anti poverty essay

Poverty Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on poverty essay.

“Poverty is the worst form of violence”. – Mahatma Gandhi.

How Poverty is Measured?

For measuring poverty United nations have devised two measures of poverty – Absolute & relative poverty.  Absolute poverty is used to measure poverty in developing countries like India. Relative poverty is used to measure poverty in developed countries like the USA. In absolute poverty, a line based on the minimum level of income has been created & is called a poverty line.  If per day income of a family is below this level, then it is poor or below the poverty line. If per day income of a family is above this level, then it is non-poor or above the poverty line. In India, the new poverty line is  Rs 32 in rural areas and Rs 47 in urban areas.

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Causes of Poverty

According to the Noble prize winner South African leader, Nelson Mandela – “Poverty is not natural, it is manmade”. The above statement is true as the causes of poverty are generally man-made. There are various causes of poverty but the most important is population. Rising population is putting the burden on the resources & budget of countries. Governments are finding difficult to provide food, shelter & employment to the rising population.

The other causes are- lack of education, war, natural disaster, lack of employment, lack of infrastructure, political instability, etc. For instance- lack of employment opportunities makes a person jobless & he is not able to earn enough to fulfill the basic necessities of his family & becomes poor. Lack of education compels a person for less paying jobs & it makes him poorer. Lack of infrastructure means there are no industries, banks, etc. in a country resulting in lack of employment opportunities. Natural disasters like flood, earthquake also contribute to poverty.

In some countries, especially African countries like Somalia, a long period of civil war has made poverty widespread. This is because all the resources & money is being spent in war instead of public welfare. Countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. are prone to natural disasters like cyclone, etc. These disasters occur every year causing poverty to rise.

Ill Effects of Poverty

Poverty affects the life of a poor family. A poor person is not able to take proper food & nutrition &his capacity to work reduces. Reduced capacity to work further reduces his income, making him poorer. Children from poor family never get proper schooling & proper nutrition. They have to work to support their family & this destroys their childhood. Some of them may also involve in crimes like theft, murder, robbery, etc. A poor person remains uneducated & is forced to live under unhygienic conditions in slums. There are no proper sanitation & drinking water facility in slums & he falls ill often &  his health deteriorates. A poor person generally dies an early death. So, all social evils are related to poverty.

Government Schemes to Remove Poverty

The government of India also took several measures to eradicate poverty from India. Some of them are – creating employment opportunities , controlling population, etc. In India, about 60% of the population is still dependent on agriculture for its livelihood. Government has taken certain measures to promote agriculture in India. The government constructed certain dams & canals in our country to provide easy availability of water for irrigation. Government has also taken steps for the cheap availability of seeds & farming equipment to promote agriculture. Government is also promoting farming of cash crops like cotton, instead of food crops. In cities, the government is promoting industrialization to create more jobs. Government has also opened  ‘Ration shops’. Other measures include providing free & compulsory education for children up to 14 years of age, scholarship to deserving students from a poor background, providing subsidized houses to poor people, etc.

Poverty is a social evil, we can also contribute to control it. For example- we can simply donate old clothes to poor people, we can also sponsor the education of a poor child or we can utilize our free time by teaching poor students. Remember before wasting food, somebody is still sleeping hungry.

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Six examples of the long-term benefits of anti-poverty programs.

Economists have traditionally argued that anti-poverty policy faces a “great tradeoff”—famously articulated by Arthur Okun—between equity and efficiency. Yet, recent work suggests that Okun’s famous tradeoff may be far smaller in practice than traditionally believed and in many cases precisely the opposite could be the case. As discussed by one of us in today’s New York Times, recent economic research, much of it using large, high-quality administrative data, shows that key income support, education, housing, health care, and nutritional assistance programs improve health outcomes, educational attainment, employment, and earnings in adulthood for individuals who received this support in childhood. This research suggests that the investments in nutrition assistance, health care, housing vouchers and other programs included in the President’s Budget would not only help low-income families today, but would also improve our future economic performance.

In the half century since President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an unconditional War on Poverty, the Federal Government has invested in strategies that aim to relieve and prevent poverty. Partly as a result of these programs, and a large number of additions and reforms since then, between 1967 and 2012, poverty measured by a measure that accounts for tax and transfer payments fell 9.8 percentage points, or 38 percent. In 2013, income and nutrition assistance programs lifted 46 million people, including 10 million children, out of the poverty. Medicaid has also resulted in better health care for tens of millions of Americans. Another 16 million people have gained coverage following the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansions, as of early 2015.

Innovative economic research is increasingly finding that these programs have long-run benefits for the children in families that receive them. These studies often drawn upon large “administrative” data sets that are collected in the process of running government programs. These data sources frequently allow researchers to track families over long periods of time with limited attrition, offer much larger sample sizes, and suffer from less missing data than major household surveys. These improvements in data quality have coincided with a “ credibility revolution ” in economics that has greatly expanded the use of randomized trials and “quasi-experimental” research designs that exploit natural experiments to estimate the causal impact of the programs.

The following is a selection of research in this area for five major current programs—early education, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP), housing vouchers, and Medicaid—plus one historical income support program.

1. Early childhood education programs increase earnings and educational attainment.

• Two famous randomized trials of relatively small, intensive early education programs targeted to disadvantaged young children were the Abecederian Project and the High/Scope Perry Preschool Study. Both of these programs conducted multiple follow-up surveys of these children through secondary school and into adulthood. A number of studies found that children from these programs saw higher high school graduation and college attendance rates and greater adult earnings, and Perry also showed lower involvement with the criminal justice system. CEA recently summarized this work and concluded early education programs yield positive net benefits of up to $8.60 for every dollar spent.

• Recent work finds that these positive outcomes aren’t limited to narrowly-targeted programs, but that modern programs like Head Start, also show promising results. The Head Start Impact Study (HSIS) is tracking nearly 5,000 children who participated in Head Start as 3- and 4-year olds in 2002-2003. So far, the study has examined children’s outcomes through 3 rd grade. This work showed some positive initial findings, with greater language and literacy outcomes, but these results have become more attenuated over time, as measured by tests in elementary school.
• Even with negligible test score improvements in elementary and middle school, programs can still provide long-term benefits for children. For example, in order to account for differences in all family characteristics (unobserved and observed) David Deming compares differences between siblings in families where one sibling attended Head Start and another did not. Even though this work does show some fade-out, it also shows that in the longer-run, participating children are more likely to graduate high school and attend college.

2. The Earned Income Tax Credit improves early health outcomes, and increases academic achievement and college attendance.

• The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) provides a refundable tax credit to lower-income working families. A family’s credit amount is based on the number of dependent children and its earnings. A long literature shows that the EITC increases labor force participation among single mothers. This work relies on quasi-experimental methods, often comparing families that became eligible for a (larger) credit with families with similar observable characteristics that were ineligible.
• The EITC has been expanded in every Administration since 1975. Examining the 1986, 1990, and 1993 reforms, which expanded the credit parameters, particularly for families with multiple children, Hilary Hoynes, Douglas Miller, and David Simon use Vital Statistics data covering all births from 1984 to 1998. These data provide information on birth weight and birth order, as well as some maternal demographic information. Since families with a first, second, or third and higher-order birth experience a different EITC schedule, the authors compare birth outcomes for single mothers across these groups and find an additional $1,000 in EITC receipt lowers the prevalence of low-birth weight by 2 to 3 percent. Using information from Vital Statistics on doctor visits during pregnancy and from birth certificate records on smoking and drinking during pregnancy, they speculate that one channel for health improvements is through better prenatal care and health.

• The EITC for which a family is eligible increases at very low incomes, then remains flat for families with slightly higher incomes before phasing out. Work by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff uses these non-linearities in the tax schedule to identify the extent to which the credit improves academic performance. Linking data from a large school district on children’s test scores, teachers, and schools from grades 3 through 8 with administrative tax records on parental earnings, they find that a credit of $1,000 increases elementary and middle school test scores by 6 to 9 percent of a standard deviation. The authors’ related work  suggests that the quality of a child’s teacher is correlated with improvements in test scores, but unrelated to other characteristics that might affect earnings (like family characteristics). Using teacher assignment to isolate the causal effect of test scores on future earnings, they estimate that these children’s future earnings gains will exceed the current EITC costs.

• Using a regression kink design to estimate changes near the EITC’s first kink point and a differences-in-differences estimation using expansions of the EITC’s plateau and phase-out region for married parents, Dayanand Manoli and Nicholas Turner find receiving an additional $1,000 EITC in a student’s senior year of high school increases college enrollment by 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points. While quasi-experimental methods, like regression kink and differences-in-differences strategies, have the potential to provide causal estimates, the validity of these designs often requires very large amounts of data. In this study, tax data provides information on family earnings and composition (from the 1040 form) and subsequent college enrollment (from the 1098-T form) on almost all high school seniors from 2001 to 2011, which enables them to examine how college-attendance behavior changes for children whose families are very close to, but on one side of, the policy change (a flat, rather than increasing, EITC or children of married parents versus single parents). 

Even though we do not yet have a fully identified study of long-run earnings data for EITC recipients yet, by improving children’s performance in school, these results suggest the EITC could generate earnings gains in adulthood as well. For example, Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff estimate that the test score gains will translate into earnings gains of 9 percent.

3.  Nutrition assistance programs improve health outcomes and economic self-sufficiency.

• The Food Stamp Program (now SNAP) was rolled out across counties between 1961 and 1975, and the time at which a county implemented the program is largely unassociated with observable county characteristics. Douglas Almond, Hilary Hoynes, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach use this phased implementation to compare children from disadvantaged families who were born at similar times, but in different counties, and therefore had differential access to the Food Stamp program. Vital Statistics Natality administrative data that provides information on birth weight and parity and maternal characteristics shows that access to Food Stamps during pregnancy reduces low-birth weight births, with the greatest gains at the lower-end of the birth weight distribution. Related work using similar cross-state variation and linking longitudinal data that follows children throughout adolescence and into adulthood shows that access to Food Stamps before birth and at young ages reduces metabolic syndrome and increases economic self-sufficiency for women.

• Like the Food Stamp program, the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) was rolled out in stages between 1972 and 1979. Work by Hilary Hoynes, Marianne Page, and Ann Huff Stevens uses this county variation to compare birth information from the Vital Statistics Natality Data among children who were born at similar times, but in different counties (with different in uetro exposure to WIC). These results suggest that WIC increased birthweights among children born to mothers who participated in WIC from the third trimester between 18 to 29 grams, and effects were largest among mothers with low levels of education.
• Other work uses more recent data on access to WIC at finer geographies. In some states, like Texas, clients must apply for WIC in person, and distance to a clinic can present a barrier to access. Maya Rossin-Slater examines data from the Texas Department of State Health Services on WIC clinic openings, which includes operating dates and ZIP codes for all clinics in the state, and birth record data which includes information on birth outcomes and maternal characteristics. In order to isolate the causal effect of WIC access, she compares birth outcomes between siblings, where one sibling was born when a clinic was open nearby but another was born without access to a nearby clinic. This work shows that WIC access increased maternal weight gain during pregnancy, children’s birth weights, and the likelihood of initiating breastfeeding upon discharge from the hospital following birth.

4. Housing assistance that enables families to move to areas with high levels of upward mobility improves college enrollment, adult earnings, and marriage rates.

• From 1994 to 1998, the Moving to Opportunity demonstration project (MTO) randomly selected low-income families living in public housing in areas of concentrated poverty to receive housing vouchers. The experimental voucher group was required to move to neighborhoods with poverty rates below 10 percent, but Section 8 voucher recipients faced no location restrictions. Randomized control trials, such as MTO, are considered the “gold-standard” in economic research since treatment status is, by definition, random, and not correlated with characteristics that might influence future outcomes. As such, randomized experiments can credibly isolate the causal effect of a program. Interim results from the experiment found some benefits to moving to low-poverty neighborhoods, like improvements in mental and physical health among adults and teenage girls , but the fact that it did not lead to earnings increases for adults or test score improvements for children was disappointing.
• In contrast to the earlier literature, work released last week by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz links the MTO data with administrative earnings data for participating children. Previous work had relied on test score results to infer that the program would have little effect on achievement-related outcomes, or relied on earnings records from the oldest participants, but actual earnings records from a greater share of participants show substantial earnings gains. Among children who were younger than 13 when their families moved, Section 8 vouchers increased earnings by 15 percent and experimental vouchers increased earnings by 31 percent. In addition, MTO increased college attendance by 32 percent and, among children who attended college, children whose families received vouchers went to higher-quality schools. While the program did not affect significantly either overall birth rates or teen birth rates, experimental vouchers did increase the fraction of births where a father was present, and both Section 8 and experiment vouchers increased female marriage rates between ages 24 and 30. In contrast to the results for younger children, older children did not see these positive outcomes, suggesting that the amount of time a child spends in a neighborhood matters for adult outcomes, and providing a reconciliation with the earlier literature.

5. Medicaid/CHIP receipt in childhood improves adult economic and health outcomes.

• States expanded access to health insurance for children through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) at different times and to different extents since the 1980s. Using this variation and administrative data that connect individuals’ adult earnings and tax information to their residence and family income in childhood, David Brown, Amanda Kowalski, and Ithai Lurie estimate that a single additional year of Medicaid/CHIP eligibility in childhood increased cumulative tax payments through just age 28 by $186, a substantial fraction of the cost of that coverage; increasing Medicaid/CHIP eligibility also increased female earnings through age 28. 

• Related work by Sarah Cohodes, Daniel Grossman, Samuel Kleiner, and Michael Lovenheim uses similar variation across States and time in Medicaid/CHIP eligibility rules. They find that individuals who were eligible for Medicaid/CHIP in childhood were more likely to complete high school and graduate from college.
• One possible explanation for the improvements in economic outcomes due to Medicaid receipt in childhood is that Medicaid generates long-lasting improvements in health status. Two studies by Bruce Meyer, Laura Wherry, and co-authors examine changes in Federal Medicaid eligibility rules caused children born in October 1983 or later to be more likely to qualify for Medicaid coverage between ages 8 and 14 than children born before October 1983. These studies find that, in the groups most affected by the discontinuity in coverage eligibility, children born during or after October 1983 experience lower mortality in their late teen years and are substantially less likely to be hospitalized as adults. 

6. Cash assistance programs that help low-income families make ends meet increase earnings, educational attainment, and longevity.

• Anna Aizer, Shari Eli, Joseph Ferrie, and Adriana Lleras-Muney examined the Mothers’ Pension, a cash assistance program in effect from 1911 to 1935, and a precursor to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. The authors use data from World War II enlistment records, the Social Security Death Master File through 2012, and 1940 Census records on 16,000 men to compare mortality of children who benefited from the program to similar children of the same age living in the same county whose mothers applied, but were denied benefits. They find that the program reduced mortality through age 87 among recipient children, and that the lowest-income children experienced the largest benefits. Census and enlistment records suggest that these improvements may be at least partly due to the improvements in nutritional status (measured by underweight status in adulthood), educational attainment, and income in early-to-mid adulthood.  Documenting that the most common reason for rejection was “insufficient need,” the authors argue their results provide a lower-bound estimate of the program’s effects.

These six examples show that programs can have large and real long-term benefits, even if in some cases interim results based on indirect measures like test scores suggest little effect. They also show how credible research designs and greater access to data can overcome some of the limitations of previous work. Finally, these results suggest that, in some circumstances, greater equity does not necessarily come at the cost of lower economic efficiency. In fact, in instances where cost-benefit analyses are available, the additional tax revenue from the higher long-run earnings stemming from these programs is sufficient to cover most or all of the initial cost. This work shows that many investments proposed in the President’s Budget would help both participants and the overall economy.

Jason Furman is the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Krista Ruffini is a Research Economist for the Council of Economic Advisers.

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/why-the-u-s-is-rethinking-its-approach-to-poverty

Why the U.S. is rethinking its approach to poverty

At least one Saturday each month, Arlean Younger volunteers handing out boxes of donated food at church. Last time, she helped distribute provisions to more than 100 people. At the end of the shift, she took home a box, too — for herself and Mylie Jai, the little girl she has been taking care of since infancy.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the number of American households in poverty was shrinking. In 2019, 34 million people lived in poverty , a decrease of 4.2 million individuals from a year earlier, according to the Census Bureau. Children made up a substantial portion of those in low-income households, according to the latest available data from a recent National Academies of Sciences study. A year since the coronavirus began its deadly rampage in the U.S., economic stresses have pushed millions more households to the brink, with some estimates suggesting it also forced an additional 2.5 million more children into poverty.

At the end of 2020, more than 50 million people were facing hunger, up 15 million from the year before, according to data from Feeding America , an anti-hunger organization. Millions of Americans have turned to food banks, with four out of 10 doing so for the first time during the pandemic.

Each month, Younger earns roughly $2,000 from her job at a company that hires home health aides. But the money is spent almost as soon as her deposit clears. Rent gobbles up $800. Utilities cost $300. Water adds $130. And $400 goes for the gas she needs to reach her health care clients. There are credit card bills and the new cost of daycare for Mylie Jae, whose school, the cost of which is normally subsidized by the state, shut down. The COVID-19 pandemic has made everything more precarious, including her own work.

Younger’s role is usually that of a manager but often demands more than overseeing client needs and people’s schedules. She supervises eight employees. Because of pandemic-driven demand, Younger said she often cares for clients herself, working far more than 40 hours, sometimes seven days a week. She drives up to 40 minutes each way to reach the clients farthest from her house; the costs are always greater than what her company reimburses her. She feels like she is struggling to provide a good home for the girl who calls her “Mama.”

Lawmakers in the U.S. have for years debated how to track poverty, and child poverty in particular. Now, in the midst of a pandemic, when the country is caught in a deep recession that has forced families deeper into financial difficulty amid widening inequalities, “it’s not surprising” that politicians have found renewed interest in curbing this hardship, said Rebecca Blank, a macroeconomist who worked on anti-poverty policy for the the Clinton and Obama administrations and now serves as chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Chart by Megan McGrew

Along with what it provides in COVID relief, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan signed into law by President Joe Biden this month offers one of the most sweeping anti-poverty packages in recent memory. Along with one-time stimulus checks to most children and adults and an extension of unemployment benefits, the legislation increases the child tax credit to between $3,000 and $3,600, depending on the age of the child, and makes that money available over the course of the year rather than only at tax-filing time. It offers housing vouchers for those nearing homelessness, as well as health care subsidies for people whose states have not expanded Medicaid.

One estimate by the Urban Institute suggests these measures will cut child poverty in half for children, and significantly for families experiencing job loss.

READ MORE: How to help kids build resilience amid COVID-19 chaos

In the pandemic, advocates have an opportunity to generate sufficient political will for the U.S. to not only sew up some of the holes in its social safety net, but make it big enough to catch more families and individuals in need. “One thing we know out of American history is when we expand these programs, it tends to be in response to more than just the very poor having need,” Blank said. “When need is more expansive, people are more willing to think about new things.”

The bill only guarantees the expanded tax credit for a year, though Democrats have promised to extend the benefit. The question now: Could this become permanent? If the tax credit expires, the child poverty rate will double again by 2022. Many Republicans, who are seeking to regain control of Congress in the next midterm elections, have voiced concerns about supporting continued assistance, citing costs or because the measures don’t do enough to incentivize work. But advocates say the idea of a long-standing safety net has now entered the conversation, and there are a number of small models of success across the country and over time that lawmakers can draw from when considering solutions.

How the U.S. has attempted to address poverty

For years, the United States has maintained a stubbornly high rate of child poverty compared to other developed countries, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reported in November 2019 . Traditionally, Americans have bristled at giving taxpayer money to alleviate poverty, especially if that means the government will assume a greater role in people’s daily lives. But not making a serious investment in solving the problem comes with major costs.

Lack of a political will has obstructed greater progress on child poverty are cold and straightforward, said Cara Baldari, vice president, family economics, housing and homelessness at First Focus on Children, a child advocacy organization. “Kids can’t vote,” she said. That has helped perpetuate a trend in the U.S. where children are more likely than adults to live in poverty because a child’s fortune matches that of the grown-up who cares for them.

Child poverty affects an estimated 9.6 million children and costs the U.S. as much as $1.1 trillion each year, according to a 2019 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine . Studies suggest children accumulate these costs over the course of a lifetime due to worse health outcomes that end up adding up to expensive treatment and lost productivity in the job market. Children who grow up in poverty are more likely to report lower incomes, worse health outcomes and less likely to experience social and emotional turmoil.

In the 2016 National Survey on Children’s Health, parents reported that 25.5 percent of children have experienced economic hardship “somewhat” or “very often.” By that measure, poverty is the most common adverse childhood experience in the United States — more common than divorce or separation of parents or living with someone struggling with alcohol or substance use. These events offer a heightened risk of trauma that can have potentially lasting effects on a child’s physical, mental and emotional health, according to Child Trends , a research organization focused on studying child development and well-being.

Other countries have made explicit moves in recent years to tackle those kinds of issues. In 2019, Canada’s Poverty Reduction Act became law , part of a $22 billion package to create poverty reduction targets and funnel resources toward programs that can help meet the social and economic need. The country is on track to reduce child poverty by half, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. New Zealand has also released intermediate and long-term targets designed to cut child poverty dramatically within a decade. In both countries, people receive direct monthly payments to give families a cushion against poverty.

The U.S. hasn’t yet gotten that far, instead operating multiple policies entangled in a way that sometimes pits them against one another. To stem hunger, the federal government funds Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP benefits. To help working families, the Earned Income Tax Credit refunds money to individuals based on what was earned and household need. And those who qualify to receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families are often flagged to receive job training or help securing employment. But families often bump up against income thresholds, earning too little to live comfortably but too much to receive government benefits. Younger, 49, has been caring for Mylie Jai for five years, ever since she offered help to a friend who had just given birth and was hopping between rundown motels in Jackson, Mississippi, without a stable home, car or job. Mylie Jai is now in preschool, and Younger is her official legal guardian. Younger was told she earns too much money to qualify for SNAP benefits, she said.

The Mississippi Department of Human Services normally covers the cost of Mylie Jai’s school, but in late February, the building was shut down after pipes burst in a historic snowfall and ice storm. Younger was forced to instead send Mylie Jae to a small daycare operated by a friend, but the state’s vouchers got caught in bureaucratic red tape, so she said she had to come up with $90 per week out of pocket.

Medicaid covers Mylie Jai’s doctor visits, Younger said, but she herself visits a community health center if she gets sick and cannot afford health insurance, despite being a health care worker.

Arlean Younger, 49, of Jackson, Mississippi, works full-time (and often logging extra hours) for a company that hires home health aides. But she struggles to make ends meet for herself and Mylie Jai, 5, for whom she is the legal guardian. Photos courtesy of Arlean Younger

Those ill-fitting pieces are problematic, said Beryl Levinger, a child policy expert and professor at Middlebury Institute, and policymakers need to take a more holistic approach, rather than hunt for a silver bullet that doesn’t exist.

Levinger also served as a researcher on a new report from child advocacy group Save the Children that used data to analyze which states offered kids the best and worst COVID-19 responses . Minnesota, Utah and Washington state ranked highest while Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas were among the lowest. This latest report suggested 6 million more children endured hunger during the pandemic, and a quarter of children lacked resources for remote learning, which made completing school work virtually impossible for many families. The report urged states to protect child care, which has unraveled during the pandemic, and address child hunger through SNAP and other federal programs.

“This problem will not end even when the last of the vaccine is distributed,” the report said. “The additional benefits and supports for these children and families will need to be made permanent until all children have access to the food they need.”

The debate over cash payments

Created as part of the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, the child tax credit offered a $500-per-child nonrefundable credit to ease the tax burden of middle-income households. Since then, it has become more tightly woven into the U.S. social safety net over time, said Elaine Maag, who studies programs for low-income families and children for the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Decades later, she said the policy has evolved and holds the potential to become a permanent fixture to help families.

But government programs, no matter how well designed or executed to fit a certain set of circumstances, often miss the mark, Maag said, because life is messy. She pointed to SNAP benefits as an example. With them, a person may have food, but if they get sick, do they have money to pay for a doctor’s visit or to fill a drug prescription? A mountain of research that suggests direct cash payments are the most effective way to alleviate poverty and documents a “growing understanding that people know how to solve their problems the best way,” Maag said. “Cash can be used to meet all your needs.”

Of all of the provisions in the latest relief bill, the $1,400 cash payments have the most potential to reduce poverty, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis. In recent years, there has been growing discussion of using a universal income to alleviate poverty, but it is not politically popular. Democratic presidential candidate and philanthropist Andrew Yang campaigned on this idea, but just a fraction of Democrats supported it, much less the country overall. In a July 2019 poll from PBS NewsHour, NPR and Marist , only 26 percent of Americans said they supported giving each U.S. adult $1,000 per month, a proposal that was more popular among Democrats than Republicans.

Despite robust evidence supporting the use of direct payments, Americans historically do not like to give people tax-payer dollars unless society deems them to be deserving, Maag said. Since the Great Depression, older adults, people with disabilities or some survivors of people who die have received cash benefits. But distributing cash payments to families or other more specific groups is an easier political sales pitch than to do so for all able-bodied adults, Maag said.

So for generations, the U.S. has pursued anti-poverty policies that are very specific about how people spend their resources, said Aisha Nyandoro, chief executive of Springboard to Opportunities, a direct service organization. “Why not try something different?”

That is what Nyandoro’s organization did in 2018 when it founded the Magnolia Mother’s Trust. The project gave $1,000 per month for 12 months to Black mothers living in extreme poverty in Jackson, Mississippi. The goal was to target systemic problems by empowering women with cash payments so they could decide how to improve their lives. The project has grown from helping 20 women to more than 200. During that time, Nyandoro said she has witnessed women pay off debt, return to school, cook more nutritious meals for their families and become better parents.

Tamara Ware was one of those women. In late February 2020, she had to leave her job at a child care facility, afraid she might bring the coronavirus home to her three daughters, ages 13, 14 and 17, who were struggling in school even before the virus forced classrooms to close and instruction to go virtual. She had been earning $11 per hour and had no savings to pay for food or housing.

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced Tamara Ware, 36, of Jackson, Mississippi, out of her job at a child care facility, Ware said she did not know how she could afford to raise her three daughters, age 13, 14 and 17. But when she received $1,000 per month for a year from the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, Ware said she could focus on being a more patient, present and understanding parent. For the first time in years, she threw a birthday party for her daughter, Erianna, in July. Photos courtesy of Tamara Ware

Within weeks, Ware was accepted into the trust. She found tutoring help for her daughters and counselors for them to address trauma they had endured, including the grief and loss of Ware’s twin sister, who had been shot and killed eight years earlier. She threw a party to celebrate her daughters’ birthdays, something she hadn’t been able to afford to do in years. She became a more patient and understanding mother, she said, and developed a deep sense of community with other mothers who worked to overcome struggles that had ensnared them for years.

“I could be in the moment,” Ware said. “Look, I ain’t gotta worry about nothing this month.”

She graduated from the program last month, and it gave her a chance to build her own business as a child care provider.

“My head is in the right direction,” Ware said. “I have the tools I need now.”

Many women in the program report feelings of joy, Nyandoro said. Often, that is because they struggled to survive. With a guaranteed income in place, the women’s focus could broaden beyond meeting basic needs and tapping to what they actually wanted in life.

“If you have lived a life of scarcity so often, joy is something you feel like you haven’t been allowed either. You’re constantly trying to survive,” she said. “You tell yourself dreams are something for other people.”

What works?

After the implementation of the “Great Society” programs in the 1960s, such as Medicaid and federal funding for education, the U.S. saw its child poverty rate cut in half. If successful, advocates say the American Rescue Plan could help bring the U.S. and other countries closer to a global goal set in motion by the United Nations (long before COVID-19) to end extreme child poverty by 2030 and cut child poverty rates in half worldwide.

Researchers behind a pilot universal income program that gave participants in Stockton, California, $500 a month released data that showed a 12 percent increase in full-time employment after one year, and 62 percent reported paying off debt, a 10 percent increase from before the program began.

The biggest spending category was food, their research showed, followed by merchandise, utilities and auto costs, which all have an impact on someone’s ability to get and keep a job, researchers said.

More than 40 mayors across the country who are part of a Mayors for Guaranteed Income initiative are launching similar programs.

“COVID-19 has made it very, very clear that you could play by all the rules, that you could be working, and that still may not be enough,” Michael Tubbs, the mayor of Stockton, told the PBS NewsHour in December.

Some economists reviewing Stockton’s pilot have also pointed out the complicated questions that arise around deciding who is eligible for these kinds of programs and how to reach them. Certain requirements may unintentionally cut out people who need help most, in favor of people who don’t have as much need. And cash can only go so far in solving structural issues like access to health care and education.

During the pandemic, fighting poverty has drawn some bipartisan support. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, proposed the $254 billion Family Security Act to replace some existing programs with a monthly child allowance — $350 for each young child and $250 for every school-aged child. But the cost of this program would mean making choices about discontinuing others, and some experts have raised concerns about the possible unintended consequences of replacing programs, such as TANF, that have been used to connect families to other services. That could lead to families falling through the cracks and needs going unmet.

But some critics say these programs don’t go far enough to incentivize work as a way to alleviate poverty. Robert Rector, a welfare policy expert for the conservative Heritage Foundation, said he doesn’t think the pandemic justifies the child poverty policies passed into law. Instead, he said, the U.S. already has “a very large welfare state,” adding that roughly $500 billion he said is currently devoted to poverty-alleviation programs should be “more efficient” and “targeted to be more supportive of work.”

READ MORE: How the economic relief law narrows the equity gap for farmers of color

The policies targeting child poverty in the American Rescue Plan represent “an enormous expansion of the welfare state” and are only exceeded by the Affordable Care Act, Rector said.

“You want to be compassionate to be people who need assistance, but you don’t want free handouts where an individual can take advantage of the charity extended to them,” he said.

In the 2019 report, researchers suggested expanding benefits to target food and housing insecurity, along with the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, and creating a child allowance, as Romney’ proposed, which the study found would have the biggest impact on low-income households. Families who claim children as dependents could receive these funds as deposits from the Social Security Administration or even the Internal Revenue Service, according to proposals currently before policymakers. They predicted that those measures could stabilize families in need and reduce child poverty by almost half in the U.S. On a basic level, putting targets in place would help policymakers see if programs like these are making a difference in reducing child poverty, such as how many children and households receive SNAP benefits or if the Census Bureau develops a more accurate measure of poverty based on who actually gets benefits or has health care coverage due to household income.

Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., said he sees increased interest in alleviating child poverty as “investing in the future of our country.” While U.S. politics are still intensely polarized, people can still rally behind children, added Davis, who authored the Child Poverty Reduction Act.

“We are at a tremendous crossroads right now in the future of our country, and so, this will help to move America forward and not move America backwards,” Davis said.

That includes people like Younger. She said she feels one major setback away from economic catastrophe, and doesn’t know how long she can keep herself and Mylie Jai afloat.

“Any help at the time of need we’re in right now, I’m thankful for,” Younger said.

She doesn’t allow Mylie Jai to attend birthday parties because she is afraid she might get sick. Her daughter plays with baby dolls and imaginary friends, and loves to play in the park.

For Younger, having a little more money could release her from being pinned down into survival mode each day. She could focus more fully on the moments she spends with Mylie Jai and be empowered to help her secure a better future.

“What would help me is to make sure the little girl I take care of every day grows up to be a prosperous adult,” Younger said.

Laura Santhanam is the Health Reporter and Coordinating Producer for Polling for the PBS NewsHour, where she has also worked as the Data Producer. Follow @LauraSanthanam

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Poverty in America — Argumentative Paper: Poverty in The United States

Argumentative Paper: Poverty in The United States

• Categories: Poverty in America

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Published: Mar 16, 2024

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Root causes of poverty, impact on individuals and society, potential solutions.

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America’s wars on poverty and the building of the welfare state.

• David Torstensson David Torstensson David Torstensson was awarded his doctoral degree in American history from Oxford University in 2009. The title of his dissertation is “The Politics of Failure: Community Action and the Meaning of Great Society Liberalism.”
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.276
• Published online: 03 March 2016

On January 5, 2014—the fiftieth anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s launch of the War on Poverty—the New York Times asked a panel of opinion leaders a simple question: “Does the U.S. Need Another War on Poverty?” While the answers varied, all the invited debaters accepted the martial premise of the question—that a war on poverty had been fought and that eliminating poverty was, without a doubt, a “fight,” or a “battle.”

Yet the debate over the manner—martial or not—by which the federal government and public policy has dealt with the issue of poverty in the United States is still very much an open-ended one.

The evolution and development of the postwar American welfare state is a story not only of a number of “wars,” or individual political initiatives, against poverty, but also about the growth of institutions within and outside government that seek to address, alleviate, and eliminate poverty and its concomitant social ills. It is a complex and at times messy story, interwoven with the wider historical trajectory of this period: civil rights, the rise and fall of a “Cold War consensus,” the emergence of a counterculture, the Vietnam War, the credibility gap, the rise of conservatism, the end of “welfare,” and the emergence of compassionate conservatism. Mirroring the broader organization of the American political system, with a relatively weak center of power and delegated authority and decision-making in fifty states, the welfare model has developed and grown over decades. Policies viewed in one era as unmitigated failures have instead over time evolved and become part of the fabric of the welfare state.

• Great Society
• War on Poverty
• America’s welfare state
• President Johnson
• Community Action Program

Since President Lyndon B. Johnson left office in 1969 competition between America’s two major political parties has in many ways centered on their relationship to the conflicts of the late 1960s. On most major issues, whether it is how the United States is governed, what role the federal government should play vis-à-vis the states, how minorities—ethnic or sexual—should be treated, or the role of the Supreme Court in interpreting the Constitution, the real and imaginary divisions the 1960s spawned continue to profoundly shape American politics. By and large these divisions have discredited American liberalism, making the 1960s known as the decade of “liberal overreach.” 1 American conservatives have for decades argued that the expansion of government through the Great Society programs was a mistake and often failed to help its intended recipients, the poor and underprivileged. 2 Charles Murray in his mid-1980s social policy blockbuster Losing Ground flatly stated that: “We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.” 3

While historians and social scientists have generally been more nuanced in their assessment of the Great Society, there is still a distinct sense in the literature that if not outright failures, the Johnson administration’s social programs did not live up to their expectations and were, at the very least, a missed opportunity. 4 Indeed, in one of the leading textbooks on American postwar history William Chafe has argued that the antipoverty effort was fundamentally flawed because policy makers never realized that what was really needed to fight poverty was a massive jobs program and redistribution of income. Other historians have agreed. They have argued that a massive program of employment and/or large-scale income redistribution would have been much more successful and desirable than the War on Poverty. 5

This broadly negative judgment on the Great Society (and in particular the War on Poverty) has become part of the wider narrative on the American welfare state. Ramshackle and largely ineffective, it is often accused of and criticized for not living up to the size and standards set by other developed countries, most notably in Europe. The manner in which the United States fights (or doesn’t fight) poverty is an important example often referred to as illustrating this broader point. Negative pronouncements are made every year in conjunction with the Census Bureau’s publication of the official poverty rates. The perennial questions asked are variations on if America needs a new war on poverty or why decades on (since the original 1964 launch) the war is still being lost. 6 Indeed, critics of varying political colors point to how rates of poverty have barely budged since the mid-1960s and that compared to European countries the United States is far behind and spends ever less on the poor. 7 In the late 1950s and early 1960s the poverty rate stood at over 20 percent. 8 By the early 1970s this had fallen to close to 10 percent and the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest ( 2013 ) estimated rate is 14.5 percent. 9 For example, noted economist and public policy doyen Jeffrey Sachs in 2006 argued in Scientific American that the United States (and other “Anglo Saxon” modeled countries) had fallen behind the high-tax and high-spend Nordic region on most indicators of economic performance. 10 He claimed that “the U.S. spends less than almost all rich countries on social services for the poor and disabled, and it gets what it pays for: the highest poverty rate among the rich countries and an exploding prison population.” 11 Others have argued a similar point. In 2001 a National Bureau of Economic Research paper argued that the United States was indeed much less generous to its poor and did not fight poverty as well as many European countries. 12 The authors argued that this was primarily a result of a political system that by and large was geared against income redistribution and a concomitant lack of broad public support for income redistribution primarily due to racism.

The Great Society and War on Poverty programs offer a fascinating prism for understanding the evolution of the 20th-century American welfare state. Its postwar development is not only a story about a number of “wars” or individual political initiatives against poverty, but also about the growth of institutions within and outside government to address, alleviate, and eliminate poverty and its concomitant social ills. From the New Deal to modern-day reform efforts including the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 , the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid coverage through Medicare Part D and the most recent Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, one of the key characteristics of the American welfare state is its piecemeal and gradual evolution. While there have been a number of “big bang” reform efforts, overall the story of the postwar period is the incremental development of a welfare state that has evolved and changed as part of other major political and socioeconomic changes and processes. This development has not been driven only by a policy or reform initiative’s perception of success; more intriguingly, policies and reforms considered as grave political errors or failures in a particular era have over time become staples of American social policy. In this respect the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty initiative is instructive. It was largely discredited at the time and since, and few would argue that the Great Society and War on Poverty have an enviable reputation—political or otherwise. Yet the faith of its biggest and most maligned component—the Community Action Program—illustrates how a social policy can fail politically and by reputation, yet survive. Over the long-term the program itself and the ideas underpinning it have become an institutionalized and elemental part of the American welfare state.

“Fighting Man’s Ancient Enemies”: The War on Poverty and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society

I want to be the President who educated young children to the wonders of their world. I want to be the President who helped feed the hungry and to prepare them to be taxpayers instead of taxeaters. I want to be the President who helped the poor to find their own way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election … This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease, and ignorance, we shall overcome. 13 — Lyndon Johnson, Special Message to the Congress, March 15, 1965 Johnson’s cause—the thing for which he hoped to be remembered—was the Great Society, his effort to outpace the New Deal, outflank group conflict, override class structure, and improve the lot of everybody in America. 14 — Richard Neustadt, in Presidential Power , 1976 edition

When he spoke about poverty, Lyndon Johnson spoke with passion. Whether it be from his childhood growing up in rural Texas, his experience from a year out from college teaching destitute Mexican schoolchildren in Cotulla, south Texas, or in his first major political assignment during the mid to late 1930s managing the Texas National Youth Administration, the 36th president of the United States had a deeply personal relationship with poverty. Throughout his years in public office, in speeches and on the campaign trail, Johnson would frequently—no matter what the topic—revert back to images of the poor and of the basic needs and wants of all peoples, regardless of their color or background. In his public and private remarks the president expressed his belief that most people had the same basic wants and desire for education, medical care, and an opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty. Because this conviction was absolutely central to his presidential program, Johnson never saw the War on Poverty and poverty itself as being discrete policy issues isolated from his overall domestic program. On the contrary, most of the Great Society’s legislative goals and victories—the extension of civil rights, voting rights legislation, setting federal standards and providing funding for elementary and secondary education, funding health care for the elderly and poor through Medicare and Medicaid—were part of the same idea of building on the New Deal to provide and extend equality of opportunity to all. 15

But poverty was never defeated. Instead of leading the fight on poverty, the President’s Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and its local staff were accused of playing an active part in the Newark riots of 1967 , funding criminal gangs in Chicago, supporting the staging of racist theater performances in New York City, and embezzling federal money in Mississippi. Such key War on Poverty components as Community Action, the Job Corps, Legal Services, Upward Bound, and even the popular Head Start, were often mentioned in sensational news stories of violence, corruption, and financial mismanagement. Almost as quickly as it had risen to the top of the national policy agenda, the War on Poverty and its programs became one of the topics the president and White House least wanted to discuss. By the end of LBJ’s presidential term when poverty as an issue did present itself, it was in the context of the growing welfare rights movement and the newfound militancy of the poor. Revealingly, for these the president did not have much sympathy. For example, during the summer of 1968 the Poor People’s Campaign—originally a campaign idea by Martin Luther King Jr.—marched and set up a camp in Washington DC. Giving speeches and meeting with administration officials, the campaign demanded that the federal government and Congress do more for minorities and the poor. But the president was not moved. Illustrating just how much the times had changed from four years earlier, when the antipoverty campaign had been launched and Johnson had laid out his Great Society vision, LBJ complained to Agriculture Secretary Freeman: “the very people we are seeking to help in Medicare and education and welfare and Food Stamps are protesting louder and louder and giving no recognition or allowance for what’s been done.” 16 In a remarkable glimpse of the subsequent staple conservative criticism that was to define the Great Society in a post-LBJ world, the president lamented the undesirable social consequences that his programs seemed to have resulted in: “Our efforts seem only to have resulted in anarchy … The women no longer bother to get married, they just keep breeding. The men go their way and the women get relief—why should they work?” 17 If Vietnam became LBJ’s foreign policy albatross, the War on Poverty was viewed by many as his domestic one. Indeed, Time magazine in 1966 wrote that “next to the shooting war in Viet Nam, the spending war against home-front poverty is perhaps the most applauded, criticized, and calumniated issue in the U.S.” 18

Not much has changed since the 1960s. Ronald Reagan’s famous 1987 sound bite—“we had a war on poverty—poverty won” 19 —if not a wholly accepted verdict, still rings true to a lot of subsequent observers and the American public. Indeed, the chief political legacy of the Great Society and War on Poverty programs can best be understood through this prism of chaotic failure. Politically the results have been stark and largely negative for the Democratic Party. Drained by the war in Vietnam and the general perception that although government programs were not directly responsible for urban rioting and student militancy, they were not doing enough to discourage them, the Johnsonian brand of consensus politics that had so dominated the Democratic Party for nearly two decades fell apart. Beginning in 1968 Democrats in a post-Johnson world embraced what many voters deemed social and political radicalism and abandoned the center ground. Indeed, presidential elections since have often been fought on the issues and perception of the issues permeating from the 1960s. In the words of former presidential speech writer to George W. Bush David Frum, Republicans have been “reprising Nixon’s 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of a century.” 20 The results have been profound: since 1968 virtually no Democratic presidential candidate either running as a self-described liberal or labeled as one by his Republican opponent has won an election. In fact, those who have run as outspoken liberals—George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984 —lost forty-nine states each and were beaten in some of the biggest landslides in American electoral history.

For the American welfare state the political legacy and poor reputation of the Great Society programs have meant that it has often found itself facing criticism of not doing enough for its intended recipients while maintaining a deep unpopularity with the general public. As sociologist John Myles has put it, there is a general perception that “for middle-aged, middle-income Americans, the welfare state is virtually all cost and no benefit.” 21 Yet while critical in contributing to these negative perceptions of the welfare state, the negative political history and legacy of the Great Society is only half of the story. Paradoxically, many of the most heavily criticized anti-poverty programs are the most misunderstood, as they have had, and continue to have, a long-lasting impact on social and welfare services in the United States.

Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: The Community Action Program and the Divisions of the 1960s

While more famous programs, such as Project Head Start and Legal Services, have achieved higher levels of visible success and entrenchment within the American social policy framework, it is arguable whether any of the War on Poverty programs have been more influential on American social policy than the Community Action Program (CAP).

When it was launched in the mid-1960s, Community Action was meant to be a way of funneling federal support directly to local communities and involving these communities in the design and implementation of local anti-poverty action programs. It was in many ways intended to bypass conventional interest groups and involve a multitude of stakeholders. Indeed, communities consisting of the poor, local government, and business and labor interests would come together and form not-for-profit Community Action Agencies (CAAs) to coordinate, engage, and devise plans for tackling the problems of local poverty. The CAP designers believed that locally planned and implemented programs would stand a better chance of successfully fighting poverty and coordinating existing federal, state, and local efforts than any program that was centrally designed and managed through existing federal departments. In particular this was a view supported and promulgated by the president’s economic counselors including Walter Heller and Charles Schultze of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and Bureau of the Budget (BOB), respectively. Yet the CAP quickly became one of the Johnson administration’s most heavily criticized and maligned programs. At root was a basic and unresolved disagreement over what Community Action actually meant.

To some the idea of Community Action was simply a management vehicle, a way of coordinating the many disparate and overlapping anti-poverty programs existing within the federal, state, and local bureaucracies. Community Action was in this light viewed as a deliverer and coordinator of services to combat poverty. Certainly, consultation with the poor and participation of the poor were elemental parts of this approach, but this version of Community Action was not about political or social empowerment. It was simply a new way of more efficiently coordinating programs and engaging the poor in an effort to help them help themselves. 22 Bypassing state government and distributing federal funds directly to the CAAs was administratively a relatively new approach, 23 but one based on what the White House and administration viewed as the “traditional and time-tested American methods of organized community effort to help individuals, families and whole communities to help themselves.” 24 This was also the view held by many in Congress. For example, Republican congressman Albert Quie was a staunch supporter of the Community Action concept, if harsh critic of the OEO, arguing that the Community Action concept devolved power locally. 25 Similarly, Carl Perkins, a member of the House Education and Labor Committee to which the poverty bill was referred to in March 1964 , supported the idea of local community involvement and participation of the poor. 26

But to others, Community Action translated into direct political empowerment—a way of forcefully confronting political and economic power structures. It was a way of taking, and giving, power to the poor by means of confrontation. This type of Community Action was closely associated with the thinking of Saul Alinsky, a former Chicago academic and community organizer who ran several independent community organizations around the country and later became associated with some of the more radical OEO-funded programs in Syracuse and Chicago. Crucially, this brand of Community Action became the popularized perception of the program and was extensively covered by major news outlets and in Congress throughout the 1960s. 27

President Johnson’s views on what Community Action would do to shake up social policy and local government appear to be very different and certainly a lot less radical than those of other proponents of Community Action. As he would later reveal in his memoirs: “This plan [community action] had the sound of something brand new and even faintly radical. Actually, it was based on one of the oldest ideas of our democracy, as old as the New England town meeting—self determination at the local level.” 28 The tragedy of Community Action, the OEO, and the War on Poverty is that these efforts never had the type of leadership and clarity of purpose that could have made this vision a political reality and from the beginning effectively sidelined the noisy minority of radicals both within the OEO and on the ground. The anti-poverty director Sargent Shriver was never wholeheartedly committed to the Johnsonian view of the War on Poverty and Community Action. While this does not mean that he was committed to a more radical view of Community Action, Shriver’s political ambitions and willingness to cater to some of his more radical constituents and own staff meant that the fundamental confusion about the purpose of Community Action and the War on Poverty—highlighted in management survey after management survey of the agency—was never resolved. 29 When the anti-poverty director finally attempted to grapple with this fundamental problem in 1967 by amending the anti-poverty legislation to include more representation of local government, the OEO had already reached a political endgame. Once the ghettos started burning and conflict and militancy firmly replaced consensus and peaceful civil rights, neither the OEO director nor the White House were in any position to stem the tide.

When CAP was launched, Shriver expressed the sentiment that it relied “on the traditional and time-tested American methods of organized community effort to help individuals, families and whole communities to help themselves.” 30 While this was certainly the view that the president took, Shriver never consistently or convincingly maintained this position. Norbert Schlei, Department of Justice lawyer and drafter of the original Economic Opportunity Act in 1964 , has argued that relatively early on there was a real shift in the emphasis of the poverty program, a shift that came from the anti-poverty director himself:

I think the whole concept [of maximum feasible participation and Community Action] began to evolve and it got to be much more this matter of putting the target population in charge, putting the local people in charge of the federal money … I really hadn’t understood that that was part of it … I think that even while it was not yet passed [the EOA] there appeared some drift in the whole thinking about community action … Some of it came out of Shriver. I would hear Shriver say things that made me feel that there had been some evolution in thinking since I was directly involved … the idea of putting the target population in a power position and the idea of putting the local government people in a power position seemed to me to be talked about like they were much more integral to the whole idea than I had understood originally. 31

Other OEO insiders have supported this view. For example, Eric Tolmach, who worked on CAP in the OEO, has also described Shriver as sending very mixed messages to those within the agency who supported radical Community Action. Tolmach argued that Shriver felt that by supporting radical CAPs “it separated him from the average bureaucrat in town, and it gained him some credibility on the one hand with large groups of people who were for doing this kind of thing, and with the poor.” 32 This is an important aspect of the history of the War on Poverty as it ties in with the bigger narrative of the changing politics of poverty and the Democratic Party during the mid to late 1960s.

Ambitious Democratic politicians such as Sargent Shriver and Bobby Kennedy—and even some Republicans like New York mayor John Lindsay 33 —saw the radicalization of the political discourse that permeated this period as an opportunity as well as a shift in how future elections and voters would be won. For Shriver, building up and maintaining a natural constituency through the poverty programs was a way of connecting with this new type of politics and its new constituents. Indeed, some have argued that this was in fact Shriver’s raison d’être for staying on as OEO director. In his oral history interview for the Johnson library, Ben Heinemann (chairman of one of the internal White House policy task forces) described Shriver’s and the president’s working relationship as “terrible” and commented that the only reason Shriver stayed on was “ambition” and a desire to “remain in the public view.” 34 The anti-poverty director, Heinemann said, “didn’t have a good alternative [to the War on Poverty] that would still have been in the public eye.” 35 That he was intent on running for office was clear to Heinemann, who described Shriver in 1967 as being “anxious to talk … about the possibilities of his running for Governor in Illinois in ’68.” 36

But Shriver’s constituency and brand of New Politics did not have the kind of national electoral impact for which he had hoped. In 1968 the Democratic presidential coalition fell apart with Richard Nixon and George Wallace combining to shave off almost 20 percentage points off LBJ’s 1964 margin of victory over Goldwater. The New Politics never emerged as a winning electoral force; instead, it created the bedrock for the success of the Republican coalition. In no small measure this was caused by the perceived radicalism of the New Politics constituents: younger voters, Vietnam protesters, and radical civil rights and welfare activists. Many of these groups took their roots in the poverty programs and the type of militancy that became the public image of the OEO. These groups contributed to splitting the Democratic Party by pushing white blue-collar voters into the GOP and shaping subsequent winning Republican presidential coalitions. When Shriver finally ran as George McGovern’s vice presidential candidate in 1972 , Richard Nixon leaned heavily on his opposition to this New Politics coalition and scored a historic victory on par with Johnson’s eight years earlier. Similarly, in 1976 when Shriver was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, he did not win a single primary; his best showing was in Vermont, where he came in second, gaining 28 percent of the vote and losing to the eventual nominee, Jimmy Carter.

In many ways, the history of Community Action represents a microcosm for the wider War on Poverty and Great Society effort. Maligned at the time, both the very nature of the program and its achievements tell a different story. Now lost in the broader fireworks of the 1960s, the Community Action Program at the time became the prime example of everything that had gone wrong with the anti-poverty effort and a symbol of the Johnson administrations’ and “big government’s” overreach. The most famous and scathing criticism came from former White House and executive branch insider D. P. Moynihan, whose negative assessment of the War on Poverty set the tone for both contemporary understanding and subsequent analysis. 37 In 1968 he went as far as to claim that intended or not, Community Action had contributed to the past summers’ rioting: 38 Although vehemently denied in government press release after press release, this image of the OEO and Community Action Agencies as playing a prominent part in the tearing up of the American social fabric persisted in the popular as well as the political mind.

Yet for all the bad press and brouhaha it is not clear that a majority, or even a large minority, of Community Action Agencies were engaged in the types of activities as depicted in the media. Certainly, there were many instances in which a local agency got into political trouble and hit the front pages of the national newspapers for all the wrong reasons, but these instances are not representative of the policy directions taken by all, or even a majority, of the agencies that had been established by the mid-1960s. By 1967 there were almost 1,100 Community Action Agencies in operation, and only a handful of these can be described as having been marked by the type of radicalism and conflict that has come to define the entire program. And, as accurately noted by historian Alice O’Connor, these grants were primarily from the CAP’s experimental demonstration programs. 39 These facts were noted and understood at the time within the White House. Internal memoranda and research suggests that there was broad support and understanding for the real achievements of Community Action within the War on Poverty. 40 For example, in the recommendations to President Johnson of the 1966 Taskforce on Government Organization it was argued that “community action agencies remain the best available instrument for integrating and focusing government and private social service programs at the local neighborhood and community level” and that “at their best, community action agencies reflect a thoroughly American, solidly conservative approach to social problems: they are locally inspired and controlled, and responsive to the disadvantaged people whom they seek to serve.” 41 Even President Johnson himself lent the program his vocal support in the 1967 State of the Union address, which dealt in some detail with the War on Poverty and, if anything, reaffirmed the president’s commitment to fighting poverty through localized Community Action. 42 Yet, these messages never reached the broader public or, until recently, the scholarship. 43 But for all the negative press, Community Action has lived on and continued to shape American social policy.

While the OEO was finally disbanded by President Gerald Ford in 1976 , Community Action has survived as a federally funded program. Today there are over 1,000 Community Action Agencies. 44 The latest data from the National Association for State Community Services Programs shows that in 2013 Community Action Agencies served close to 16 million individuals (part of 6.7 million families) of which over 70 percent were at or below the federal poverty line. 45

But in contrast to its role set out in the original Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 , the federal government now plays a reduced part in the funding and monitoring of national Community Action. Instead, much of the responsibility has since the 1990s been transferred to the state level.

Created as a new federal agency by Congress in December 1974 , the Community Services Administration (CSA) replaced the disbanded OEO. Never part of the Executive Office of the President, the CSA remained a separate independent agency outside the established federal bureaucracy until its own subsequent closure in 1981 . That year President Ronald Reagan replaced, and Congress approved, the CSA with a small Office of Community Services lodged in the Department of Health and Human Services. This office remains in operation and is today responsible for the government-supported Community Action effort. But under the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981 the federal government’s direct role in funding local CAPs was replaced by Community Service Block Grants (CSBG). No longer do federal grants go directly to local Action Agencies. Instead CSBGs are distributed to the states, which then in turn administer them to organizations that are officially designated Community Action Agencies under the CSBG Act. 46 These block grants are applied for by individual states and approved on an annual basis by the Office of Community Services. Outside of government, Community Action is represented by the National Association of Community Action Agencies, a group formed in 1971 to provide a national voice for Community Action. This association professes to be a “national forum for policy on poverty and to strengthen, promote, represent, and serve its network of member agencies to assure that the issues of the poor are effectively heard and addressed.” 47

It would seem that if longevity is any measure of success, there is a strong argument to be made that Community Action has been anything but a failure. Although the CAAs of today are different from those of the 1960s, the requirement that Community Action boards should be made up of a combination of the poor, local and state government, and the private sector is still there. 48 Outlasting the Office of Economic Opportunity, the continued existence of these CAAs suggests that while the centralized operational arm of President Johnson’s War on Poverty could not survive on its own, the local organization, run for and by local communities, could, and has. This is a powerful testament to the idea that decentralized policymaking in social and welfare policy involving all relevant stakeholders is as an enduring part of American social policy as ever. Remarkably, this belief has since the late 20th century crossed party and ideological lines, becoming a defining characteristic of modern American conservatism.

From Community Action to Compassionate Conservatism

In the mid-1990s compassionate conservatism became part of the mainstream political lexicon. Pioneered by Texas academic Marvin Olasky in his 1992 The Tragedy of American Compassion , compassionate conservatism was embraced by a number of influential Republican thinkers, politicians, and strategists. Indeed, during this time many Republican think tanks and grassroots organizations acutely felt the need for the Republican Party to redefine itself, and move away from the popularized image of the party with a cold heart, dead-set against helping the poor and needy. John Ashcroft, Ralph Reed, Bob Dole, Bill Bennett, Jack Kemp, Dan Coats, and Jim Talent all became part of this burgeoning compassion movement. Loudest of the voices calling for a new direction was freshly appointed Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, who pleaded for more compassion in the GOP. During his first session as Speaker he repeatedly made reference to Olasky’s work when outlining the need for Republicans to adopt a new conservative agenda. 49

But it was not only in Washington that Republicans were talking about compassion. While George W. Bush had shown an interest in the founding ideas of compassionate conservatism as early as 1993 —even meeting with Professor Olasky—and had during his first term as governor made it easier under Texas state law for private and religious charities to operate, Bush would not become compassionate conservatism’s national face until his 1998 gubernatorial re-election. On victory night of his landslide win he declared that he had big plans for the future, wanting to give the Republican Party a new look, that of compassionate conservatism. 50

During the following primary campaign for the Republican 2000 presidential nomination, Governor Bush set out his vision and philosophy for what compassionate conservatism meant to him and a future Bush administration. In a defining speech summing up the work of a task force of policy analysts and academics he had appointed in February, Bush in July 1999 outlined what compassionate conservatism meant and what as president he could do for America’s poor. Central to this speech, and the governor’s conception of compassionate conservatism, was the idea that anti-poverty initiatives should be local and as far as possible designed and run by third-sector agencies. He argued that local communities, religious organizations, and other nongovernmental groups should together with local, state, and the federal government fight poverty and provide opportunity for the poor, homeless, and needy:

We will make a determined attack on need, by promoting the compassionate acts of others. We will rally the armies of compassion in our communities to fight a very different war against poverty and hopelessness, a daily battle waged house to house and heart by heart. This will not be the failed compassion of towering bureaucracies. On the contrary, it will be government that serves those who are serving their neighbors. It will be government that directs help to the inspired and the effective. It will be government that both knows its limits and shows its heart. And it will be government truly by the people and for the people. 51

To Governor Bush, such a plan to fight poverty stood in stark contrast to the efforts of the War on Poverty and the Great Society, which he accused of being too bureaucratic, government-centered, and lacking in true compassion:

In the past, presidents have declared wars on poverty and promised to create a great society. But these grand gestures and honorable aims were frustrated. They have become a warning, not an example. We found that government can spend money, but it can’t put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives. 52

The ideas of fighting poverty through local charities and religious organizations became a defining feature of Bush’s successful presidential campaign. Compassionate conservatism and the belief that faith-based organizations could revolutionize the way in which the federal government delivered its social welfare programs became one of the campaign’s core selling points on domestic policy. Indeed, as early as June 1999 political correspondent Adam Nagourney of the New York Times was writing about compassionate conservatism as being Governor’s Bush’s defining political slogan. 53 Once he took office, the president’s Faith-Based Initiative was at the center of his compassionate agenda. While the actual legislation put forward for the initiative was primarily about the federal government not discriminating against religious groups when providing funding for local anti-poverty and social welfare services, at its heart the initiative was as much about local action being the best remedy for social problems like poverty, drug addiction, and single parenthood. 54 Yet what Governor and then President Bush failed to at least publicly acknowledge was that the influence of the War on Poverty and Community Action had already extended and heavily influenced the manner in which America’s welfare state actually provides and delivers its public services. The Great Society’s, War on Poverty’s, and Community Action’s most important social policy legacy is perhaps the contribution it made toward the outsourcing of service provision to the third sector and nonprofits.

Community Action and Modern American Social Policy

Local, decentralized, usually not-for-profit and nongovernmental—in all but a few instances, these are the defining characteristics of the providers of many of the public services Americans receive today. Since the 1960s and the launch of the Great Society programs, the growth in the provision of governmental services through the third sector has been astonishing. Although in sheer numbers the Social Security program is still the number one social welfare program today, many public services are not provided through or by the American government. Instead, government services are now largely provided by nongovernment entities and nonprofits in particular. This is especially pronounced with regard to social services and human services, where nonprofit organizations actually deliver a larger share of the services government finances than do government agencies themselves. 55 Through some of the biggest federal welfare and human services programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, student aid, and food stamps, the American state at all levels—federal, state, and local—serves mainly as the ultimate payer and regulator, but not provider of public services.

Similarly, and while conceptually different, the expansion of the use of grants-in-aid programs since the 1960s has also significantly bolstered the use of nonprofits and nongovernmental entities in the provision of public services. Through grants-in-aid the federal government provides block grants to state and local governments with relatively few programmatic requirements on how services should be provided. These grants are then used and distributed by state and local governments, which contract out the provision of services to nonprofits and the private sector. 56

In 2011 it was estimated that over 30 percent of the federal government’s budget went to the direct purchasing of public services or grants to provide such services. 57 For nonprofits in particular the growth has been significant both for direct purchases and grants, growing by an estimated 195 percent for the former between 1977 and 1997 and over 330 percent for the latter in the two decades between 1982 and 2002 . 58

While the seeds of the use of nonprofits and nongovernmental entities existed prior to the 1960s, the Johnson administration’s anti-poverty and welfare programs greatly expanded and institutionalized the use of the third sector in the provision of public services, primarily through the War on Poverty programs and the use of Community Action. Indeed, political scientist and noted historian of the third sector Peter Hall saw the War on Poverty as central to the growth of the postwar nonprofit sector:

if the political right supplied the rhetoric for efforts to down-size government, liberals and progressives could take credit for actually implementing large-scale privatization, first through local nonprofit organizations—many of them faith-based—subsidized by Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and later through deinstitutionalization of the mentally disabled and the subsequent creation of a vast system of community-based treatment and care provided by nonprofits operating under contract with state and local government. 59

Conclusion: America’s Wars on Poverty and Welfare State

In his classic 1990 dissection of the welfare state, Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen outlined three welfare state regimes: liberal, corporatist, and social democratic. 60 With its traditional reliance on the power of the market, strict entitlement rules and means-testing, low social welfare benefits, and a culture of individualism the United States was described as the archetypical liberal regime standing in stark contrast to most European nations. 61 While Esping-Andersen’s work has been much criticized since—and revised by the author—the idea that the American welfare state is fundamentally different (indeed even exceptional) in size, purpose, and function from other developed Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies lives on both inside and outside academia. But what does the evidence actually show?

Traditionally, measures of welfare states and social protection look at the availability of social insurance (e.g., unemployment and health insurance) and availability of welfare and assistance programs, as well as labor market policies. 62 More often than not these are measures of total public and government expenditure. Using these traditional measures of social spending as an initial gauge of the size of the welfare state it is clear that the United States has historically spent less than other developed countries on social and welfare services. For instance, OECD data from 2014 show public social expenditure in the United States totaled just over 19 percent of GDP. 63 This is in comparison to an average of between 28 and 32 percent in France, Finland, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, and others. Clearly the United States is behind these countries. And for this year the United States was also below the OECD average of 21.62 percent but ahead of both Canada and Australia. But levels of public spending do not necessarily tell the whole picture.

