Poverty, work, and welfare: Cutting the Gordian knot.

The United States boasts the largest and arguably richest economy in the world, yet it leads high-income countries in the fraction of children living in poverty. Policy debates about child poverty are contentious in two important ways: 1) Although poverty itself is measured by comparing family income with a poverty threshold (currently around $28,000 for a family of four), whether income itself is the driving force behind the negative associations between poverty and child well-being is unclear. Some believe that other conditions associated with low income, such as single-parent family structure, matter the most. If income is immaterial, policies designed to boost family income are unlikely to help poor children. 2) Many policies designed to help families meet their basic needs carry with them a risk that recipients will either not seek work or, if they are already working, reduce effort and even drop out of the labor force altogether. Some fear that children growing up in families in which no adult is employed may themselves work less when they reach adulthood. Thus, even if these programs reduce short-run poverty, they may increase intergenerational poverty, suggesting a need for programs that simultaneously reduce poverty and increase paid employment. Both of these issues were at the heart of the deliberations of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years. The committee was formed in 2016 when Congress directed the National Academies to conduct a comprehensive study of child poverty in the United States. The core of its Congressional charge was to review research on linkages between child poverty and child well-being and identify evidence-based programs and policies that could reduce the number of children living in poverty in the United States by half … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: gduncan{at}uci.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1