There are many ways to measure economic well-being because there are many different ways for individuals and families to encounter problems. This multidimensional aspect of poverty becomes apparent quickly to anyone investigating the measurement of poverty. There is a considerable literature that includes different ways to measure income poverty, and non- income poverty such as material hardship, and social deprivation. In general, there is agreement that all of the approaches capture different pieces of the puzzle while no one single measure can yield a complete picture.

In this paper I examine the relationship between the official U.S. poverty measure, an improved income-based poverty measure, and measures of material hardship, to see whether or not the revisions to the measure change the relationship of income-based poverty to material hardship. While some would expect that the failure on the part of a poverty measure to predict material hardship for a given family indicates that income poverty measures are useless, there is an emerging consensus that income poverty and indicators of material hardship are really two different answers to two different questions.