Unmasking Hidden Poverty in America: The Role of Time Deficits

In Unmasking Hidden Poverty in America: The Role of Time Deficits, Zacharias et al. (2025) integrate time deficits into poverty measurement. They highlight that inequalities based on gender, race, class and family structure shape the ways in which households handle unpaid care work, which undermines economic well-being.

The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is a member of the Care Economies in Context project team.

Citation

Zacharias, A., Rios-Avila, F., Masterson, T., & Sinha, A. (2025, April 4). Unmasking Hidden Poverty in America: The Role of Time Deficits. Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. https://www.levyinstitute.org/blog/unmasking-hidden-poverty-in-america-the-role-of-time-deficits/

Introduction

What if Household Production is recognized as a necessity?

Imagine if unpaid work done at home—cooking, cleaning, childcare, eldercare—were recognized as part of basic needs as, for example, a minimal quantity of food and clothing? Would it change how much poverty we find? An upcoming study by the Levy Economics Institute suggests it absolutely would.

The study augments the traditional poverty line by considering the minimal time required for unpaid work. Families that do not have enough available time to set aside for unpaid work requirements will have to purchase market substitutes to maintain a budget reflected in the traditional poverty line. Adding the cost of such market substitutes to the standard poverty line results in a time-adjusted poverty line which underpins our flagship metric the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP). Through a series of studies, we have developed LIMTIP estimates for Argentina (2005), Chile (2006), Ghana (2012–13), Korea (2009), Mexico (2008), Tanzania (2011–12), Turkey (2006), Ethiopia (2015), and South Africa (2015).

We estimate LIMTIP for the United States for the first time and the measure reveals that poverty in the U.S. is far more widespread than conventional, official poverty measures suggest, and in fact exposes inequality across multiple dimensions: gender, race, class, and family structure.