Less attention has been paid to private or third-sector spending and activities and indirect variables such as the impact of tax laws. Regarding the latter, instead of authorizing direct social spending, American lawmakers have long used the federal tax code as a social policy tool. The most notable example in which the tax code works as a government subsidy by tax exempting certain types of benefits is the employer-based health insurance benefit, which is exempt from income and payroll taxation. While this benefit has been in place since the 1940s it was formalized into law in the 1954 Revenue Act. 64 The growth and development of this benefit has profoundly shaped the American welfare state and while nominally in the nonpublic sphere of spending it is nevertheless a significant de facto concession of tax revenue for the federal government. In 2013 this was estimated to amount to a loss of revenue to the federal government of $250 billion or roughly 7 percent of the total 2013 federal budget. 65 Moreover, if one looks beyond levels of public social expenditure and also include spending outside of government the U.S. position changes dramatically. Looking at the latest total public and private spending estimates by the OECD the United States actually has one of the highest rates of social expenditure—and biggest welfare states—in the world at close to 29 percent of GDP in 2011 , behind only France. 66 Table 1 shows this data for the United States and other OECD countries.

Table 1 Net total social expenditure (public and private), % of GDP, OECD countries 2011. 67

By comparison the country and welfare model the American welfare state is most often contrasted with, Sweden, is quite far behind with a rate of 24.6 percent of GDP net social expenditure in 2011 . Furthermore, if one looks at the trajectory of public social expenditure over a longer time-frame it is not at all clear that the American postwar experience is any different from that of other developed countries or the EU. OECD data going back to 1960 suggest that while always lagging behind average public spending levels in the EU (which is explained by the higher levels of nonpublic spending) U.S. government expenditure has since the 1960s followed an almost identical trajectory. Table 2 shows public social expenditure from 1960 to 2014 comparing levels in the United States, Japan, EU21, and OECD.

Table 2 Public social expenditure, % of GDP, United States, Japan, EU-21, and OECD, 1960–2014. 68

As Table 2 shows, the spending patterns and trajectory are very similar across all countries and regions. Interestingly, the data in the table also suggest that social spending has over the long term, by and large been immune to changes in government and political affiliation. For example, except for the Reagan years, social expenditure in the United States grew quite markedly during periods of Republican administrations particularly in the 1970s and 2000s under presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. Indeed, the period in which the biggest difference between levels of social expenditure between the EU 21 and the United States can be seen is between the mid-1970s and early 1980s. During this time social spending continued to grow in the EU21 while in the United States it actually decreased under President Jimmy Carter.

The above statistics and data from the OECD show that measured as a share of economic output the United States invests a similar amount to other developed countries in social spending. They also show how since the 1960s and throughout most of the postwar period the trajectory of American public social expenditure has not been markedly different from other developed economies. Instead, the difference between the United States and other countries has been the presence of nonpublic entities. One of the key findings by political scientist Jacob Hacker in his 2002 The Divided Welfare State was that in the United States a large portion of social spending and the make-up of the American welfare state is nonpublic. 69 Looking at the history of the American welfare state, there was no Beveridge report or equivalent starting point for a complete overhaul and introduction of a welfare model. The closest the United States came to this was during the New Deal era and World War II. Some have indeed argued that U.S. policy planners during the latter stages of the New Deal (and particularly during the course of WWII) were intent on moving America toward a Beveridge-style full-employment welfare state. 70

The War on Poverty and the Great Society illustrate the development of the postwar American welfare state. The Community Action Program specifically offers an instructive historical example of the ways in which the modern American welfare state—the provision of public services through nonprofits—gradually and paradoxically developed over decades out of what was and has been widely regarded as a prime example of a failed social policy. Mirroring the broader organization of the American political system, with a relatively weak center of power and delegated authority and decision-making in fifty states, the welfare model has developed and grown over decades. Policies such as Community Action viewed in one era as unmitigated failures have instead over time evolved and become part of the fabric of the welfare state.

Discussion of the Literature

There is no distinct unitary historiography of all themes covered in this article, that is, Great Society liberalism, President Johnson, the War on Poverty, Community Action, and the American welfare state. Instead, broadly speaking, scholars have focused on various aspects within these topics, which, while although often overlapping, are often best viewed and understood as coming from discrete research silos. For example, studying the American welfare state has often been the purview of social scientists. Perspectives have ranged from the quantitative to sociological to political institutional to a more traditional history narrative. 71 Looking at the Great Society, the Johnson administration, and the War on Poverty programs, this literature can roughly be divided into two categories: that which looks specifically at, say, the War on Poverty (or specific programs or components of the War on Poverty including Community Action, Legal Services, etc.), and that which looks at either of these within the context of bigger themes like the 1960s, Great Society liberalism, the Johnson presidency, or the evolution of the American welfare state. Since the 1970s more has been published on the latter than the former; consequently, books on these broader themes make up the larger and more well-established literature. They include textbook accounts and more traditional sweeping narratives, including biographies. Because Community Action and the War on Poverty never lived up to their political or policy expectations—neither vanquished poverty or revolutionized the way federal, state, and local anti-poverty efforts were coordinated—much of the general historiography about the two tends to emphasize failure—failure to fight poverty, failure to adequately plan programs, failure to foresee the conflict that the War on Poverty programs (in particular Community Action) are viewed as invariably leading to. There is also a strong tendency to view Community Action and the War on Poverty as targeting black poverty. These ideas are as common in specialist studies as in general surveys of American history and the 1960s. Examples where one or more of these perceptions are prominent include William Chafe’s The Unfinished Journey , Walter Trattner’s From Poor Law to Welfare State , Irving Bernstein’s Guns or Butter , and Judith Russell’s Economics, Bureaucracy, and Race: How Keynesians Misguided the War on Poverty . There are a few exceptions to this negativism, including Robert F. Clark’s 2002 The War on Poverty: History, Selected Programs and Ongoing Impact , Michael Katz’s The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare , and John E. Schwarz’s America’s Hidden Success: A Reassessment of Public Policy from Kennedy to Reagan . However, these have had a relatively limited influence on public or academic perceptions of the poverty programs.

Recently, a new generation of scholars have been examining the War on Poverty and local programs, often from a grass-roots perspective. Examples of these include Kent B. Germany’s 2007 New Orleans after the Promises , Robert Bauman’s 2007 Journal of Urban History article “The Black Power and Chicano Movements in the Poverty Wars in Los Angeles,” Noel Cazenave’s 2007 Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on Poverty Community Action Programs , Susan Youngblood Ashmore’s 2008 Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama , and Guian McKee’s 2008 The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia . 72 These studies are all of real importance, as they form part of a new historiography that in many respects challenges established perceptions about the War on Poverty. They provide an often detailed and rich account of a particular local anti-poverty effort and real insight into the local politics of a program. While many of these studies still focus on urban areas, there has also emerged a new sub-field in the study of anti-poverty programs that examines its rural component. 73 Just as with their urban counterparts these studies are adding nuance and much needed detail to the War on Poverty scholarship. They are showing how rural anti-poverty efforts functioned and were part of wider historical processes that were changing the complexion of American society, in particular the advance of civil rights in the South and Southwest.

Primary Sources

The National Archives, College Park, Maryland, and Lyndon Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas, house the most important primary sources with regard to the federal and presidential aspects of the War on Poverty, Johnson administration, and Community Action Program. For the Community Action Program the most relevant archival records and record groups are: National Archives, College Park, Maryland, Records of the Community Services Administration, Record Group 381, Headquarters Records of the Office of Economic Opportunity 1963–1981 . For the War on Poverty and administration of the OEO the most relevant files in the Johnson library archives are organized around the President’s key staffers. 74 The Johnson Library also houses a number of important oral history interviews of the key figures in the War on Poverty. The Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Scripps Library and Multimedia Archive, houses a significant collection of oral history interviews and tape recordings from a number of postwar presidencies including the Johnson administration. 75 Significantly, these collections are digital and housed in an online library accessible to all anywhere in the world.

Further Reading

• Brauer, Carl M. “Kennedy, Johnson and the War on Poverty.” Journal of American History 69.1 (June 1982): 98–119.
• Danziger, Sheldon , and Weinberg, Daniel H. , eds. Fighting Poverty: What Works and What Doesn’t. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
• Davies, Gareth . From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996.
• Davies, Gareth . See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007.
• Gillette, Michael L. Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History. New York : Twayne, 1996.
• Heale, M. J. The Sixties in America: History, Politics and Protest. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001.
• Heale, M. J. “The Sixties as History: A Review of the Political Historiography.” Reviews in American History 33.1 (March 2005): 133–152.
• Hecker, J. The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States. Washington, DC: New America Foundation, 2002.
• Heidenhammer, Arnold J. , Hugh Heclo , and Carolyn Teich Adams . Comparative Public Policy: The Politics of Social Choice in America, Europe, and Japan. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990.
• Hodgson, Godfrey . America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
• Johnson, Lyndon . The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency 1963–1969 . New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971.
• Jorgenson, Dale W. “Did We Lose the War on Poverty?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 12.1 (Winter 1998): 79–96.
• Katz, Michael . The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. New York: Pantheon, 1989.
• Levine, Robert A. The Poor Ye Need Not Have With You: Lessons from the War on Poverty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970.
• Marris, Peter , and Martin Rein . Dilemmas of Social Reform: Poverty and Community Action in the United States. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1974.
• Matusow, Allen J. The Unravelling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s . London and New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
• Moynihan, Daniel P. On Understanding Poverty: Perspectives from the Social Sciences. New York and London: Basic Books, 1968–1969.
• Moynihan, Daniel P. Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty. New York: Free Press, 1969.
• Patterson, James T. America’s Struggle against Poverty 1900–1994. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1994.
• Schwarz, John E. America’s Hidden Success: A Reassessment of Public Policy from Kennedy to Reagan. London and New York: Norton, 1988.
• Skowronek, Stephen . Building a New American State—The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities 1877–1920. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Sundquist, James . Politics and Policy: The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1968.
• Sundquist, James , ed. On Fighting Poverty: Perspectives from Experience. New York: Basic Books, 1969.
• Trattner, Walter I. From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America . New York: Macmillan, 1989.
• Woods, Randall . LBJ: Architect of American Ambition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

1. The Economist , Leader. “Is America Turning Left?” 11 August 2007.

2. Prominent critics have included Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, D. P. Moynihan, Irving Kristol, and George W. Bush.

3. Charles Murray , Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 9.

4. See: William Chafe , The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) ; Walter Trattner , From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America (New York: Macmillan, 1989) ; Ira Katznelson , “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order , ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) ; Irving Bernstein , Guns or Butter The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) ; and Robert F. Caro , The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (London: Collins, 1982) and The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent (London: Bodley Head, 1990).

5. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey , 242; Allen J. Matusow , “The Great Society: A Twenty-Year Critique,” in Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism: A Brief Biography with Documents , ed. Bruce J. Schulman (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), 186 ; and Judith Russell , Economics, Bureaucracy, and Race: How Keynesians Misguided the War on Poverty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 5–15.

6. See, for example, a January 5, 2014, New York Times article on the fifty-year anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s launch of the War on Poverty. The New York Times asked a panel of opinion leaders a simple question: “Does the U.S. Need Another War on Poverty?” While the answers varied, all the invited debaters accepted the martial premise of the question. That a war on poverty had been fought and that eliminating poverty was a “fight” or a “battle” was not in doubt.

7. See, for example: National Public Radio “How America’s Losing the War On Poverty,” August 4, 2012; Robert Rector “How the War on Poverty Was Lost,” Wall Street Journal , January 7, 2014 ; Erika Eichelberger , Jaeah Lee , and A. J. Vicens , “How We Won—and Lost—the War on Poverty, in 6 Charts,” Mother Jones , January 8, 2014 ; and E. Porter , “The Measure of Our Poverty,” New York Times , September 20, 2013.

8. C. DeNavas-Walt and D. Bernadette , U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60–249, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013 (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2014), 12.

10. Jeffrey Sachs , “The Social Welfare State, beyond Ideology,” Scientific American (November 2006), 3.

12. A. Alesina , E. Glaeser , and B. Sacerdote , “Why Doesn’t the US Have a European-Style Welfare State?” Harvard Institute of Economic Research, Discussion Paper Number 1933, Harvard 2001, 38–39.

13. Lyndon Johnson, Special Message to the Congress, March 15, 1965, Public Papers.

14. Richard Neustadt , Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership, with Reflections on Johnson and Nixon (London and New York: Wiley, 1976), 34.

15. One of the biggest and most important differences between the Great Society and the New Deal was that the former was to be achieved by the harnessing of capitalism and free enterprise. See, for example, the importance attached to economic growth theory and tax cuts to LBJ’s domestic program. On the contrary, the latter was justified as a consequence of the negative impact of the Great Depression and the perceived failures of unfettered capitalism.

16. Quoted in Woods, LBJ , 843.

18. Time , “Poverty: Six-Star Sargent,” March 18, 1966, Time , online archive.

19. Ronald Reagan, Remarks at a White House briefing for members of the American Legislative Exchange Council , May 1, 1987, Public Papers of the President .

20. George Packer , “The Fall of Conservatism: Have the Republicans Run Out of Ideas?” New Yorker (May 26, 2008): 47–54.

21. John Myles, “Postwar Capitalism and the Extension of Social Security into a Retirement Wage,” in The Politics of Social Policy in the United States, ed. Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 268.

22. This was the version of Community Action that the Bureau of the Budget, Council of Economic Advisors, and President Johnson developed at the end of 1963 and early 1964. See D. P. Torstensson “The Politics of Failure, Community Action and the Meaning of Great Society Liberalism” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2009) , chapter 2.

23. There did exist cases where the federal government gave money directly to individuals, bypassing state and local authorities. Examples of this were direct aid under the Office of Education, grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, programs administered by the Welfare Administration and Vocational Rehabilitation Agency, and the Federal Aviation Agency. For fiscal 1965 new obligations of these funds were $1.462 billion. See War on Poverty Microfilm, Part 1, WH Central Files, Reel 1, microfilm shot 389.

24. Sargent Shriver , Draft Document, “Charge to the Economic Opportunity Council,” December 7, 1964, War on Poverty Microfilm , WH Central Files, Reel 1, microfilm shots 452–455.

25. Albert Quie, April 30, 1969, LBJ Oral History, Miller Center.

26. Michael Gillette , Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History (New York: Twayne, 1996), 125 . Other Congressman, such as Phil Landrum, supported the EOA in 1964 and while Landrum became an outspoken critic of the OEO and Community Action he nevertheless supported the re-authorization of the EOA in 1967 with the insertion of the Green amendment. See Torstensson, “The Politics of Failure,” 231.

27. Only months after the first grants had been approved, Community Action was making the newspaper headlines for all the wrong reasons. In March 1965 the Washington Post ran a page 1 story entitled “Poverty-War Conflict Erupts over Local Control.” This report detailed how the poverty program was generating conflict over the participation of the poor, particularly in the “most sensitive battle-ground” of Community Action. This was described as taking place all over the country, with the problem being particularly acute in Louisiana and Alabama, where there was the added issue of racial discrimination. On cue, national columnists and D.C. insiders Rowland Evans and Robert Novak published an Inside Report , “George Wallace vs. the Poor,” a few days after this article detailing the local and national politics of Community Action. In this piece the duo argued that the “reliance on local leadership is the Achilles heel of the community action program” and the cause of so much of the trouble both in North and South: “In the big cities, patronage-hungry political bosses are muscling in … [and] Wallace-style segregationists are applying their deadening touch in the Deep South.” By the end of March, a mere seven months after the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, the Washington Post declared that “Civil War Goes on in Poverty Plans.” See Washington Post , March 6, 11, and 22, 1965, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

28. Lyndon Johnson , The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 74.

29. Between 1965 and 1969 numerous management surveys of the OEO were carried out by the federal bureaucracy, private management consultants, independent groups, and the U.S. Comptroller General. With remarkable consistency, they all pointed to a similar set of problems the agency faced and over time failed to come to terms with: the inability to agree on and define what the War on Poverty and Community Action actually desired to achieve and an incapacity to draw clear lines of responsibility and communication between the different levels of the agency.

30. Sargent Shriver , Draft Document, “Charge to the Economic Opportunity Council,” December 7, 1964, War on Poverty Microfilm , WH Central Files, Reel 1, microfilm shots 452–455.

31. Norbert Schlei, May 15, 1980, LBJ Oral History, Miller Center.

32. Eric Tolmach, April 16, 1969, LBJ Oral History, Miller Center.

33. For example, in a bid to steer the political debate in a more liberal and for him personally more politically desirable direction, as member of the Kerner Commission Lindsay wrote the oft-cited report summary that gave a very polarizing view of the causes of rioting. The summary claimed baldly that America was moving toward two separate societies—one white, one black—and urgent, massive government action was required. From Gareth Davies , From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 204–205.

34. Ben Heinemann, April 16, 1970, LBJ Oral History, Miller Center.

37. Moynihan was fiercely critical of social scientists and sociologists whom he viewed as having played a key role in the poor performance of the War on Poverty. His criticism of the poverty program was part of a broader movement of former liberals moving away from the Democratic Party and the Great Society. By the late 1960s contemporary intellectuals and public policymakers were contributing to the popular chorus of critiques of the Great Society’s social programs, the War on Poverty chief among them. Many liberals like Moynihan and sociologists Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell became associated with Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, founders of what would become labeled as neo-conservatism. Magazines such as Public Interest and Commentary —edited by Kristol and Podhoretz, respectively—began criticizing the Great Society and the very idea of transformative government social programs. Moynihan featured articles in both throughout the late 1960s in which he attacked the War on Poverty and Community Action.

38. Daniel P. Moynihan , “The Professors and the Poor,” Commentary (August 1968): 28 , ProQuest Historical Magazines.

39. Alice O’Connor , Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 170–172.

40. See “Memo From: Frederick Bohen, To: Members of the President’s Task Force on Government Organization, Subject: The Attached Paper on the Poverty Program and the Office of Economic Opportunity, November 30, 1966,” War on Poverty Microfilm , WH Aides A-M, Reel 4, microfilm shot 634–675.

41. Letter from Ben Heinemann, December 15, 1966, with a summary statement and the full “Taskforce on Government Organization” report attached, War on Poverty Microfilm , WH Aides, A-M, Reel 6, microfilm shots 160–177.

42. Lyndon Johnson, State of the Union, January 10, 1967, Public Papers .

43. Only in the last few years has there been a sustained questioning of many of these negative policy conclusions. These newer studies are all of real importance precisely because they challenge established judgements about Community Action. See: Kent Germany , New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship and the Search for the Great Society (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007) ; Robert Bauman , “The Black Power and Chicano Movements in the Poverty Wars in Los Angeles,” Journal of Urban History 33 (January 2007): 277–295 ; Noel Cazenave , Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on Poverty Community Action Programs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007) ; Susan Youngblood Ashmore , Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964–1972 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008) ; and Guian McKee , The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

44. National Association for State Community Services Programs, Community Services Block Grant Annual Report, Analysis and State-level Data (Washington, DC: NASCSP, 2014), 43–46.

46. See: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families .

47. National Association of Community Action Agencies , Community Action Partnership.

49. Marvin Olasky , Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What it Does, and How It Can Transform America (New York: Free Press, 2000), 6–7.

50. Ibid. , 2.

51. George W. Bush , “The Duty of Hope,” July 22, 1999, in Olasky , Compassionate Conservatism , Appendix B, 219.

52. Ibid. , 218 .

53. New York Times , “Republicans Stalk a Slogan, Hunting for Themselves,” June 20, 1999, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

54. George W. Bush, Remarks on Compassionate Conservatism in San Jose, California , April 30, 2002, Public Papers .

55. Lester M. Salamon , Partners in Public Service: Government-Nonprofit Relations in the Modern Welfare State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) . See also Peter D. Hall’s “The Welfare State and the Careers of Public and Private Institutions since 1945,” in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History , ed. Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 380–381.

56. For details of the growth in the grants-in-aid system see Ben Canada’s Federal Grants to State and Local Government: A Brief History , The Library of Congress, Report for Congress, Order Code RL30705.

57. S. Pettijohn , “Federal Government Contracts and Grants for Nonprofits,” Urban Institute Washington DC, 2013, 1.

58. J. McGinnis et al., Building Public Services through the Nonprofit Sector: Exploring the Risks of Rapid, Government Funded Growth in Human Service Organizations , American University School of Public Affairs Research Paper No. 2014-0010, 2014, 1.

