Transcripts For CSPAN2 Discussion 20240703

This is an hour and a half. [background noises] [background noises] hello, welcome everyone. We are delighted you are able to join us today for a conversation about recently released National Academy of sciences consensus report called reducing intergenerationaler poverty. My pleasure this morning is to introduce you to the panelists who will be speaking today pit will first year from three people who are coauthors on the report to will be telling you some Key Highlights from the report. I encourage you to read the report theres a lot of detail in their that we will not be able to cover today. And then we will have a broader discussion. Introducing the report shall be greg duncan he is distinguished professor at the university of california irvine. If he has long researched greatlooking childrens early behavior and skills relate to later life outcome. Heat previously, spent 25 years university of michigan working on the income dynamics with director at one point. Hell be joined by harry as an resident senior fellow as well as professor at the school of Public Health in georgetown. Former chief economist u. S. Department of labor. Has Extensive Research on low wage market among other topics will be joined by mary is the Harold Washington professor of theology at northwestern. Also the black studies department. Her Research Focus on forces shaping black communities, families and youth. After we hear from these three about the report itself we will be turning we will hear from Bradley Harding who is associate professor at the Public Policy of georgetown and also nonresident senior fellow. His research looks at family conditions, policies chuckles inequalities and how they shape income and other. We will then hear who is a senior fellow emeritus. The economic Study Program her Research Spans many topics including fiscal policy, economic growth, poverty and social mobility she was previously associate director of the omb and has received the prize distinguished fellow of the American Economic association. This conversation be moderated by Amy Goldstein is who is a visiting fellow newly arrived in the economic studies program. Amy joins after spending 36 yearss as a staffer at the Washington Post covering social policy. She showed the Pulitzer Prize for herhe coverage of 911. Shes also the author of janesville in american story very much ties into many of the themes in the report. I am delighted we are able to welcome all these guests today i will turn over too greg to talk about the report, thank you. Thank you, thanks to everyone for coming. I am greg duncan i chaired the committee wanted to provide a bit of an introduction over the committee came from and set up the recommendations for next speakers will talk about. In 2021 Congress Asked the National Academies to put together a consensus of panel to come up with ideas for programs and policies for which evidence indicated they stood a good chance of reducing intergenerational poverty. Some of you may know the report came out in 2019 a road back to reducing Child Poverty was all about short term poverty what could we do today this going to reduce Child Poverty tomorrow . This is what can we do today for children, their families, their environments that 20 years from now or 30 years from 3 now is going to reduce their chance of being poor when they become adults. The National Academy receives these requests and then they appoint a committee i was chairing the committee. The full committee you can see is quite diverse. It is quite numerous. There are a lot of members with the consensus committees you need to have everyone agree on every word of the report that comes out. It is an interesting process that took us a couple of years. Its a very Diverse Group in the sense many are academics but not all are academics. They span the political spectrum. So, while committees are given a statement of task the assignment is to write a report that addresses all of these elements in the statement ofpo task and nothing more its really focused on the statement of task. What were the committees key statement of tasks . First we identified the drivers. One of the most important is to identify policies and programs especially at the federal level that have been shown with strong evidence to reduce intergenerational poverty. Third, evaluate the ethnic disparities and structural factors that contribute to intergenerational poverty and forth, identify highpriority gaps in data and research that impede our efforts to learn more about intergenerational poverty. Our definition of intergenerational poverty was very straightforward is the situation whichor children who grow up in low income families are themselves low income when they become adults. Relatively straightforward. We tried to gauge the extent to which intergenerational poverty was persistent. Turn first and foremost to work who is a member of the committee and based on irs tax records. The kind of results we are finding holds up when you look at other data sets and other definitions of a low income in this case low income is defined as a childhood in this case that was a persistently in the bottom 20 of the Income Distribution. That constituted in this particular analysis growing up in a low income family. These are children born around 1980 , 78 and 82 were followed in this case an irs tax records until they were in their 30s 30 or 39 is the period of adulthood we look at with the data. What fraction of children are spend the bulk of their childhood in the bottom Income Distribution families are also in the bottom 20 between ages 30 and 39 when they have their own families. The rate of persistence this 34 separate 34 of the people growing up in low income families for themselves low income. When i have more time and ask the audience before what would they expect that fraction to be . I think the average is 50 or 60 may be people are persistent at 34 . A lot of those who rise above the bottom 20 do not raise that far above it. 34 chance is still twice as high as the chance of a child growing up outside the bottom 20 is a linkage. What is particularly striking in the data is the extent to which the rates of intergenerational persistence a differ right race and ethnic groups. For whites the 34 figure is 29 of white children growing up in low income status are low income for asians it is much less, 17 . For latinos to have a wreath its very similar to whites that holds up across different measures on economic mobility or immobility. What really stands out our black children and native American Children who have much higher rates of persistence than any other group that holds up across different measures you can find intergenerational persistence with consumption data with a wealth data with income data and that ranking shows to hold up. So rates for black children are particularly height they received quite a bit of attention in the report. So we have many more descriptive results i would encourage you to read the report. I might say the first 250 pages of the report is very sick they were designed to read like a novel. But then there is an appendix the book itself is not his which is the big thick book would indicate. The next think the most important things were to identify the keyey drivers of intergenerational poverty and come up with policies and programs that have been proven to reduce intergenerational poverty. Here is the actual wording. On the task of identifying apolicies and programs that hae Proven Ability to reduce intergenerational poverty spent a lot of time is coming up its evident standard. Give many correlational studies. Thousands of correlational studies. You have some studies that are strong and random assignment insert in the experimental sense that show certain programs and policies have eight short run impact. Maybe higher birth weights. Maybe tutoring with higher test scores in the next grade. We really wanted evidence for intergenerational they had to be longterm studies that followed the children into adulthood. At least the point you knew something about