Odds are, you are poor. Or you’ve been poor.

Conventional wisdom repeatedly implies that poverty is a permanent state afflicting a small number of Americans, while the rest of us thrive in a vast, if besieged, middle class. In fact, most Americans between age 25 and 75 have spent at least one year living under the poverty line.

“One of the biggest myths about poverty in the United States is that a relatively small segment of the population is poor, and that this represents a more or less permanent underclass,” Columbia University economist and social work professor Irwin Garfinkel tells Columbia magazine. “But poverty is quite dynamic. Lots of people move in and out of poverty over the course of their lives. And it doesn’t take much for people at the edge to lose their footing: a reduction in work hours, an inability to find affordable day care, a family breakup or an illness.”

Even if you bounce back, the effects of these setbacks linger. For young adults, attending college or taking a low-paid internship burdens them with opportunity costs. Debts accrue with compound interest; damaged credit ratings block otherwise qualified people from buying homes. Diseases go untreated during periods without health care.

Americans pay a price for the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism.

To find out exactly how high the cost is, Garfinkel and his colleagues have created the Poverty Tracker, dubbed “one of the most richly detailed studies of poverty ever undertaken in the United States.”

Initial findings are distressing: “While the city’s official poverty rate is 21 percent, the Columbia researchers found that 37 percent of New Yorkers, or about 3 million people, went through an extended period in 2012 when money was so tight that they lost their home, had their utilities shut off, neglected to seek medical treatment for an illness, went hungry or experienced another ‘severe material hardship,’ as the researchers define such extreme consequences.”

The researchers hope “they will have enough data to begin helping public authorities, legislators, foundations, nonprofits, philanthropists and private charities address the underlying problems that affect the city’s poor” by the end of 2014.

Nationally, more than 35 percent of all Americans are currently ducking calls from collection agencies over unpaid debts.

What can be done?

Under this system? Not much. Democrats, who haven’t even proposed a major anti-poverty program since the 1960s, aren’t meaningfully better on poverty than Republicans.

The Poverty Tracker shows that poverty is a huge problem in the United States. Unfortunately its authors, who draw their salaries from an institution intimately intertwined with monied elites, dare not openly suggest what they know to be true, that the key to eliminating poverty is to get rid of its root cause: capitalism.

TED RALL’s next book is After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests.