An essential feature of the capitalist age is the tendency of extreme wealth to organize, perpetuate, and protect itself. This tendency has naturally given rise to all kinds of creative justifications for hierarchy and, in particular, the right of those at the top to remain there. The flip side, of course, is the vast industry committed to what might be called the mystification of poverty — represented in a seemingly endless series of efforts to represent poverty as the result of something other than a lack of money.

In this respect, few societies have managed to innovate quite like the United States, where neo-Victorian social attitudes and myths of moral desert are regularly weaponized against any effort at redistribution. For the political tribunes of wealth, poverty will always be about anything and everything else — inadequate work ethic, the corrosion of the nuclear family, bad personal judgment — and the policy remedies every bit as ethereal.

It’s hard to think of a stronger rebuttal to these mystifications than the stream of data to emerge from the United States’ momentary experiment in mass cash transfers during the COVID-19 pandemic. As per new numbers released this week by the Census Bureau, the share of Americans living in poverty was about 9.1 percent in 2020 — down from nearly 12 percent the previous year, and lower as a share of the general population than at any time since 1967. The context for this drop in poverty was the single biggest economic contraction since the Great Depression: a national calamity that saw the economy hemorrhage millions of jobs. When the same thing occurred during the last recession, poverty rose to 15 percent.