Reducing Intergenerational Poverty (2024) / Chapter Skim
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Poverty reduces overall economic output and places increased burdens on the educational, criminal justice, and health care systems. Understanding the causes of intergenerational poverty and implementing policies and programs to reduce it would yield a high payoff for children and for the entire nation.
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The committee reviewed research literature and a commissioned paper and held public sessions focused on Native American communities, the child welfare system, and the justice system. The committee also held closed listening sessions with low-income parents and caregivers,2 federal-level public policy experts, and community-based service providers with perspectives on poverty in rural areas, among Alaskan Native and Native Hawaiian communities, and among Latino3 communities.
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In contrast, Black and Native American children who grew up in the same economic circumstances -- the 10th rung of the parental income ladder -- on average climbed only as far as the 28th rung by the time they were in their 4 As detailed in Chapter 2, a similar study based on different data and an income cutoff corresponding to the U.S. Official Poverty Measure threshold found that 29% of children growing up in poor households were themselves poor at age 30.
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The size and consistency of these gaps across the entire distribution of parental household income point to the importance of developing and implementing large-scale, effective policies and programs to ameliorate them. KEY DRIVERS OF INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY The committee examined the drivers of intergenerational poverty and mobility for all children as well as the factors that moderate these drivers (e.g., histories, practices, contexts, and structural factors)
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Child income is measured as mean household adjusted gross income (AGI) in 2014–2015, and parent income is measured as mean household AGI in 1994–2000.
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Improving the health of low-income children improves their future educational attainment, employment, and earnings while reducing their reliance on public assistance. Three important mechanisms for improving child health and other outcomes are access to family planning services, health insurance coverage in pregnancy and childhood, and food and nutrition programs.
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Housing, Residential Mobility, and Neighborhood Conditions9 The places where children live -- their homes and neighborhoods -- are foundational for their health, education, and development. Consistent correlational evidence has linked intergenerational poverty with high lead levels, homelessness, overcrowding, moving frequently, and high housing costs relative to family income in childhood.
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While there is a dearth of definitive causal evidence on the effects of the various components of the child welfare system on eventual adult poverty, research does point to some promising approaches to preventing child maltreatment in the first place. RACIAL DISPARITIES AND STRUCTURAL FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THESE DRIVERS12 The challenges that Black and Native American families face in propelling their children into socioeconomic security result from contemporary and historical disparities, discrimination, and structural racism.
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Given these persistent intergenerational disparities, improving outcomes for Black people and Native Americans will likely require some race consciousness in our policies and their implementation to ensure that impacts are as positive as possible for these marginalized groups. Education Disparities Despite decades of improving educational outcomes among Black and Native American individuals, achievement and attainment gaps remain.
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Black and Native American children are significantly more likely to grow up in highpoverty neighborhoods, which is also correlated with lower intergenerational mobility. Criminal Justice System Disparities Substantial evidence documents racial disparities in both the commission of violent crime and victimization as well as in arrests, charging, convictions, sentencing, incarceration, and community supervision.
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The committee found direct evidence of success in reducing intergenerational poverty for five of the seven key drivers: education; health; income and parental employment; housing; and crime. Education Interventions Evidence for the value of early care and education programs, including parenting support programs such as home visiting, is mixed.
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Finally, although the strongest evidence on the long-term impacts of child nutrition is based on historical data, more recent evidence links nutrition programs in childhood to medium-term outcomes such as health in early adolescence. Family Income, Wealth, and Parental Employment Interventions Evaluations of expansions of the EITC have produced strong direct evidence that intergenerational poverty can be reduced through earnings subsidies that increase both family income and parental employment during childhood and adolescence.
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Reducing Racial Disparities Racial disparities are relevant to virtually any intervention aimed at reducing intergenerational poverty, so the committee also looked for evidence about programs specifically designed to reduce them. The committee was unable to identify long-term evaluations of programs that would specifically address racial disparities in intergenerational poverty.
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The lack of affordable ECE can interfere with the effectiveness of many programs designed to address intergenerational poverty. Children themselves need ECE that promotes their health, safety, and school readiness.
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RESEARCH AND DATA NEEDED FOR UNDERSTANDING AND REDUCING INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY Although the committee was able to identify a number of policies and programs that appeared to be effective in reducing intergenerational poverty, it lacked high-quality evidence on the intergenerational impacts of many other promising programs. This is sobering but not surprising, given the expense and difficulty of scaling up promising interventions identified in controlled experiments, the length of time required to see the effects of interventions on intergenerational poverty, the difficulties of assembling data for historical, retrospective analysis, and the costs of obtaining adequate sample sizes for the populations most at risk of intergenerational poverty, especially Native Americans.
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Creating a Federal Data Infrastructure for Research Use Existing census, survey, and administrative data -- linked for families over time and across subject domains, including income, wealth, demographics, health, and education, and with appropriate confidentiality protection -- would be invaluable for cost-effective research on intergenerational mobility. At present, much of the data for studying intergenerational poverty and related topics are controlled by various federal and state agencies and are difficult to link or use for academic research or policy evaluation.
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(1) -1 for research use; • Work within OMB and with relevant agencies and congressional committees to secure sustained funding for data linkage projects, Federal Statistical Research Data Centers, and technical capacity in the states to share records to support cost-effective research on intergenerational poverty, economic opportunity, and related top ics; and • Work with relevant agencies to establish guidelines for consent and data storage that will facilitate the re-use of survey and intervention data, linked to subsequent administrative records, for long-term follow-up and for studies not yet anticipated at the time of the original study.
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