Reducing Intergenerational Poverty (2024) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 1-20
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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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Intergenerational economic disadvantage disproportionately affects Black and Native American families. As shown in Figure S-1, only 17% of Asian children living in households with incomes below or near the poverty line were poor in adulthood, compared with 29% of poor White children and 25% of Latino children.
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and limit the intergenerational mobility of both Black and Native American children. It focused on seven specific domains:
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education system -- including early education, K–12, and postsecondary schooling, as well as career training -- is a key driver of upward intergenerational mobility for many children, including low-income children. However, low-income children start school with lower levels of academic and social skills than other children, on average, and these average gaps do not close as they progress through school.
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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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Studies covering policy changes over the past 25 years provide the strongest evidence for the beneficial intergenerational impacts of expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
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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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Health and Health Care Disparities A history of unethical medical experimentation, contemporary implicit bias among health care professionals, high uninsurance rates among Native American individuals, and greater exposure to chronic stress, racism, and environmental toxins all have a negative impact on the health of lowincome Black and Native American children, reducing their chances of upward mobility. Employment and Earnings Disparities Even after improvements in their relative earnings over time, Black workers still have lower average earnings, face less predictable work hours and less stable employment, and reside disproportionately in states where the relatively low federal minimum wage is binding.
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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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. These include increasing K–12 school funding, having more Black teachers, reducing harsh school discipline, strengthening financial aid and student support programs in postsecondary education, establishing career training programs, expanding Medicaid access, reducing pollution, funding nutrition programs, expanding the EITC, reducing juvenile incarceration, supporting therapeutic programs such as Becoming a Man, engaging in vacant lot abatement, and policing in high-crime neighborhoods.
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• Reductions in harsh school discipline have been linked with higher educational achievement and attainment, lower usage of safety net programs, and reduced involvement in the criminal legal system later in life. Second, the committee found that some important issues that arose in our listening sessions did not fit neatly into just one of the seven intervention domains.
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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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Reduce exclusionary school discipline* Increase access to Ethnic Studies courses • Postsecondary Expand effective financial aid programs for low-income education students*
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Housing and Neighborhoods • Residential Expand coverage of the Housing Choice Voucher program mobility and couple it with customized counseling and case management services to facilitate moves to low-poverty neighborhoods Neighborhood Crime and the Criminal Justice System • Juvenile Use juvenile confinement only for youth who pose a serious incarceration and immediate threat to public safety* • Child investment Improve school quality and reduce lead exposure in ways strategies identified in the education and health categories*
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