59. Hall, “The Welfare State and the Careers of Public and Private Institutions since 1945.”

60. Gøsta Esping-Andersen , The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 27.

62. See: A. Hicks and L. Kenworthy , “Varieties of Welfare Capitalism,” Socio-Economic Review 1.1 (2003): 27–61 ; and Asian Development Bank, The Social Protection Index Assessing Results for Asia and the Pacific , ADB, 2013.

63. OECD, “Social Expenditure Update (November 2014),” OECD Social Expenditure database.

64. Jeremy Horpedahl and Harrison Searles , “The Tax Exemption of Employer-Provided Health Insurance,” Mercatus on Policy , July 2013, George Mason University, 3.

65. M. Rae et al., “Tax Subsidies for Private Health Insurance,” KFF, October 2014 Issue Brief. Federal budget numbers are from CBO (2014), “The Federal Budget in 2013: An Infographic,” April 18, 2014.

66. OECD, Net total social expenditure, % of GDP, OECD Stat.

68. OECD, Public social expenditure, % of GDP, OECD Stat.

69. Jacob Hacker , The Divided Welfare State The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

70. See Edwin Amenta and Theda Skocpol , “Redefining the New Deal: World War II and the Development of Social Provision in the United States,” in Weir et al., The Politics of Social Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988) .

71. See, for example, Arnold Heidenhammer , Hugh Heclo , and Carolyn Teich Adams , C omparative Public Policy: The Politics of Social Choice in America, Europe, and Japan , (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990) ; Meg Jacobs and Julian E. Zelizer , “The Democratic Experiment—New Directions in American Political History,” in The Democratic Experiment—New Directions in American Political History , ed. Meg Jacobs , William J. Novak , and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1–19 ; and Julian E. Zelizer , “Clio’s Lost Tribe: Public Policy History since 1978,” Journal of Policy History 12.3 (2000): 369–394 . Julian E. Zelizer , “Beyond the Presidential Synthesis: Reordering Political Time,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America , ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 346–359 ; Theda Skocpol , States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980) (first published 1979); Stephen Skowronek , Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997) (first published 1982); Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds ; Hicks and Kenworthy, “Varieties of Welfare Capitalism”; Trattner, From Poor Law ; and Edward Berkowitz , America’s Welfare State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

72. See Germany, After the Promises ; Bauman, Black Power and Chicano ; Cazenave, Impossible Democracy ; Ashmore, Carry It On ; and McKee, The Problem of Jobs .

73. See Robert Korstad and James Leloudis , To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) ; Thomas Kiffmeyer , Reformers to Radicals: The Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008) ; Greta de Jong , A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) ; William Clayson , Freedom Is Not Enough: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010) ; Françoise N. Hamlin , Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) ; and Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian , eds., The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964–1980 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

74. Papers of Bertrand Harding; LBJ, Papers, Confidential File, WE MC; Files of Marvin Watson; Files of Bill Moyers; Files of Frederick Panzer; Files of Harry McPherson; Files of Henry H. Wilson; Files of Charles H. Roche; Papers of Alfred H. Corbett; Papers of Bernard L. Boutin; LBJ Papers, Task Force Reports; Confidential Files, Agency Reports, OEO; Cabinet Papers; Legislative Background, Economic Opportunity Act.

75. Oral history interviews of key players in the War on Poverty and OEO housed at the Miller Center online collections include: Don Baker; John A. Baker; Ted Berry; Horace Busby; Edgar and Jean Cahn; William Cannon; Douglass Cater; Anthony Celebrezze; Jack T. Conway; James Gaither; Ronald Goldfarb; Kermit Gordon; Edith Green; Bertrand Harding; Ben W. Heinemann; Walter Heller; Harold W. Horowitz; Hubert Humphrey; Herbert Kramer; Frank Mankiewicz; Harry McPherson; Lawrence O’Brien; Ann Oppenheimer Hamilton; Robert C. Perrin; Albert Quie; Joseph Rauh; Norbert Schlei; Charles Schultze; Jule M. Sugarman; James Sundquist; Eric Tolmach; Jack Valenti; and Adam Yarmolinsky.

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Jumping Genes: Disease and Health

A second chance: species we returned to the wild, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, gerald durrell and the love of wildlife, featured author, latest book, development and strategies for fighting poverty.

One reason anti-poverty policy has not worked better than it has is because we went into it naively, without enough of an understanding of what makes it hard. This essay addresses what I have learnt about this question from my own research, most of which, is based in India.

Finding the poor

Who are the poor.

Suppose someone wants to help the poor. How would he find them? A part of the problem is inevitable: “poor” is an invented category, like tall or beautiful. While we often have a sense of what we mean when we talk about the poor, getting to an operational definition of poverty requires making many rather arbitrary choices. For example, even if we were prepared to bite the bullet and say that people who are below a certain level (“the poverty line”) are the poor and the rest are not, we would not know how to set that critical level. For one, the level of what? Income, consumption, and wealth are the obvious candidates, but one could no doubt think of others. Of these income might seem the most natural, till one starts worrying about the challenges of measuring incomes: after all, incomes vary a lot, especially for the poor who tend not to have salaried jobs, and some of that day-to-day or month-to-month variation is expected or even deliberate (think of the vendor who takes a day off each week) and does not affect what they can buy or consume (because they spend out of their savings or borrow). In other words we run the danger of calling the vendor poor because we measured his income on his off day.

Averaging over longer periods of time obviously helps us here, but creates other problems. People are not very good at remembering what happened several weeks or months ago, especially if there is a lot of underlying variation. Moreover, it turns out people have a very hard time figuring out what their own incomes are (unless they are salary earners, and even then they may not know value of the benefits that come with the job). This is in part because they have both inflows and outflows (i.e. earnings as well as costs), and these do not happen at the same time (so you have to figure out how to make them comparable).

For these reasons many economists favor using measures of consumption, which clearly varies a lot less than income (reflecting people’s inclination to avoid large swings in their consumption) and therefore is closely related to average income over the period. This comes with its own limitations: we systematically underestimate the well-being of those who are saving a lot compared to those who do not save, even though the latter might have a better future facing them. Dealing with health spending poses yet another problem: should we exclude health expenditures when we calculate consumption on the grounds that this is a compulsion and not a choice, or include it because it shows that this family is able to deal with its health problems (whereas an even poorer family might have to resign itself to endure the ill-health).

Measuring consumption, though probably easier than measuring income (mainly because people tend to have relatively stable consumption patterns and therefore you get a reasonable idea by asking them how they spent money over the recent past) is also far from straightforward. For one it can be extremely time consuming: people have a hard time recalling what they consumed in the last week unless you prompt them by specifically going through the entire list of goods they could have consumed and asking them about each of them separately. Consumption decisions are also “gendered”: Men usually know more about how much they spent on fixing up the house, while women are often much better informed about the price of onions. As a result you may need to poll more than one person in each household to get an accurate picture of its consumption spending.

The practice of identification

Given how time-consuming and painstaking one needs to be to do either income or consumption measurement right, it is perhaps no surprise that most governments in developing countries take a more rough and ready approach to the problem of identifying the poor. Instead of looking for direct measures of consumption or income, they typically use what are called proxy means tests. In a proxy means test, each family gets scored based on a relatively small number of what are believed to be good proxies for the family’s standard of living. The identification of the BPL (Below Poverty Line) population in India, for example, is based on a scoring rule which puts some weight on measures of family wealth (ownership of land, kind of house, whether the house has indoor plumbing, etc.), some direct measures of well-being (such as whether you have two square meals a day), some measures of earning capacity (education of the adults, type of job they hold, etc.) and some indices as to what one might call behavioral responses to poverty (whether children are in school, working, etc.). Mexico’s flagship welfare program, now called Oportunidades, uses a very similar index to identify potential beneficiaries: the index they use is a weighted mean of the number of people per room in a household, the age of the household head, the dependency ratio, the level of schooling and occupation of the household head, the number of children ages 5–15 not attending school, the number of children under 12 years, and some simple binary variables characterizing the housing and asset holdings of the household. Indonesia’s various targeted public assistance programs use a similar, though somewhat more sophisticated rule.

The advantage of a rule like this is that the necessary data could be collected in half an hour or less; the disadvantage is that it may not always get us where we would like to be. Using data from Indonesia, Nepal, and Pakistan that has information about both consumption and assets, Filmer and Pritchett (2001) show that between 60–65% of those in the bottom 40% of the distribution based on consumption were in the bottom 40% based on asset ownership. In other words, something like 35–40% of the poor might be misclassified but probably less, since there is no reason to assume that the consumption always gets it right.

There is however another concern. Using specific forms of wealth as markers has the advantage of being easy to measure but the disadvantage of being easy to manipulate: if I think that building another room in my house will reduce my chances of a hand-out from the government I might choose to put my savings into gold. This becomes an even bigger concern when we base the choice on whether your child goes to school. Parents who are already unconvinced of the benefits of education (more on that later) may not hesitate too much before withdrawing their child from school in order to secure their position on the public assistance list.

The implementation challenge

Any method for identifying the poor is of course only as good as the people using it will allow it to be. As we already noted identifying the poor is hard work, even with simplified criteria and it is not clear that those responsible have a strong reason to get it right. Indeed it is not hard to imagine that the person who decides whether you get to be on the public assistance list or not might want to charge something for that favor, and if you are really poor and cannot afford the price, he may prefer to hand your card to someone, less deserving, who can. There is also a natural tendency to be generous in interpreting the rules: why deprive somebody just because he fails to meet the criteria, when there is very little risk that anyone will complain if you do.

Consistent with this, a recent study in India that compares the number of poor people in the country with the number of BPL cards issued concluded that there were 23 million extra BPL cardholders (NCAER 2007, reported in Times of India 12/22/07). Another study, conducted by the international NGO Transparency International in partnership with the Center for Media Studies in India focused more directly on mistargeting. They asked a random set of households both questions about their economic status and also whether they have a BPL card (TI-CMS 2007). The study concluded that about 2/3rds of households that were actually BPL had BPL cards, which is not too bad given that the measure of economic status they used was relatively crude and they still out-performed the Filmer-Pritchett study of targeting using wealth data, mentioned above. Of course there are also inclusion errors (the 23 million extra cards) but this could just reflect the fact that it is hard and perhaps pointless to make fine distinctions within a group that is generally poor.

However a more detailed study from Karnataka resists this more benign interpretation. In Atanassova, Bertrand, and Mullainathan (2007), the authors survey 21 households in each of 173 villages in the Raichur district in the state of Karnataka. In each of these households they collect the data used for the BPL classification by the government and based on that data they can construct their own BPL list. They find that while 57% of households in the control villages have a BPL card, only 22% of the households are actually eligible. Moreover, 48% of households are misclassified. The inclusion error, i.e. ineligible households who have a card, is 41% and the exclusion error, i.e. households who are eligible for BPL but don’t have it, is close to 7%. This means that about one third of the eligible households don’t have a BPL card, while about half of the ineligible households do have a BPL card. More worryingly, when they use income as a proxy for wealth, the poorest among all ineligible households are not the ones who have a BPL card. In particular those who are just above the eligibility cutoff for BPL, i.e. those with annual incomes between Rs. 12,000 and Rs. 20,000, are less likely to be included than those whose incomes are between Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 25,800 and 42% of the wealthiest people (with income above Rs. 38,000) have a BPL card. When they investigate the reasons for the inclusion of ineligible households, the fact of being socially connected to village officials turns out to be a good predictor.

A more participatory approach

The fact that the identification process can get captured by the village elite may be one reason why others have suggested a very different approach: why not make use of the fact that small communities (like villages) can probably identify those among them that are really poor? And while individual villagers might have reason to slant their information in specific ways, this ought to be mitigated if we brought together a large enough group of them.

Bandhan, one of India’s largest Micro Finance Institutions, made use of this approach to identify beneficiaries for their Ultra-poor program. Under this program, families that were identified as being too poor to be able to brought under the microcredit umbrella were offered the “gift” of an asset (which could be a cow, a few goats, or a threshing machine) and some short term income assistance (for the period before the asset starts paying off) with the hope that this might permanently rescue them from dire poverty and put them in the mainstream of the village poor population. Following the methodology developed by the Bangladeshi NGO BRAC, which originally came up with this program, for identifying the ultra-poor, Bandhan carried out Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRAs) in the village (2). In the PRA, a minimum of twelve villagers ideally drawn from various sections of village society sit together and come up with a map of the village where each household is assigned a location. Then they classify the households into six groups, from the poorest to the richest. Following the PRA, Bandhan selects about 30 households from the set of lowest ranked households.

Bandhan’s process does not stop here. They then collect asset and other information about these 30 households and eventually 10 are picked to be part of the Ultra-poor program. We were however interested in the effectiveness of the PRA as a way to target the very poor and in some ways the results bear out the validity of this approach (Banerjee, Chattopadhyay, Duflo, and Shapiro 2008). Those who were assigned to the bottom two categories in the PRA have about 0.13 acres less land than the rest of the surveyed population which might not seem much until we consider the fact that the average land holding in this population is actually 0.11 acres. Similarly while 34% of the surveyed villagers report not always getting a square meal, that fraction is another 17 percentage points (i.e. 50%) higher among the poorest two groups in the PRA. Such households are also less likely to have much schooling and more likely to have a child out of school or a disabled family number.

The one place where the PRA does not help is in identifying those who are consumption poor, but then we also found that in these villages possession of a BPL card is uncorrelated with consumption. And unlike the BPL card, the PRA does predict being land scarce and not being able to get two square meals.

Villagers therefore do have information that they are able and willing to use in the public interest: in particular their information might make it possible to make distinctions within the population of the poor.

Unfortunately, at least in these villages, the PRA completely missed a quarter of those who showed up in our survey—their names never came up. And since our survey deliberately focused on the poor, it is not because these people were irrelevant to the question at hand. Basically it seems that even in a village of a few hundred people, “out of sight” might be “out of mind.” The PRA classifies those it finds relatively well, but what about those it leaves out?

Another concern with the PRA approach is that it might work better as a way to identify the ultra-poor, than as a way to identify the average poor person. Most people probably feel that they are superior to the ultra-poor, and therefore a certain noblesse oblige takes over when they are thinking in terms of helping those unfortunate people. When it is the average poor person who is being identified, most villagers probably feel that they are just as deserving as anybody else, which is likely to lead to disagreements and conflict.

Nonetheless the results from this very small pilot were promising enough to encourage us to investigate this issue further. Perhaps one should combine the two approaches: begin by coming up with a list of the potentially poor based on wealth (or other) data and then have the village community edit the list (to reduce the risk of people being forgotten) based on their superior information. One could imagine many other hybrids as well. In some ongoing research, Rema Hanna, Ben Olken, Julia Tobias, and myself from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, along with the Indonesian government and Vivi, Alatas and her team from the World Bank in Jakarta, have been designing experiments to rigorously compare the efficacy of the survey and PRA methodologies for identifying the poor, and to study some of these hybrids.

Self-targeting

The alternative to targeting is self-targeting. The idea of self-targeting is of course not new. The notorious Victorian poorhouses, which Scrooge commended and about which the compassionate gentleman in A Christmas Carol said “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die,” were exactly that: a place so miserable that only those who are so desperately poor that they had no recourse would want to go there. India’s recently introduced National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), under which every rural household is entitled to 100 days of unskilled public employment at the minimum wage on demand (i.e. within 15 days of asking for employment) in their village is probably the biggest single effort in this direction.

The theory behind such schemes is well-known: it does not need to be targeted, because only those who have no better alternatives would want the kind of work (digging ditches, carrying bricks) that it offers. The fact that it is work on demand also means that you don’t need anyone’s sanction to seek work. It also has the advantage of flexibility: a lot of extreme poverty is temporary and/or unpredictable. For example, when the income earner in your family is unexpectedly taken ill, it might take a long time to get your family reclassified as BPL, but the right to work is designed to be always there for the asking.

The disadvantages are also clear: what happens if there is no one in your family who is fit enough to do manual labor? Moreover, labor is a social resource: making people dig ditches in order to prove they are poor, is of course wasteful unless you want the ditch dug. If you never wanted the ditch and had some way of knowing who the poor were, you could have given them the money and let them do something productive with their time. A significant part of the original NREGS documents was therefore devoted to spelling out what the village needs to do to make sure that the labor is used to create useful (public) assets for the village.

Corruption is also a challenge. This is of course always an issue, but the fact that the NREGS is supposed to be driven and therefore there is no fixed budget, must make it particularly tempting to throw in a few extra names. This is the problem of fake muster rolls (a muster roll is where NREGS transactions are recorded) that critics of the program have talked about. For this reason, the program requires that all muster rolls be displayed in public and supporters of the program put a lot of emphasis on what are called social audits. During these audits, concerned volunteers try to find the people named in the muster rolls and ask them if they received the claim payments.

These audits do reveal a fair amount of corruption in the implementation of the NREGS. In the state of Jharkhand a social audit of five randomly chosen villages carried out by researchers from Allahabad University found that about one third of the money was lost (Dreze, Khera, and Siddhartha 2008). More frighteningly, one of the activists involved in a social audit somewhere in Jharkhand was murdered, and the presumption is it had something to do with what the audit had unearthed. On the other hand, in Chattisgarh an audit of nine randomly chosen projects suggest that about 95% of the claimed wage payments were actually made.

While 5% seems good and one third less so, it is not clear what the benchmark ought to be. This is also the problem with the other criticism one hears; that the program is not doing enough. The Comptroller and Accounts General of India, a government organization charged with the oversight of public programs, reported that 3.2% of those who had registered themselves for the program had actually worked for the full allowed 100 days and that, on average, a registered family got less 20 days of employment. In response the Ministry of Rural Development, which runs the program, pointed out that among the families that actually participated in the program (i.e. those who actually worked) the average number of days of employment was closer to 40 and 10% worked for all 100 days.

But how does one tell whether 40 days (or 10%) is too many or too few? If no one actually ends up taking these jobs, but the presence of NREGA employment at minimum wages pushes up earnings in the private sector and everyone still continues to work there, we would presumably call the program a success. We would also think it a success if almost no one takes the jobs, but the assurance that a job would be available if need be makes the populace less worried and/or more willing to take profitable risks. By contrast, if everyone wants an NREGA job, but only 50% get employment for 100 days a year, we would presumably be quite disappointed. The CAG report mentioned above, suggests that there is at least some unmet demand, and blames the fact that the program is understaffed, but we do not know how much.

In the survey mentioned above that we carried out in the West, we also found that at least in the villages that were part of our study the possession of a job card (which is what you get by registering for the program) does not predict being poor. Does that mean this program is seriously off-target, or is it that everyone wants to get a job card in order to be safe, but they actually plan to use it only if they run out of alternatives?

Most importantly, even if the targeting is reasonably good and the leakages are no worse than in other programs, how do we know that it was worth the hoops that people had to jump though in order to get the money? In other words, unless we are reasonably confident that the assets built by using program labor were worth the time and effort that went into them, how can we be sure that it made sense to go through all that to get better targeting?

Most of this could have been answered if the program had been subject to a rigorous evaluation (combined with a detailed survey of the various groups that end up not participating in the NRGS), but the current decision to extend it to the whole country means that there will not be such evaluation in India (3). The question of whether self-targeting is worth the trouble remains an open question.

The performance of targeted programs

The government of India’s largest targeted program is the Targeted Public Distribution Scheme under which BPL households are allowed to buy subsidized food-grains and other eatables from what is called a fair price shop in the village, which in turn gets supplies from the nearby government warehouse. This is the program that the government’s own Finance Minister recently described in the following terms: “About 58 per cent of subsidized grains do not reach the target group, of which a little over 36 per cent is siphoned off the supply chain. I ask you, respectfully, do not the poor of India deserve a better PDS? How can we sit back and watch helplessly the poor being robbed of their meager entitlements?”

What is striking about the numbers he quotes (from the government’s own Programme Evaluation Organization’s recent report) is that the biggest source of leakage is not the mistargeting of BPL cards, discussed above; it is the direct theft of the grains along the way. Of this 36%, 20% is “lost” in transit, while the other 16% is distributed against “ghost” BPL cards (i.e. cards issued to people who don’t exist).

The report also gives a measure of what it calls “exclusion error.” According to its numbers only 57% of the BPL households are served by the TPDS. In other words, one cannot even argue that the massive leakages are the cost of reaching all the poor people.

While, as discussed above, targeting is problematic, it is hard to imagine that the government could not do more to prevent the theft if there was the political will. Indeed we do see that in at least two Indian states, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, theft is less than 20%.

But if lack of political will is a big part of the problem and targeting is as inefficient as it seems to be, there may be a case for giving up on targeting. This would both eliminate exclusion error and bring the non-poor, with their greater influence on the political system, into the ambit of the program.

Helping them to help themselves

In the conventional view the government does this primarily by helping the children of the poor grow up with the health and education that would enable them to be full participants in the economy. It might also provide healthcare for adults as a way to insure them against things that are largely out of their control.

