Transcript
RON HASKINS
: The reason that we're focusing on poverty -- there are several reasons, but here is a very good one, namely, that poverty has been very stubborn. We essentially have not reduced poverty since the early 1970s. Now, there're some exceptions. We've reduced poverty for the elderly quite a bit, and it's a very straightforward explanation: We gave them money. That's one way to reduce poverty. And we did it through Social Security. Biggest advance in Social Security benefits so poverty among the elderly declined, and whereas throughout human history poverty among the elderly has been the highest poverty rate today in the United States, it's much lower than that for children, for example.
And the second example of where we've had some success was among single female-headed families, because so many mothers went to work during the 1990s, the second part of the 1990s when we had quite a substantial decline in poverty among female-headed families.
But still our poverty rate, as you can see, has not really gone down much, and so we really need to focus on poverty, and that's what we're doing with this volume. And, in fact, the charge we gave all the authors was to propose a single way to reduce poverty, to defend it, and to tell us how much it would cost.
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