Special Report

From the end of world war ii through the mid 1970s, the real wages of American workers nearly doubled, moving up in tandem with the growth in productivity. The United States benefited from an implicit social contract: By working hard and contributing to productivity, profits, and economic growth, workers and their families could expect improved […]

In her book Men in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt recounts a story in which Pope John XXIII asked one of the Vatican gardeners, “How are things going?” The worker replied, “Badly, badly, Your Eminence,” telling Pope John what he earned and how many family members he had to support. “We’ll have to do something about […]

New evidence on brain development during a child’s early years makes it clear that early childhood should be a focus of increased policy attention. We now know that the basic architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that might be compared to the construction of a home: Beginning before birth, the brain’s […]

American higher education is no longer the avenue of intergenerational upward mobility that it once was. Instead of serving as an agent of opportunity, much of higher education has become simply another agent of stratification. Two statistics are especially alarming. Top-achieving high-school graduates from low-income families now head immediately off to college at the same […]

Our nation, at its best, pursues the ideal that what we look like and where we come from should not determine the benefits, burdens, or responsibilities that we bear in our society. Because we believe that all people are created equal in terms of rights, dignity, and the potential to achieve great things, we see […]

One out of every six full-time U.S. workers earns less than 125 percent of the poverty line — under $18,865 a year for a family of three. And the share of low-wage workers is considerably higher in many of the sectors with the most job growth: retailing, hotel and food services, health care, and human […]

In the last decade, we have seen that an effective approach to reducing poverty requires changes in personal behavior as well as government support. Further, we have learned that by judiciously applying policies that demand and then reward good behavior — what might be called carrots-and-sticks policies — we can induce and maintain the behavior […]

From the 1970s through the mid-1990s, poverty policy was among the nastiest battlefields in the national culture war. Left and right slugged it out over why people were poor and how (or whether) to help them. Conservatives generally enjoyed the upper hand in these debates by focusing on individual-level causes of poverty, like family breakdown, […]

Our love-hate relationship with foreign-born workers has once again taken center stage in the national drama over immigration, only now it’s set against a backdrop of heightened concerns over national security and an unprecedented geographic dispersal of the foreign-born. Legal as well as undocumented immigrants are widely blamed for displacing U.S. workers and driving down […]

Economists may disagree a lot on policy, but we all agree on the “education premium” — the earnings boost associated with more education. But what role can education play in a realistic antipoverty policy agenda? And what are the limits of that role? First, it depends on whether you’re talking about children or adults, and […]