India has, by a wide margin, the largest number of wasted and stunted children in the world. According to the recent National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3), 48% of children are stunted and 43% are wasted, which means that India, a much richer country, has roughly twice the stunting and wasting rates as sub-Saharan Africa.

However, while malnutrition is clearly a huge problem in India, it is not clear to what extent it is a matter of access to food rather than nutritional practices. The shocking levels of stunting and wasting rates we report above turn out to correspond to the average for the middle category among the five wealth categories reported in the NFHS. It is hard to imagine that this group cannot afford the levels of nutrition that children must be getting in an average family in an average country in sub-Saharan Africa.

Moreover, it is not obvious that the TPDS, as currently designed, does very much to fix problems of malnutrition. In part it is just an income transfer and most of the evidence suggests that extra money does not turn into very much extra nutrition (Strauss and Thomas 1998). The fact the extra income comes in the form of extra food might help, but only if the 20kg. of grain that a family gets from the TPDS is more than what it would have bought in any case, which, from all accounts, seems implausible.

Given this and the rather disastrous performance of the TPDS, it might make sense to entirely rethink the idea of providing food subsidies to people. Why not give people money rather than food and thereby avoid all the problems that come from the fair price shops? It is true that the price of food varies, but the amount of money could be tied to the consumer price index and in any case there is a strong suspicion that, under the current system, when the market price goes up relative to the TPDS price, leakages increase and the poor end up with less.

There is of course still the challenge of how to make sure the cash actually reaches those who it’s meant for, but this is where information technology can help us. South Africa pioneered the technology of using ATM machines that can recognize fingerprints to deliver pensions and something similar might very well work in India. Certainly it seems worth an experiment or two.

However it is not clear that a cash transfer program, however well implemented, will do much for the problem of malnutrition. As pointed by recently by Deaton and Dreze (2008), the substantial increase in the incomes of the poor between 1983 and 2004 did not lead to a sharp increase in calorie or protein consumption, even in the group that lives on a low 1,600 calories a day. Both calorie and protein consumption went down for all the other (less-poor) groups.

This raises the concern that the poor may be under-investing in nutrition, either because they do not recognize its value or because they do not want to be left out entirely from the consumer paradise that middle-class India is becoming (4). In either case, it suggests that informing and influencing people’s consumption choices may be an important part of nutrition policy. This is reinforced by other evidence. For example, exclusive breastfeeding till the age of six months is one simple and widely recommended way to fight malnutrition and many childhood diseases. According to the NFHS, the average duration of exclusive breast-feeding is only two months. It is also recommended that breastfeeding be started right after childbirth, so that the child does not miss out on the colostrum, which contains many valuable nutrients. Only a quarter of the mothers in NFHS say that they started breastfeeding within an hour of child birth.

The challenge here is to change behavior, including behaviors that may be deeply embedded in tradition. The Government of India’s current idea is that this will be the responsibility of a ASHA Sahayogini, a local woman with some schooling who will given 23 days of training and a stipend of about $25 a month. It is not entirely clear that the kind of people who will take this job will have the energy, the knowhow, or the charisma to the point of being able to persuade other women to change age-old practices. A credible evaluation of the impact of this program is however not on the horizon as far as we know.

The poor performance of the Indian primary education sector has been in the news in recent years thanks to the Annual Survey of Education Reports brought out by the prominent educational NGO Pratham. The basic finding from these reports is well-known: 42% of fifth graders in India cannot read at second grade level, and 68% cannot do subtractions involving two digit numbers.

Yet while there are examples of schools where more than hundred children crowd into a single classroom, the Indian education sector is not underfunded by the standards of comparable countries. India spent 3.7% of its GDP on education in 2005, which is somewhat below the average for lower middle income countries (4.3%) but higher than the average for East Asia and the Pacific (2.9%) (World Bank 2007). According to a recent paper by Murgai and Pritchett (2007), government teachers in India are a paid more than other people with similar qualifications. Student to teacher ratios are high but below 40, the cut off that is used in Israel (a much richer country) for the maximum acceptable class size.

The problem, at least in part, seems to lie in the quality of teaching. According to the World Absenteeism Survey (Chaudhury et al. 2003), which sent surveyors to schools at random times to measure teacher presence, 25% of teachers are missing on any given day. Moreover, conditional on being present, they spend only 45% of their supposed teaching time in the classroom (5).

However what is less emphasized, but equally striking, are child absence rates, which are comparable or higher than teacher absence rates. Given this, one might wonder if the teachers are not simply responding to the general climate of indifference they find among their pupils. Perhaps, at the margin, a few more days of attendance by teachers will not do much for child performance. A recent randomized experiment reported in Duflo, Hanna, and Ryan (2007) tests this hypothesis. Seva Mandir, a prominent NGO in the state of Rajasthan, was facing teacher absence rates of 40% in the single-teacher schools it ran in some of the more remote corners of the state. Under encouragement from Duflo they started monitoring the teacher’s presence using a camera and paid the teacher based on the number of days present. It was introduced in a random set of schools, so that the impact could be evaluated.

Many people in the Seva Mandir community felt that while this might make teachers come to school more, it will not affect learning. In fact it raised test scores by a not inconsiderable 0.17 standard deviations, proving that if teachers put in more effort children do benefit.

The fact that better incentives for teachers can lead to better student results was also the conclusion of Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2006). They studied an experiment in Andhra Pradesh where government school teachers were promised a reward based on the improvement in the performance of their students and found a significant impact on test scores, including fields where the results did not count towards the incentive.

However the affect of incentives was, once again, not huge—0.15 standard deviation. Clearly a lot more would be needed to transform India’s faltering education sector. How are we to generate the incentives needed for that to happen?

One answer, which was at the heart of Indian government’s last major attempt to reform primary education—the Sarva Shiksha Aviyan (or SSA)—is that the community has to play a much more active role in demanding education from the system. However in a survey of 280 villages in Jaunpur district in the Indian state of UP, revealed that at least four years after the launching of the SSA 92% of parents did not seem to know about Village Education Committees, which is the main channel through which they can get involved in improving the local school and access SSA funds, while only 2% could name its members (Banerjee et al. 2006). At that time we had speculated that this could be because no one had taken the trouble to inform them about the VEC or the SSA. We therefore carried out a field experiment in the district aimed at informing and mobilizing parents around the state of education in their village and the possibilities opened up by SSA (6). In this experiment volunteers from Pratham spent a day and a half in each village, holding numerous small and large meetings where they informed parents about their rights, including the right to complain about teachers who do not attend and the right to hire extra teaching assistants (shikshakarmis) for their overcrowded schools. They also told them about the (poor) performance of the children in the village and taught them how to test their child’s reading skills.

None of this had any effect on any parent outcome except that a statistically significant but minuscule 2.6% more parents now knew about the VEC: there was no increase in the number of complaints, no additional visits to the school, no extra effort put into hiring teaching assistants. And not surprisingly, given that, it had absolutely no effect on test scores.

What we cannot yet tell is whether this indifference stems from a belief that the educational route to prosperity does not work for people like them (India, after all, has a long history of believing education is only for certain elite castes). Or is it that they believe that teachers are beyond their reach, politically and socially, and therefore are convinced that trying to make them change their ways is not really an option for people like them. However there is some recent evidence suggesting that it might be a bit of both: Jensen (2007) carried out an experiment in the Dominican Republic where he told poor parents about the returns of education, and found that their children do work harder in school when this happens. On the other hand, the only successful intervention—our UP study—was the one where trainers from Pratham trained village volunteers how to teach. One or more classes were started in every treatment village, children came and test scores increased substantially. The success of this experiment and the failure of the other interventions (the ones requiring some degree of social action) suggest that parents do care about education but shy away from confronting the teacher.

In either case it is hard to be confident that parental activism is going to solve the lack of incentives, at least in the near future. The alternative is to rely on market solutions, i.e. some kind of a program where parents are given publicly financed vouchers that will pay private school fees for their children. The usual arguments against vouchers seem relatively uncompelling in the Indian context: will it generate more segregation and inequality in the kinds of education children get? Perhaps, but given that the rural elite has already exited the public system in many areas, it is at least as plausible that it would reduce inequality, at least as long as the vouchers are set up in such a way that they cannot be used to subsidize sending children to really elite schools. Should one be concerned about parents colluding with school management to cash in their vouchers instead of sending their children to school? Unlikely, we think, now that parents care enough about education to reach nearly 100% school participation rates.

Moreover the veritable explosion of private schooling among relatively poor families in rural India in the last few years means that in many villages there are multiple private schools competing for students. According to ASER (2007) 19.3% of all children age 6–14 in rural India go to private school. Muralidharan (2006) reports on a nationally representative survey of rural private primary schools in India and observes that 50% of the schools in the 2003 survey were founded in the previous five years.

Muralidharan also observes that these schools are cheap (the median monthly fee is less than $2 at current exchange rates) despite the fact that the teachers in these schools are more likely to have college degrees and that they have a student-teacher ratio that is slightly more than half that found in public schools. This is because private school teachers are paid between 10–20% of what public teachers are paid. Andrabi, Khwaja, and Das (2003) who studied a very similar phenomenon in the province of Punjab in Pakistan, argue that the gap in performance between private and public schools is too large to be explained by plausible selection arguments: i.e. private schools are simply cheaper and better.

However we clearly need much more compelling evidence before such a radical shift would be warranted. Karthik Muralidharan and Michael Kremer are currently carrying out a randomized evaluation of school vouchers in the state of Andhra Pradesh; hopefully a number of other upcoming voucher programs in other states will also be evaluated. The challenge for all these evaluations is how to deal with the fact that supply of private schools will need to adjust to the expansion of demand that will happen when vouchers are universalized, but does not happen under experimental conditions. The fear is that fees will go up sharply as schools compete for teachers. In order to be able to answer this question, Muralidharan and Kremer, randomize both across and within villages. If the village is the relevant market for teachers, then the village level experiment will tell us about the impact on school fees and the supply of schools. If however teachers are willing to change villages in order to find work, as seems likely, this will not give us the complete answer and further research would be needed (7). In the meanwhile, the education sector is clearly drifting.

Any problem that the education sector has, the healthcare sector shares in abundance. The 40% absentee rates for the Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANMs), the lowest level health practitioner in India’s multi-tiered healthcare system, are substantially higher than that of teachers (Chaudhury et al. 2003). When a number of health sub-centers (where these nurses are based) were randomly chosen for a program of incentives based on attendance, the nurses and their immediate bosses colluded to completely undermine the incentives: nurse attendance after the experiment was actually lower than before (Banerjee, Duflo, and Glennerster 2008).

Even more worrying, though perhaps unsurprising given the absentee rates, is the fact that even very poor people have mostly stopped making use of these nurses. In the rural Udaipur district, where per capita daily expenditure for the average person is no more than a dollar a day, Banerjee, Deaton, and Duflo (2004) found that less than a quarter of visits to healthcare providers were to government facilities. Nearly 60% of all visits were to private practitioners and the rest were to traditional healers. This is despite the fact that private “doctors” are further away, more expensive, and less likely to have any medical qualifications.

When we asked potential patients why this is so, they cited quality of treatment. We know that this quality is often poor. We already talked about the very high rates of absenteeism. Das and Hammer (2007), based on a survey of public and private doctors in urban Delhi, make the point that public doctors who deal with poorer patients more often than not prescribe medicine without ever touching the patient. But a part of what patients call quality is also what the government providers complain about—they say that private providers overuse injections, in particular injected antibiotics and steroids, and this is seen by the populace as good treatment. Our data does provide some support for this view. A remarkable 60% of all visits to private practitioners involve an injection being given, though we do not have the data to say whether these are actually dangerous for the patients. The consensus view among experts is that there is substantial over-medication.

A related concern is that the movement towards private healthcare means that people are no longer talking to people whose job it is to educate them in public health practices (rather than sell them a treatment). For example, in rural Udaipur district less than 5% of children are fully immunized according our data (Banerjee et al. 2008) and it is not clear that any of the private health providers are going to do anything about it.

More generally, what makes healthcare for the poor particularly hard is that the market solutions are not necessarily particularly attractive, precisely because of the tendency to underestimate the cheap but valuable preventive aspects of medicine, relative to expensive and potentially harmful curative procedures. Subsidized health insurance is the equivalent of vouchers for the case of healthcare, and there are a number of on-going experiments in India including one that we are evaluating. However almost all of these insurance policies only pay for inpatient services for the simple reason that they are much easier to verify. This means that check-ups, tests, and all other forms of preventive medicine are expenses carried by the individual and that the insurance system actually discourages.

At this point there are some doubts about whether even this very simple product can be made economically viable. A product that covers more outpatient services is likely to be much more costly because the utilization of these services is far harder to monitor, and the government may have to get involved. One advantage of a subsidized program is that it could be used as hook to get people more involved in early detection and prevention, as in order to get the insurance at a subsidized rate the individual would need to meet certain requirements.

That such incentives can work well is demonstrated by a recent experimental study where women were offered a kilo of lentils whenever they got their children immunized. This more than doubled the number of children who are fully immunized (Banerjee et al. 2008).

In some ways government policy in India is moving in this direction. There is now a scheme that gives financial incentives for women who give birth in hospital and as part of the scheme the woman is required to make a certain number of antenatal and postnatal visits to the clinic. While enforcement of these new rules seems relatively lax at this point, it has the potential to make a substantial contribution.

The way forward

The current trend in anti-poverty policy is a rather different approach to the idea that the poor need to take charge of their lives. Instead of thinking of the poor as workers who need to have the requisite skills, it thinks of them as potential entrepreneurs who need capital and property rights and the protection of the law: hence the emphasis, for example, on microcredit. It is not that investment in human capital is unimportant; it is more that the sponsors of this view are skeptical of the government’s ability to deliver human capital and would rather see the poor earn extra income to pay for the human capital they want for their children.

The fact that it is not easy to get the government to deliver is, of course, entirely consistent with the argument we are making. The question is whether we can be confident that where the government will not deliver, the poor will; that they can and will pull themselves up by their bootstraps, with a little help from micro-credit organizations.

As we have argued elsewhere at length (Banerjee and Duflo 2007, 2008) there is no empirical warrant for this view. The basic point is that the poor neither have the skills, nor the knowledge of markets, nor the understanding of technology, to compete effectively in the marketplace. They are also, even after they get their microcredit loans, limited by their capital to the most primitive technologies and most crowded occupations, and hugely vulnerable to all the risks of entrepreneurship. The businesses that they actually run bear the imprint of all these constraints. They are tiny (the median firm owned by the poor has no employee) and heavily concentrated in the few industries that can be entered with minimal specialized skills.

What is more, the poor themselves do not expect their businesses to transform their lives. If they did they would put more effort into growing these businesses. We argue that many could easily expand their businesses, make more money, and thereby slowly climb the ladder out of poverty; but they choose not to.

None of this is to deny that the poor are not resourceful or energetic; it is just that the playing field is so slanted entreat the point of entry that only those few with enormous resolve and/or talent can make it past the starting line. Nor is it to question that microcredit has probably made the lives of the poor more bearable and therefore deserves our support.

But in the end, the government must remain at the center of anti-poverty policy, because without some help and resources from the outside the poor face an utterly unfair challenge. It does not need to do all the things it currently does (badly) and it should certainly focus more on paying for things rather than making them. Income support and strategically targeted subsidies to key delivery agents (NGOs, Microfinance Institutions, private firms) can go a long way in making the lives of the poor better, without involving the government in delivery. But we should not forget that a very important part of what the government does are things that the market will not—behavior change, preventive healthcare, education for those who live in areas where there are no private schools, emergency relief, etc. Even in these cases, the government can work with implementing partners outside the government, as the example of BRAC in Bangladesh has shown, but realistically, the government will continue to be a major delivery agent in the economy. The challenge for those of us who are in what might be called the ideas sector is therefore to think of ways of redesigning what the government does to make it work better, both in terms of choosing between what it does and what it delegates, and in improving its effectiveness in what it must do.

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• The case for this claim is made in Banerjee (2007).
• Participatory Resource Appraisals (PRAs) are a standard technique for getting a group of villagers to map out their village together.
• There is still value in trying to evaluate the impact of varying some of the program details before the whole thing gets etched in stone. Would there be more jobs created if, for example, instead of assuming that all program beneficiaries have to work for the community, some of them were sent off to work for private business, even though the government continues to back-stop their wage and make sure that no one earnes less than the minimum wage? Would there be more energy in the program if the local elites start to feel that they too have something to gain from it? Or would it somehow encourage the elite to try to “capture” the program?
• These are not the only possible explanations—Deaton and Dreze (2008) suggest that it may reflect that there is less demand for hard physical labor.
• This put India among the worst performers in the survey (only Uganda at 27% teacher absence rates did worse).
• For the experiment see Banerjee, Banerji, Duflo, Glennerster, and Khemani (2008).
• The answer may also depend on whether the scaled up voucher program will be accompanied by shutting down a large number of public schools, in which case a lot of teachers would be available to be hired.

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Compassion, Empathy and American Anti-poverty and Immigration Policy

Steve Cohen

It is difficult to imagine two people as different as Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Trump, born to wealth, taught to repress feelings; Biden, a man of the working class, deeply shaped by misfortune and faith but with the great gift of connecting over shared emotions. We’ve gone from the least empathetic leader in my lifetime to perhaps the most empathetic. In our system of government, the president is both the head of government (the prime minister) and the head of state (the monarch). As head of state, the president represents the nation and has the mission of unifying the country. He represents the nation’s shared values and symbolizes America, along with the flag, the White House and the Capital Dome. Biden routinely speaks of unity and common values; Trump reflexively appealed to his political base alone and saw the nation through red and blue-tinted lenses.

In a presidency that is less than one month old, President Biden has reassured the Dreamers that they would not be abandoned, began the difficult process of welcoming refugees, started to reunite immigrant parents separated from their children, and most importantly, refocused America on the issue of impoverished children. While no one should be “blamed” for a lack of economic success, there is an American ideology that assigns fault for being poor. However, even those who blame adults for being poor spare children from such blame. If poverty is inexplicably defined as failure, even those holding such a ridiculous view see children as innocent victims. When America’s now tattered “safety net” was first put into place, our welfare system was called “Aid to Families with Dependent Children” (AFDC). AFDC was part of the Social Security Act of 1935. In 1997, AFDC was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. Again, welfare was focused on children.

Despite this nation’s wealth and the economic boom that was supposedly underway in the pre-COVID Trump economy, the number of hungry children in America has remained unacceptably high in good times and bad. Pre-pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture counted 11 million “food insecure” children. The Children’s Defense Fund counted 12.5 million hungry American children at that time. My colleagues at Columbia’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy published a report this past November on the impact of COVID on American poverty and concluded that:

“In contrast to measures of poverty based on a family’s annual resources, we project monthly poverty rates based on a family’s monthly resources before and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The monthly poverty rate increased from 15% to 16.7% from February to September 2020, even after taking the CARES Act’s income transfers into account. Increases in monthly poverty rates have been particularly acute for Black and Hispanic individuals, as well as for children. In April and May, the CARES Act was successful in offsetting potential increases in monthly poverty but was not successful at preventing a rise in deep poverty, defined as having monthly income lower than half the monthly poverty threshold.”

The persistence of childhood poverty and the impact of our weakened economy on children has resulted in the reemergence of childhood poverty on America’s political agenda. A recent article by Jim Tankersley and Emily Cochrane in the New York Times reported that:

“The early weeks of the Biden administration have brought a surge of support, in the White House and across party lines in Congress, for what could be the most ambitious effort in a generation to reduce child poverty. The plans vary in duration, design and the amount they would add to the federal debt, but they share a new and central premise in the policy debate over how to help the poor: that sending monthly payments through tax credits to parents, even if they do not earn income from work, is the best way to help feed, clothe and house children from low-income families.”

Senator Mitt Romney has proposed a plan to provide $4,200 per year for every child up to the age of 6, as well as $3,000 per year for every child age 6 to 17. About 20% of American children live in poverty in contrast to 13% of the children in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. The rate of child poverty is highest (about 40%) in single-parent households. The current economic crisis, and the spread of poverty into families that have never experienced it before has created a wave of sympathy and political support for addressing the issue of childhood hunger and poverty.

All over America, we see an upsurge in direct assistance to those in need from people who have enough resources to help out. From community refrigerators in Brooklyn, to drive-in food pantries in Texas, the fact of hunger in the midst of America’s plenty is calling on all of us to pay more attention to people in need. Just as we saw in the Great Depression, and again during Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, American poverty is at long last stimulating a response in Congress.

The cruelty of the Trump years has been replaced, at least for now, by a renewal in America of the compassion expressed by our empathetic and expressive new president. To Trump, feelings and frailty are a form of weakness. That is why he hid the seriousness of his own fight with COVID-19 and made a show of ripping off his mask and strutting on the Truman Balcony of the White House upon his return from the hospital. Strength and winning were all that mattered. Illness, frailty, business failure and yes, poverty were indicators of personal failure and weakness to be avoided and swept under the rug at all costs.

