘‘Our citizens … are constantly inundated by a culture that equates dignity with income, possessions, and the ability to be self-sup- porting’’ (2003, 39). In other words, just because American poor people have more food, better housing, and access to higher-quality education than poor people in some other countries, that does not mean that they are not poor by American standards. It is true, however, that the percentage of the truly poor people has gone down in the United States, due in large part to government programs. ‘‘Using some contem- porary definitions of poverty … it is roughly accurate to say that 40% of Americans were poor in 1900, 33–40% in the Great Depression, 25% in the mid-1950s, and 6 to 15% between 1970 and 1980,’’ says James Patterson, a history professor at Brown University. Furthermore, the idea of what a person needs to escape poverty has become more generous over the years. Patterson points out that, by 1977 stand- ards, most Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century would have been considered poor (1994, 12–13). As the overall standard of living has risen in the United States, so has the mini- mum standard of living that the public has been willing to grant to the poor and needy. Diana Karter Appelbaum (1977) surveyed a number of ‘‘poverty lines’’ throughout the twentieth century. She found that the pre-1929 poverty-line budgets provided a less well-balanced diet, and allowed for smaller housing and fewer com- forts, than the poverty-line budgets of the 1960s and after (for more on this issue, see the entry on the Poverty Line). Although this is certainly good news, others see the glass as ‘‘half empty’’ and point out that the federal poverty line is set far too low to actually meet the basic needs of real families. In 2007, the official percentage of people living below the poverty line in the United States was around 12.5 percent however, this statistic masks the fact that the government recognizes that its poverty line is too low: many government programs provide benefits to people above the poverty line. For exam- ple, almost half the schoolchildren in this country are eligible for a free school lunch, meaning that they live in a family with an income of less than 130% of the federal poverty line. The official percentage of people living in poverty, even given the fact that the poverty line is set too low, has stayed the same or risen somewhat since the early 1970s. The United States seems to be stagnating in its progress against poverty. What does work in the battle against poverty? To read about laws and govern- ment programs that have been fairly successful at decreasing poverty and unem- ployment, or at increasing access to jobs, education, money, food, housing, health care, political participation, and other necessities, see the following entries (note xii | Preface