Have you heard that a family of four in the US is now considered poor if their household income is under $136,500 (£103,300) a year? Don’t @ me about the maths – I’m just the messenger. The person behind this calculation is Michael Green, who is chief strategist and portfolio manager for Simplify Asset Management. I think this means that he makes large sums of money by fiddling with even larger sums of money. When not doing that, Green writes a newsletter and recently published a viral piece on Substack arguing that the poverty line, calculated as $31,200 by the Department of Health and Human Services, is a “broken benchmark”. These days a family with a low six-figure income is officially “the new poor”, he reasoned.

Green’s essay has sparked numerous rebuttals, with people arguing that he had turned the poverty measure into a middle-class measure. “It’s completely........

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