Our new president lost his wife and a child in a car accident when he was 30 years old and watched an adult son die of brain cancer in 2015. He has dedicated his life to public service. His ability to connect one-on-one is legendary. The contrast to his predecessor is clear and his electoral victory was in large measure a response to his empathy and regard for others when compared to Donald Trump’s cruelty and extreme self-regard. During this time of COVID-induced isolation, illness and loss, we needed a leader able to express and address our pain. Pretending that COVID-19 would soon disappear made little sense to many, in the face of growing numbers of infections, hospitalizations and death. While many voted for Trump’s view of the world, over seven million more voted for Biden’s.

President Biden seems determined to use the COVID-created economic crisis to take a long overdue and non-incremental step that will reduce poverty in America. Similarly, the immigration issue has also festered for decades while over 11 million people have taken their place in American society as our neighbors and friends in what remains, a nation of immigrants. Trump began his campaign for the presidency by riding down the Trump Tower escalator and warning that hordes of criminals were crossing the nation’s borders. His administration promoted cruel immigration policies that separated families at the border and conducted ICE enforcement raids that deported immigrants and caused fear and anxiety in millions of immigrant households. Trade restrictions, new limits on visas for workers and students, xenophobic language (“the China Virus”) and anti-foreign policies were the product of the Trump Administration’s America First philosophy. Biden’s initial efforts at immigration reform have already been labeled “amnesty” and “open borders” by conservatives. But despite their best efforts, the Trump administration could not find and deport the millions of people who settled here illegally, and the courts also prevented him from acting against people who were brought here illegally when they were children. Illegal immigration and hungry children are facts of American life that require action instead of endless symbolic debate.

Trump was willing to exploit anti-immigrant impulses for political gain and rarely expressed any concern for the human impact of his policies. A significant part of Biden’s case for immigration reform will be built on stories about the role played by immigrants in our communities and in our economy, and similar to the issue of child poverty, he will appeal to the sense of compassion and empathy he is able to credibly convey to the nation. Compassion will clearly be a consistent message of his still new presidency. It is a relief to see empathy, compassion and human connection back in the White House. It is a hallmark of the American presidency. In his second inaugural speech, at the end of a bitter and bloody civil war, and about a month before his murder, Abraham Lincoln best expressed the unifying mission of the American President as head of state:

“ With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

Lincoln could empathize with insurrectionists and for their families. Surely, we can now find it in our hearts to help children, dreamers and refugees. Our new president gives me hope we can do just that.

Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Columbia Climate School, Earth Institute or Columbia University.

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Compassion alone causes many to make decisions neither in their own, nor society’s, quality of life interests. Many in California are ‘compassionate’ to the exclusion of reason, and the consequences are disastrous, as evidenced by the California Exodus, the recall movements, and the EDD fiasco – to identify a few. Those ruled by emotion and belief, rather than reason, tend to make decisions (vote) based on a knee jerk compassion, without considering the broader picture. Their “compassion toward the plight of immigrants” isn’t balanced by realization of the consequences. Politicians, and CEOs leverage compassion to achieve cold blooded ends, and the compassionate are completely fooled. Rational people balance their compassion with practical consideration:

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Anti-Poverty Programs From the Federal Government Essay

Introduction.

The Government offers several initiatives aimed at reducing poverty in the country. The programs provide financial assistance to low-income individuals and families to cover basic needs like housing and food. They are designed to improve individuals’ economic circumstances. These programs are generally administered by various federal agencies that offer opportunities different. The anti-poverty programs that have been most effective in reducing poverty rates in the United States are Social Security, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

Social Security is a government agency that offers financial support to qualified people and their families who are unable to work because of retirement, disability, or death. The benefit amount is determined by the worker’s past wages (Greszler, 2020). The Social Security program is supported by payroll taxes paid by both employees and employers. A national government program known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) gives food assistance to low-income individuals and families that qualify for it. Food goods can be purchased using SNAP benefits at supermarkets and farmers’ markets (Hoynes & Schanzenbach, 2020). SNAP offers households advice on good eating and nutrition. The federal government runs the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to determine the households that qualify for aid. Households can receive financial aid through LIHEAP to cover their heating and cooling expenses (Raissi & Reames, 2020). LIHEAP also assists families with home upgrades that save energy.

In conclusion, anti-poverty programs from the federal government have helped to reduce poverty rates in the United States. These programs have provided financial assistance to low-income individuals and families to cover basic needs like food and housing, as well as access to education and job training. While there is still work to be done in terms of reducing poverty rates, these programs have made a significant impact.

Greszler, R. (2020). Social Security Policy for the Next Administration and the 117th Congress. Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, (3559), 2020-11. Web.

Hoynes, H., & Schanzenbach, D. W. (2020). Policies to Strengthen our Nation’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Washington Center for Equitable Growth, February , 18.

Raissi, S., & Reames, T. G. (2020). “If we had a little more flexibility.” Perceptions of Programmatic Challenges and Opportunities Implementing Government-Funded Low-Income Energy Efficiency Programs. Energy Policy, 147 , 111880.

• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
• Food Stamp: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
• Supplemental Security Income Policy Project
• Rural Development, Economic Inequality and Poverty
• Global Poverty: Ways of Combating
• Poverty and Homelessness as a Global Social Problem
• Poverty: Aspects of Needs Assessment
• What Is Poverty in the United States?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, September 4). Anti-Poverty Programs From the Federal Government. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anti-poverty-programs-from-the-federal-government/

"Anti-Poverty Programs From the Federal Government." IvyPanda , 4 Sept. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/anti-poverty-programs-from-the-federal-government/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Anti-Poverty Programs From the Federal Government'. 4 September.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Anti-Poverty Programs From the Federal Government." September 4, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anti-poverty-programs-from-the-federal-government/.

1. IvyPanda . "Anti-Poverty Programs From the Federal Government." September 4, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anti-poverty-programs-from-the-federal-government/.

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IvyPanda . "Anti-Poverty Programs From the Federal Government." September 4, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anti-poverty-programs-from-the-federal-government/.

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Why the Fight against Poverty Is Failing: A Contrarian View

October 31, 2006 • 20 min read.

Abraham George is the founder of The George Foundation, an NGO engaged in humanitarian work in India, and the author of India Untouched: The Forgotten Face of Rural Poverty. In this contrarian essay, he explores why the current strategies that governments and development agencies are employing to reduce poverty are not working the way they should. Among his arguments: Microcredit programs, as they are now practiced in India, do little to help the poor.

• Public Policy

By the World Bank’s broad definition of poverty ($2.00 or less a day per person), there are more poor people in the world today than a quarter century ago. Nearly half the world’s population, over three billion people, lives in poverty. In India alone, two-thirds of its one billion-plus population is poor. Yet, the strategy for alleviating poverty across practically every developing nation has remained essentially the same for the past several decades.

There is plenty of talk about ways to increase income, reduce illiteracy and ill-health, and empower women. The increased attention given to these issues and pledges of additional financial assistance by world leaders are not matched by new and effective national initiatives that can significantly reduce poverty. So far, none of the poor countries has been able to achieve any of its key developmental targets. The emphasis is still on more funding for programs that have been in existence for many years. Yet these programs have had only marginal effect, and have not kept up with population increases.

My personal experience on developmental projects is confined to India, but the broader lessons learned there are applicable to most developing countries. What follows explains what I consider are misconceptions in the current approaches, and how the attack on global poverty can be far more successful.

International Development Assistance Hasn’t Worked

The UN Millennium project argues that it is the poverty trap of poor health, poor education and poor infrastructure reinforcing each other rather than bad planning, corruption, and ineffective execution that is hindering development of poor countries. The idea is that underdeveloped nations can be saved through more outside assistance and by expanding existing programs that are run mostly by governments. Those who support this notion want the World Bank and other international agencies and donors to make increased contributions to supplement domestic government resources. But there is very little evidence that foreign assistance has made much difference in overcoming the poverty trap in any country.

As a consequence of the financial assistance received from international agencies, national governments rely on strategies developed by planners at organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations. There is no shortage of ideas, enthusiasm, and expectations at the planning level, but what is lacking is good execution.

Planners have no responsibility for ensuring that funded projects meet their goals in the field. Other than requiring periodic written reports and demonstration of individual cases where success has been prearranged, there is little feedback or accountability.  Beneficiaries are not in a position to let their views be known, nor do they understand what is expected in the longer run.

Misuse of Funds

Governments, international agencies and donors have spent billions of dollars to address poverty. For example, in rural India, the government spends significant funds on subsidies (for electricity, fertilizer, fuels, etc.), food rations, price supports, land allocation/distribution, job training and financial assistance for initiatives in agriculture and small businesses. Loans from the World Bank and other international agencies and bilateral aid supplement domestic government resources. But who has benefited from all these programs and assistance?

The beneficiaries are usually corrupt officials who manage and distribute funds, and landlords and powerbrokers who directly or indirectly extract benefits for themselves. In India, over 90% of the agricultural land is owned and partly cultivated by less than 10% of the rural population who are termed farmers; others are mostly laborers. Governments allocate land to the poor, but they are unable to utilize it because of limited water resources, bad soil conditions, and/or the inability to secure credit. Larger subsidies benefit bigger farmers, but the poor do not gain much directly from any government programs.

The presumption that with more money, corrupt and inefficient governments and bureaucratic institutions will utilize funds efficiently and improve the deplorable conditions of the poor is an illusion. There are too many impediments to poverty reduction: bribery, political influence in the allocation of land and/or credit, diffused focus and priorities, poor execution, a shortage of rural infrastructure, and social inequality, among other factors. Supporters of the “more money” approach should be reminded of what the late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi once admitted: Less than 15 cents of each dollar in assistance intended for the poor finally gets to them. That is not to say that assistance should not be increased. But the real focus should be on ensuring that the allocated resources reach the poor.

Corruption and misallocation of development funds are ultimately the result of failed governance. Why bad governance? Unethical and illegal practices flourish in countries without free and independent press to investigate wrongful practices. Where the press is not sufficiently strong, there is little chance of preventing the “opportunistic behavior” of individuals, businesses and officials. Corruption can be reduced by assuring press freedom and strengthening private social institutions (such as advocacy groups) that stay independent. (Surprisingly, a democracy like India does not permit private radio stations to broadcast daily news!)

If citizens cannot rely on an impartial judicial system, there is little hope for a just and fair society. Societies that do not protect property and persone from predators cannot expect to create sufficient wealth for everyone. It is the erosion of press independence and the weakness of legal system that are most troubling.

The Limited Role of NGOs

There are several participants in the developmental arena: national and foreign governments, international agencies, private companies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The role of NGOs has gained attention in recent years as they focus on micro-issues and provide grass-roots assistance. Many have taken up projects to improve the quality of education and healthcare, while focusing on specific critical areas such as HIV/AIDS, illiteracy and women’s empowerment.

NGOs have been advocates for the poor, pointing out issues of concern and presenting ideas for improvement, often figuring out how to press through the corrupt and self-serving regulations faced by their beneficiaries. Several are involved in income generation activities, offering microcredit or assisting with water resource management and use of indigenous technology. Some private companies have formed NGOs to attract grants from their governments and international agencies. These efforts usually complement those of governments in the implementation process.

Despite positive contributions, NGOs have not been involved in major developmental undertakings intended to create large employment and wide income generation through sustainable businesses. This is attributable to their lacking good managerial skills and organizational structure to take up business ventures. Further, donor funds are usually restricted to narrowly defined projects. Consequently, the role that NGOs are best suited to play is in support of projects funded by governments and international agencies, or those limited initiatives approved by private donors.

Unfortunately, those NGOs that actually carry out developmental work in the field are stuck within programs specified by planners in developmental agencies and donor institutions. New ideas that deviate from those already specified by planners seldom qualify for any funding. Thus, project proposals are prepared to reflect the requirements set by these planners in terms of methodology and outcomes. There is little initiative from the ground up, and no real feedback. Demonstrating compliance on paper ends up more important than actually getting the job done effectively. As a result, recipients of developmental funds spend significant time preparing reports for the planners to qualify for continued funding, and less time worrying about what benefits the poor.

Microfinance Is Not a Panacea

The expression “social entrepreneurship” was coined to reflect corporate benevolence toward the poor. Muhammad Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1976, intended exactly that when he started giving poor people credit and assisting them in their local business ventures. Subsequently, many NGOs around the world started offering small loans to women who could otherwise not obtain credit from commercial banks. As different microcredit programs sprang up in poor countries, governments, international agencies and private donors joined in with necessary capital. Several experts in these institutions termed microcredit a revolutionary concept, and there is growing belief among many that it might be the way to solve poverty.

Today, some for-profit funds and supposedly not-for-profit organizations market microcredit lending in developing countries, and even offer advertised returns on investment. One such microcredit intermediary in India recently publicized that it has been charging 36% interest until recently, when it dropped the rate to 26% for some borrowers by making the lending process more efficient. After all, it argued, credit card companies charge as high as 28% interest for credit-risk customers.

The assumption is that poor people can be rescued quickly and easily with a modicum of money. (Microcredit is intended mainly for starting or expanding small businesses run by borrowers.) The claim is that microcredit (loans of around $100) has lifted tens of millions out of poverty in the developing world. However, assertions that more than 90% of the people who receive microcredit are poor, that most of them succeed in businesses started with these loans, and that they repay the loans at 24% annual interest or higher, go unchallenged.

So far, there has not been any outcry on the high rate of interest. The poor do not have any voice in, or understanding of, financial markets. They are happy to get loans to meet personal emergencies (such as expenses toward surgery, marriage or dowry) or to pay off financial obligations to local money lenders who charge even higher rates. Microcredit intermediaries claim that this is social entrepreneurship, and not living on the backs of the poor.

In my personal experience in rural India, I have observed that a small number of people, mostly village leaders and their family members, operate the few shops and businesses. They are the only ones who have the support mechanisms, knowledge, and skills to make a business succeed. A great majority of the poor rural populations do not have the ability or experience to start or run businesses, with or without access to credit. To expect them to succeed in business is unrealistic. They are uneducated and labor for landowners and for the few nearby businesses. At best, they might benefit from the trickle down effect if landlords and small businesses prosper.

The George Foundation is engaged in poverty alleviation projects in rural Tamil Nadu, India, focusing on income generation activities, education, healthcare and community development. The foundation has studied some 17 villages and over 50 microcredit programs in South India. Data show that less than 5% of those receiving micro-loans start any business of their own. One preferred activity is buying and selling sheep, hopefully at a profit equal to the wages foregone. These types of activities are unsustainable in the long run. Consequently, less than 2% continue beyond the first three years, and very f ew succeed in any such “business” with small amounts of money and little or no support, training, or skills.

Microcredit lenders are not concerned about what the borrowers do with their loans. Loans are usually made to individuals, but guaranteed by groups that can demonstrate their capacity to repay. Most borrowers of microcredit repay loans from income received at regular jobs, or from grants provided by governments for self-help programs. Not surprisingly, it is the intermediaries — commercial banks and loan facilitators — that gain the most from the spread between the cost of funds for the intermediaries and the loan interest charged by them. Commercial banks in India, for example, receive funds for microcredit programs from the government-run NABARD bank at 5% to 6%. They then lend at 10% to12% to a microcredit intermediary which, in turn, lends at 24% to 36% to the final borrower.

The assurance of loan repayment makes microcredit popular among lenders, in addition to the high interest charged. Borrowers are motivated to repay loans because of an expectation of future monetary benefits. If one borrows and repays twice (no need to start any business, but maintain good paperwork), then he/she becomes eligible for a grant for $100 or more from a separate government program (each state offers its own variation of this facility). The free money from the government can be used to repay the third micro-loan made to that beneficiary. The government is short the amount of the grant, but the borrower is debt free, and the microcredit middle man is assured of capital and high returns.

Why this round about way to offer free money when there are several direct means to reduce the debt burden of the poor? The answer probably lies in the fact that this form of “hand-out” is invisible within “social entrepreneurships”. Moreover, major financial institutions have become embroiled in this commercial activity. A new breed of educated and well-trained loan sharks, with bank support, is now in the microcredit business in India. Microcredit has become a trendy cure-all. If poverty alleviation were a matter of lending, the world could eradicate poverty easily. It would cost about $300 billion at $100 per person — a small sum in comparison to the trillions of dollars already expended over the past half a century. The present form of microcredit, as practiced in India, results in little or no sustainable development benefit for the poor. 

Importance of Private Sector Participation

In developing countries, the government bears the primary responsibility for delivering basic services for the poor. It has traditionally been the agent for healthcare, education and job training, especially due to the inability of rural populations to pay for basic services. A significant portion of the costs associated with public services will continue to be borne by the state until rural incomes rise and/or until the private sector finds it attractive to be involved in such efforts.

Government-run institutions have, for the most part, failed to offer quality services because they are unable to motivate those who carry out the tasks in the field. Those who can afford to pay for quality services rely on private providers. Even those who work for government go to private clinics for their healthcare needs, and send their children to private schools. Quality will never improve unless service providers have the incentive to serve the poor. Until then, the “haves” have markets to choose from, while the “have-nots” have bureaucrats to dictate to them.

But, lack of affordability should not prohibit private sector participation. With NGOs as project facilitators, opportunities exist for public-private partnership. Private institutions can deliver services at reduced prices, but at a profit, within a competitive and independently monitored system where the costs are subsidized or even fully paid for by the government.

In developing countries there is no serious effort to involve private companies, though most rural areas are, in fact, ideally suited for industries in herbal products , alternate fuels, cement and tile, lumber and pulp, meat, dairy and poultry. These private industries should function in a free market with sufficient checks and balances to ensure that they operate in a socially and environmentally responsible manner. By offering job opportunities in villages, they would alleviate migration to cities for employment.

Financial incentives like low-interest loans and tax breaks, and physical infrastructure improvements will motivate private companies to build factories in rural areas. Elimination of controls on the sale of agricultural products, and assistance in finding new markets will attract many businesses. These measures will in turn improve the demand for produce and boost commodity prices to levels that can financially sustain rural families. Further, international agencies and donors must consider equity participation in companies instead of simply channeling funds through governments or offering grants. They should provide loans at low interest rates directly to local entrepreneurs who can demonstrate an ability to run successful businesses. In short, some of the available developmental funds must be used to support commercial activities in deprived communities. With more economic activity, the poor labor class can gain employment at better wages.

Government’s role ought to be that of a catalyst. There should be no room for bribes. The focus should be to provide incentives for private (and community) participation. When private individuals and institutions find it worthwhile to take risks and invest in economically depressed areas, there will be sustainable development and poverty reduction. As incomes rise, there will be less need for government involvement in the delivery of many services currently provided.

It is not money alone but integrity and ideas that will make the real difference. A noted economist once asked me how I would go about improving the productivity of rural laborers on our farms. Creative thinking was my thought! We have instituted a program of de-worming drugs every six months, and daily iron tablets and protein-rich nutritional supplements prepared from locally available grains and nuts. Our workers wear wide hats protecting them from direct sunlight. These are simple, low cost measures, but they have contributed to a healthier and more productive labor force on our farms. For less than $10 per person a year, we have doubled their productivity!

A New Model for Corporate Philanthropy

Contrary to the recognized activities of NGOs, our foundation has embarked on a path similar to those of private organizations: We build institutions, develop human resources and managerial skills, and undertake major commercial projects — for humanitarian reasons. One project currently underway is a 250-acre banana farm, the second largest in South India. My life-long experience in business, my convictions about free and open markets and the need to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit in the individual have helped me not to rely on donor funds alone. Instead, our foundation has invested in sustainable projects that generate “profits” as well as steady income for the poor.

Our decision to confine business activities to farming results from the fact that the rural adult population in India is generally illiterate and lacks industrial skills. It is farming that gives them opportunities to better their lives; it is what villagers have a natural affinity for; and it is an industry where large numbers can be employed.

With the goal of empowering poor women and elevating their income-generating capacity, The George Foundation set up Baldev Farms, a “learn while you earn” program. The farm uses precision agricultural tools, organic fertilizers and superior technology in drip irrigation to conserve water. Apart from the farm workers’ daily wages, we set a portion of the profits generated from the sale of produce in a savings account to be used at the end of five years for the purchase of one third to one half acre of land for each family. Families will then cultivate their newly purchased land, sharing resources, such as wells and tractors. The foundation will remain a support organization to help address concerns and difficulties, while also offering know-how and access to markets.

Within three years of starting Baldev Farms, more than 150 villagers, mostly women, have found labor and supervisory employment in the field; hundreds of others have benefited indirectly. Most have already come out of poverty, paid off their debt and freed themselves from bonded labor status. As the foundation expands its farming activity in high-value fruits and vegetables, it will soon generate sufficient cash flow to finance other humanitarian initiatives.

