Have those advances come at the expense of the American worker? They have certainly led to economic dislocation, but America's poverty rate has remained relatively steady. When talking about U.S. poverty rates, it is important to keep in mind that extreme poverty in America is vanishingly rare. Instead, our poverty rate is determined by the U.S. Census Bureau “by comparing pre-tax cash income against a threshold that is set at three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, updated annually for inflation using the Consumer Price Index. It's also adjusted for family size, composition, and age of householder.”

According to both the Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton and Cato's Michael Tanner (who relied on U.S. Census Bureau data), the American poverty rate has moved between 15.2 and 11.3 percent over the last four decades. On three occasions (1983, 1993 and 2010) it reached over 15 percent of the population. Those were post-recession peaks that disappeared as soon as the economy recovered.

In fact, America experienced her lowest poverty rate since 1974 in 2000, when openness of the American economy, as measured by the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World index, was at its highest. Since then, America's economy has become less free. Could that be the reason why the American recovery from the Great Recession was so sluggish and why America's poverty rate has not retreated as fast as it did on previous occasions?