Though the final chapter on this program is not yet written, the concept of offering each poor family a piece of the land to cultivate profitable crops is proving to be sound. With the profit sharing plan in place, everyone in our farm is highly motivated, takes initiatives and works hard. It is becoming increasingly clear to us that good management and a dedicated work force are assuring profitability to empower the poor.

Admittedly, our “corporate” approach to philanthropy cannot be replicated by most NGOs. Only private for-profit companies have skill bases and resources to undertake such business ventures. But they must recognize that market opportunities can be tapped only when the purchasing power of consumers rises. Hence, for the foreseeable future, investment in the rural sector ought to be toward production as opposed to selling to the “bottom of the pyramid.” In the longer run, it is competitive markets and involvement of the community in sustainable development projects that will solve poverty.

As long as significant poverty exists around the world, and the disparity between the rich and the poor widens, private companies in developing countries need to make a contribution to solving the problem. A dialogue must begin between and among business leaders on devising rules for business conduct in deprived communities. The model must consider how poor people can be brought into the mainstream of consumers with sufficient purchasing power within a reasonable time period. Those who work must earn enough to be able to come out of poverty. Minimum wages and benefits must be adequate to meet at least basic human needs, and farmers must be able to sell their crops at prices that assure a fair net gain. Economic success and social justice must go hand in hand.

There is serious concern in many circles, and rightly so, about whether the private sector can be trusted to operate fairly in communities that are poor. The fear is that free markets mean exploitation, citing what they call the “Wal-Mart Syndrome” of forcing suppliers, especially those from poor countries, to offer products at prices that leave little gain for workers.

Troubling issues like this one will always exist. But they can be addressed through effective enforcement of laws and regulations concerning minimum wages, worker safety and benefits, non-competitive practices and environmental protection. Private companies must resist the temptation to extract government funds for their business activities in the name of social entrepreneurship. They must recognize that it is in their long-term interest to win the support of the communities where they operate. Repressive local norms in compensation and treatment of labor must be replaced with fair practices that assist the poor in adequately caring for their families. Market forces of supply and demand and competition for gaining a dedicated labor force and loyal consumers are powerful factors in motivating good behavior on the part of corporations.

There are no easy answers. Poverty, in large part, can be solved if the poor gain new skills and if more jobs become available in the rural sector. For some, the solution lies in ownership of a permanent income generating asset: land. The poor need to have the opportunity to own and develop land, and grow profitable crops that can be sold in a competitive market.

More money is not a prerequisite for success; proper use of available funds is. There is no substitute for good planning, effective organization and execution with accountability. Only those who bear financial risk can be expected to perform effectively.

Handouts will not solve poverty; neither will it be solved by grand government projects, or by piecemeal interventions of NGOs. Instead, poverty will be solved with vibrant economic activity driven mostly by the private sector. The hundreds of millions of new jobs that are needed each year will come mainly from corporate business ventures in rural areas. The developmental strategy to address poverty must embrace this reality.

A market-based approach to poverty reduction will result in income and wealth creation, and lay the groundwork for the next generation to avail of a wider range of opportunities with enhanced resources.

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The Anti-Poverty, Targeting, and Labor Supply Effects of Replacing a Child Tax Credit with a Child Allowance

The replacement of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) with a child allowance has been advocated by numerous policymakers and researchers. We estimate the anti-poverty, targeting, and labor supply effects of such a change by linking survey data with administrative tax and government program data which form part of the Comprehensive Income Dataset (CID). We focus on the provisions of the 2021 Build Back Better Act, which would have increased maximum benefit amounts to $3,000 or $3,600 per child (up from $2,000 per child) and made the full credit available to all low and middle-income families regardless of earnings or income. Initially ignoring any behavioral responses, we estimate that the replacement of the CTC would reduce child poverty by 34% and deep child poverty by 39%. The change to a child allowance would have a larger anti-poverty effect on children than any existing government program, though at a higher cost per child raised above the poverty line than any other means-tested program. Relatedly, the child allowance would allocate a smaller share of its total dollars to families at the bottom of the income distribution—as well as families with the lowest levels of long-term income, education, or health—than any existing means-tested program with the exception of housing assistance. We then simulate anti-poverty effects accounting for labor supply responses. By replacing the CTC (which contained substantial work incentives akin to the EITC) with a child allowance, the policy change would reduce the return to working at all by at least $2,000 per child for most workers with children. Relying on elasticity estimates consistent with mainstream simulation models and the academic literature, we estimate that this change in policy would lead 1.5 million workers (constituting 2.6% of all working parents) to exit the labor force. The decline in employment and the consequent earnings loss would mean that child poverty would only fall by at most 22% and deep child poverty would not fall at all with the policy change.

This paper, which has been subject to a limited Census Bureau review, is released to inform interested parties of research and to encourage discussion. Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not represent the views of the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau has reviewed this data product for unauthorized disclosure of confidential information and has approved the disclosure avoidance practices applied to this release, authorization numbers: CBDRB-FY2021-CES005-024 and CBDRB-FY2021-CES005-028. We thank many employees of the U.S. Census Bureau for their assistance; Jacob Bastian, Pablo Celhay, Jeffrey Grogger, Elaine Maag, Nikolas Mittag, James Sullivan, Scott Winship, and participants at the NTA Annual Conference, ASSA Annual Meeting, and Niskanen Center event on child tax credits for helpful discussions and comments; and Gillian Meyer, Connor Murphy, and Angela Wyse for excellent research assistance. We appreciate the financial support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Menard Family Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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• October 6, 2021

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The hardest part about growing up poor was knowing I couldn’t mess up. Not even once.

by David Tran

I think we have an ideology about talent that says that talent is a tangible, resilient, hardened, shiny thing. It will always rise to the top. To find and encourage talent, all you have to do as a society is to make sure the right doors are open. Free campus visits, free tuition, letters to the kids with high scores. … You raise your hand and say, “Over here!” And the talent will come running, but that’s not true … [i]t’s not resilient and shiny … [t]alent is really, really fragile.

— Malcolm Gladwell

I grew up in East Oakland, California, as the youngest son of Teochew-Vietnamese immigrants. School was always easy for me — I never really felt challenged throughout elementary school. Amid the droves of teacher strikes and substitutes, the truly dedicated teachers of Oakland’s Maxwell Park Elementary School were few and far between.

But in fifth grade, I was fortunate enough to be taught by Mrs. Harris, who changed my life forever. On weekends, Mrs. Harris invited students to her house for lunch. Using her own money, she gave away trinkets to those who did well on assignments.

And during a parent-teacher conference, she did something unthinkable and so incredible that I didn’t fully comprehend its impact until years later.  She begged my parents to have me apply to private middle schools to get me out of the failing Oakland public schools .

My parents, who don’t speak much English, did not understand what was happening. They didn’t know what a private school was, let alone why anyone would pay for school when there was free public education. Neither graduated from high school before fleeing from Vietnam to America with my eldest brother in tow. While they valued education for their children, they thought of education as uniform and binary — you either went to school or you didn’t. And as long as their kids went to school, that was good enough.

I had taken a shot at the big leagues, trying to get into a better school, and I had been rejected.   I wasn’t smart enough. I hadn’t worked hard enough. I wasn’t enough.

If it had been up to my parents, nothing would have happened. But Mrs. Harris was hell-bent on making sure that I would have this opportunity for a better education. Every day, she would ask me, “So have you started applying yet?” “Did your parents look into Head-Royce yet?”

After weeks of hounding my parents, Mrs. Harris, my brother, and most of my 16 aunts and uncles managed to convince my parents to look into this private school idea. Thanks to their efforts, I ended up applying to the prestigious Head-Royce School in Oakland, taking the admissions test, and getting accepted.

But I didn’t attend. Instead, I ended up going to the local public middle school because  my parents and I had failed to turn in the financial aid forms before the deadline . It took a village to push my parents to apply to Head-Royce, but there wasn’t anyone around to help us with something as mundane yet essential as filling out the financial aid forms on time. There probably were people who could have helped us, but my parents didn’t want to bother anyone by asking for help. That was their immigrant mindset: You shut up, work hard, and definitely don’t burden others.

I got a voicemail from the head of admissions at Head-Royce, asking if I still wanted to enroll despite the lack of financial aid. Growing up, I never really thought that we were poor, or at least I didn’t understand what that meant. The words “federally assisted lunch program” actually made me feel special since I got free lunches at school.

But once I found out that the school’s tuition cost more than my parents made in a year, I realized there was a world beyond what I had known. Before applying, I had no idea that Head-Royce or private schools even existed, but now that I had a window into that world, it felt like the window had been boarded over, shutting me out.

Here’s the crazy part — I internalized this whole process to mean that I wasn’t good enough for Head-Royce. I had taken a shot at the big leagues, trying to get into a better school, and I had been rejected.   I wasn’t smart enough. I hadn’t worked hard enough. I wasn’t enough.

At first, my parents complained about the unfair system. However, soon after, both my parents and I took the closed door to mean that I wasn’t good enough, that I hadn’t scored high enough on the tests, that Head-Royce   didn’t want me after all. If I had and if they did, they would have given me a scholarship. I felt awful and ashamed. I wasn’t good enough.

It’s a feeling that has persisted throughout my life, even as I attended an excellent college and started a successful company. It’s a feeling that many people like me — people who have fought their way out of poverty — struggle with. This is a problem we need to fix, and fast.

I really needed someone to believe in me

I might have given up on myself, but Mrs. Harris refused to give up on me. When she found out that I wasn’t going to Head-Royce, she went to work on a backup plan. We tried to get into a better public middle school in the wealthy part of Oakland, but nothing came of our efforts. Undeterred, Mrs. Harris contacted and pushed to get me into the Heads Up  summer program, which offered free classes at Head-Royce for underserved kids.

During summer classes at Heads Up, I felt challenged academically for the first time ever and really started to love school. That newfound appreciation for education also rubbed off on my parents — they somehow saved up enough from their minimum wage jobs to pay for a math tutor whose house I went to twice a week that year. Mrs. Harris changed everything. I hope she’s reading this, since I don’t think I ever even said thank you.  Thank you.

Given the long odds we beat to get here, sometimes in our heads, our world feels very fragile; at any moment, the clock could strike midnight

Those summer classes gave me hope during sixth grade, which ended up feeling like a lost year. I can’t remember any of the teachers’ names. I just have memories of the English teacher who the kids made cry and the substitute math teacher who yelled at me when I corrected him on how to do long division — never mind why a sixth-grade class was still being taught long division.

I applied again to Head-Royce, this time for seventh grade. We applied for financial aid as soon as it opened up and had several people check over the forms to make sure everything looked right. Thanks to the generosity of the Malone Family Foundation , I received a financial aid package that allowed me to attend the school.

Head-Royce felt like paradise. Everyone there was smart and loved to learn. The coursework was actually challenging. I loved it. Even so, I never felt like I fit in. I never, ever told anyone about what had happened when I had previously applied to Head-Royce — it remained a huge, shameful, dirty secret. I don’t think I ever got over that feeling that I wasn’t good enough, though it certainly motivated to me to work my butt off.

Years later, at Stanford, where a large percentage of the student body receives some financial aid, I maintained that internalized feeling of not belonging in this world, of not being good enough. I never talked about it. Not at Head-Royce. Not at Stanford.

Why the feeling of not being good enough haunts kids who grew up poor

On my way to a friend’s new luxury apartment in San Francisco last month, I listened to an episode of  Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast called “Carlos Doesn’t Remember.” I quickly found myself in tears — the protagonist’s story was my story. It was probably many of your stories.

Carlos is a smart, hard-working high school sophomore from a bad part of LA. He was fortunate enough to meet Eric Eisner, a former entertainment lawyer who founded a program called  YES  to help kids like Carlos get a scholarship to an elite private school. It sounds like he’s got his ticket out, but it’s never that simple. You don’t just leave behind where you came from because you get a scholarship to a good school.

Gladwell revisits a moment in Carlos’s life when his private school teachers were concerned that he didn’t play with the other kids during recess. It wasn’t due to a lack of friends, because he was usually very gregarious in the classroom. Nor was it due to him feeling self-conscious as the only Hispanic kid at the predominantly white school. Eisner found out:  He literally couldn’t play because his shoes were three sizes too big and he couldn’t afford another pair .

Carlos had also been accepted to a prestigious boarding school but didn’t enroll because he didn’t want to leave his sister alone in foster care. He doesn’t like to talk about these things — in fact, he claims he doesn’t remember any of these incidents.

Carlos’s story highlights a problem that I’ve experienced but was never able to articulate. While scholarships are supposed to be an equalizer — and we as a society should continue to make education more affordable and scholarships available — the real battle underprivileged kids face can be much more insidious and intangible. My co-founder Ricky Yean touched on this battle in “Why it’s so hard to succeed in Silicon Valley when you grew up poor” :

Tangible inequalities — that which can be seen and measured, like money or access — get the majority of the attention, and deservedly so. But inequalities that live in your mind can keep the deck stacked against you long after you’ve made it out of the one-room apartment you shared with your dad. This is insidious, difficult-to-discuss, and takes a long essay to explain.

Being poor, you cannot afford to fuck up the opportunity that comes along

After listening to Gladwell’s podcast, I realized that both Ricky and I — any many others who’ve tried to escape poverty — are motivated by survival instinct.  Once you see a way out, you become laser-focused on that opportunity. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a scholastic or sports scholarship, or a less traditional path. Being poor, you cannot afford to fuck up the opportunity that comes along.

You don’t take it for granted because you understand you’re playing by someone else’s rules. Even today, Ricky and I often feel like that. Given the long odds we beat to get here, sometimes in our heads, our world feels very fragile; at any moment, the clock could strike midnight. We’ve encouraged each other to talk more openly about these feelings, in an effort to strengthen and reinforce the reality of what we’ve built.

As Gladwell points out, it’s often only possible for poor kids like me to reach their potential when we have a champion who can not only show us the way but help carry us there. Mrs. Harris was that hero for me. She wasn’t a big-shot lawyer in this case; she was just a teacher who believed in me. She made opportunities happen for me, and she persisted when things hit unexpected roadblocks.

But not every kid is lucky enough to have a Mrs. Harris. Or an Eric Eisner. Remembering that and thinking about how many underprivileged kids must be experiencing this on a daily basis is why Carlos’s story brought me to tears.

We as a society need to do more to not only find these lost diamonds in the rough but dig them up, champion their cause, and push open doors for them — like Mrs. Harris did for me.

We always need more Mrs. Harrises and Eric Eisners, but this isn’t just a call for champions. I believe that in order to level the playing field for underprivileged, minority, or other disadvantaged groups, providing opportunities is not enough — we need to start talking openly about the differences in background, mindset, and opportunities that persist even after you attempt to level the field.

In the face of adversity, you have far fewer chances, a much smaller margin for error

When discussing diversity, people often bring up the idea of a pipeline, where the focus is on bringing in as many qualified, underrepresented, or underprivileged candidates as possible. But perhaps we should start thinking about it as less of a pipeline and more of a leaky funnel.

The fact is when you grow up poor or disadvantaged, there are innumerable places where you might drop off before you have a chance at a better life. As Gladwell points out, many of the brightest students in Carlos’s hometown end up gang-affiliated as early as the eighth grade, long before free SAT prep courses, scholarships, and admissions officers can open up doors for them. We have to do more to ensure that the underserved know what opportunities are available to them and help them through every step of realizing those opportunities.

In the face of adversity, you have far fewer chances, a much smaller margin for error. The oversights and slights you internalize over the course of many, many years make the rare opportunities you find even rarer and leave you unable to capitalize on what’s left. If we want to start to spot and seal the cracks and leaks that leave people behind, we need to begin the dialogue on unseen inequalities and unexpected drop-offs.

To everyone who has experienced this— who has felt like they don’t belong or aren’t good enough — the world needs to hear your story. Only then can it begin to give current and future underdogs a better chance at a better life. And just remember: You are good enough. You do belong.

David Tran is the co-founder and CTO of  PRX.co , a venture-backed, software-powered PR startup. Previously he started Crowdbooster, a social media optimization solution, was an entrepreneur in residence at Stanford's StartX, and graduated from Stanford with a BS in computer science. David spends a lot of his free time training for marathons and rooting for the Warriors, the A's, and the Stanford Cardinal.

This essay is adapted from a post that originally ran on Medium .

First Person  is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our  submission guidelines , and pitch us at  [email protected] .

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Poverty Reduction in A Transforming China: A Critical Review

• Review Essay
• Published: 29 July 2022
• Volume 27 , pages 771–791, ( 2022 )

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• Lu Liu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1274-5670 1 , 2  

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A Correction to this article was published on 23 August 2022

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This review essay surveys the literature that explains China’s poverty reduction progress since the late 1970s. It examines three dominant explanations: geographic conditions, economic growth, and anti-poverty policies, whose impacts on poverty have evolved with China’s socioeconomic transformation. The review finds that the government has come to play an increasingly significant part in mitigating geographic adversity and making growth more inclusive for the poor over the last two decades. However, our understanding of the political institutions and processes underpinning poverty reduction remains incomplete because most studies concentrate on national and provincial authorities but overlook the county government. As counties have gained considerable resources and authority in poverty reduction, an investigation of their capacity and efficacy is fundamental to explain their various poverty alleviation outcomes. This essay thus proposes a framework for future research that investigates county governments’ bureaucratic arrangements and their relations to society to explain their performance in poverty reduction. This essay concludes with lessons and limitations of China’s government-led poverty alleviation campaign.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewer as well as Jessica Teets, the editor of the Journal of Chinese Political Science , for their valuable comments and suggestions on the manuscript. The author bears sole responsibility for the arguments in the essay. This research was funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China, grant number 22AZD050 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, grant number 71721002.

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The original online version of this article was revised: Note for Fig.2: “The idea of investigating the inequality among poverty-stricken counties was inspired by Qian (2018).” has been added. The below bibliographic information has been added in the reference list: “Qian, J. 2018. Interaction Between Public Policies and Institutions: The Case of Poverty Reduction in China. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4177151 or https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4177151 ”

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Liu, L. Poverty Reduction in A Transforming China: A Critical Review. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 27 , 771–791 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-022-09822-2

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• Parker Honored with Award for Anti-Poverty Initiatives in Latin America

In a world where the convenience of running water and refrigeration is often underappreciated, it is sobering to confront the reality that, in Latin America alone, 201 million people are living in poverty, many without such basic necessities, according to the Social Panorama 2022  report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. This demands urgent attention and action.  

Given the widespread poverty that has permeated Latin America, School of Public Policy Professor  Susan W. Parker felt a calling early on to make a difference. Her journey began during her college years when she first took an economics course and recognized that economics had the potential to positively impact people's lives. Since then, she has dedicated her career to improving the lives of those facing economic hardship. Recently, in recognition of her work, Parker was honored with the award of Honorary Professor of Economics by the Catholic University of Peru. 

Expressing gratitude for the recognition, Parker shared, "It was a most special recognition and ceremony." She continued, "Professionally, it is extremely meaningful as I interpret this honor as a recognition that my work has had an important influence in the area of development economics in Latin America. That is always the goal of my research." Next year, Parker will spend part of her sabbatical at the Catholic University of Peru and looks forward to working and interacting with their professors and students.

Parker emphasized the importance of understanding the economics of poverty as a means to improve global well-being. Her research has centered largely on issues such as education and health in developing nations, with a particular emphasis on the evaluation of programs and public policies. Her work has significantly impacted the landscape of anti-poverty initiatives, particularly through the evaluation of conditional cash transfer programs. These programs were pioneered in Mexico and Brazil in the 1990s and have since expanded globally as essential tools in poverty alleviation strategies.

"I was one of the first individuals working on the education impacts of these programs,” explained Parker. “My research along with my co-authors showed these programs were successful not only at reducing current poverty but at getting more children to remain in school and thereby improve their skills and opportunities later on in life." Parker continued, "This led to their scaling up in Mexico and adoption in many other countries."

Parker's research has had a direct influence on policy decisions. She and her co-authors found that poor households tended to overstate their living conditions due to shame and stigma. Despite lacking basic amenities like running water, they would falsely claim to have them when surveyed. This led to their exclusion from assistance programs because they "over-reported" themselves out of eligibility. These findings prompted the Mexican government to refine their approach, ensuring that vulnerable households were not excluded from desperately needed assistance.

Looking ahead, Parker plans to utilize her recognition from the Honorary Professor award for the greater good. "I hope it will help me continue to carry out and share impactful research which contributes to the formation of public policies across Latin America to reduce poverty." 

• Center for Intl. & Security Studies at Maryland
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Mamata Banerjee, Trinamool party leader and the state’s top elected official, accused Modi’s party of an attack that left one activist dead on Friday. Several houses and shops were burned in the Purba Medinipur district, the Press Trust of India news agency quoted Banerjee as saying.

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