their Higher Education there completed education. He knew sunday but the Health Status is a strict standard and had to be a long run enough study that showed a particular program or policy was linked to improvements in the next generation. We freely acknowledge many programs and policies effective are undoubtedly not included with the evident screen. Once you relax the evidence screen you open it up to it many, many more questions about the extent to which the short run effect might affect the long run fact or not. With that kind of introduction let me turn to harry who will talk about drivers and especially the programs and policy lists that we came up with. Thank you, greg. So first we focus on the drivers of intergenerational poverty. We have seven different areas, realms of life were reanalyzed evident these factors influence causally affected. And then do we have evidence of policies that can causally reduce that factor but we look at the seven different realms. Childrens education, childrens health, Family Income and employment. Family structure, housing, crime and the criminal Justice System and child maltreatment. Out of those seven areas, five of the seven we are able to identify clear causal impacts of these factors on longterm poverty as will some policy evidence are reducing this. Why dont we start marching into those. We saw with education so first it is not hard in the area of education to show two things. Number one, large and lasting disparities in Educational Achievement and attainment between income groups. Between racial and ethnic groups in number to those disparities have a large impact on earnings we notice is important area to look for we found evidence in these three realms of policies that have Lasting Impacts. You might notice Early Childhood education is missing from the table. Im going to defer almost complete to greg during the q and a. We did not find we had a number of conditions on top of what greg mentioned when we would count a policy as working. One was the policy was relatively recent. At leastti since the 1990s. The policy had to have had some scale when it is evaluated we simply did not find Early Childhood programs that met those conditions that had Lasting Impacts on child outcomes. Without a lot of fadeout. I willt put it there and we can follow up later. And these other three areas we did find good evidence starting in k12 we found evidence increasing k12 School Spending in the poorest districts really did have an impact. Some of you may remember for a long tennis conventional wisdom that money does not work at education especially for poor kids that conventional wisdom has been overturned we found strong evidence that in fact it does. On top of the third two other areas without the evidence is quite strong. Increasing teacher Workforce Diversity. You can match teachers and students by race and gender and others having black mail teachers turns out to be quite an effective way to teach black boys in school and improve their achievement the other thing is reducing exclusionary School Discipline which is very very harmful for children and again often for young men of color we thought that was important policy as well. On the post secondary front we found two buckets of policies that were are important number one expanding effective Financial Aid programs for low income college students. What they mean by effective . Pell grants it was more mixed than we thought we do not include pell grants but we had to programs for fouryear colleges and michigan and the buffet scholarship in nebraska that generated quite strong evidence of success and increasing campus support such as tutoring and Case Management, career guidance. Quite a few rigorous studies that showw those who have impacting completion rates. What about young people who are not going to College Degrees . Theres been a troubling area. We found nice evidence of Occupational Training programs that have a Lasting Impact. High quality in ed we have three examples of that career academies, technical high schools and pathway programs from high schools into Community College most notably the ptech program all this of generate long and lasting district large and Lasting Impact as Occupational Training program for adultss and youth we call sectorial trading the training is designed to match the skill needs of employers in high demand high wage sectors a set of well known programs Jewish Vocational Services and some others project quest that generated the impacts we want to see it. Next on income employment how do we improve the income and employment there is quite strong evidence income Employment Matter for child outcomes how to improve that the best way to improve that is what i covered post secondary education or Occupational Training. Effective Occupational Training. What about for people who do not improveut their skills enough to have strong labor market earnings . Here a big find was a earned income tax credit. The earned income tax credit is it win, win, win program. It puts income of the pocket the people who need it. It also encourages their employment and raises their employment. And it has positive effects on children in those families. That was a winner across the board we came up with a number of different possible ways to increase the earned income tax credit for it you make notice we dont include the Child Tax Credit. Were going to talk about that the Panel Discussion later but we have evidence the Child Tax Credit raisess shortterm income reduces poverty shortterm but not longterm. We could not go there and this report we did include combining as one of the several different ways it can be increased. On the health, our strongest fighting probably the most important was consistent medicaidid coverage. Consistent 12 month eligibility with all poor people and postpartum coverage for moms. We also thought given the highmp persistence of poverty for native americans it turns out expanding access to Indian Health services improves the Health Outcomes of native americans. Some other buckets on help it evidence on Family Planning. That has positive effects of this film is a increasing funding for title x programs or ensuring medicaid beneficiaries have access to Family Planning seems to be effective policy be to other areas nutrition we support expanding child access to snap benefits for all permanent and undocumented parents. Also air quality is an important determinant for health with pork at supporting the epa work with local authorities to monitor our qualities especially in schools. Crime is another big year would withpretty strong evidence of to distinct effects of crime and criminal justice on childrens outcomes number one, exposure of children to Violent Crime turns out to be very negative, very scoring in ways it hurts her life outcome but excessive detention juvenile detention has very negative impact on children. In short periods of detention turn out to very negative effects on children led to toots at the policy conclusions number one use juvenile confinement only propose a immediate threat to safety one could debate exactly where that line is. That seemed to be an important conclusion but it turns out theres a number of programs to reduce Crime Victimization rates. Scaling up programs to abate vacant lots and abandoned homes which are often the geography of where Violent Crime occurs increasing grants or committee based organizations, expanded funding for police in high crime neighborhoods putting cops on the streets clearly reduces homicide especially communities of color if the cops are abusive is going to put off any good cause effect with the combined that with effective strategies Like Community policing to picture the impact stay positive. If you other, to other areas seem important reducing gun violence the evidence guns are tied to homicide was just overwhelming. We strongly believe in improving gun safety and ways that pass constitutional review. We have Second Amendment issues are verynd important we came up with a number examples limiting child access to guns restricting rights to carry et cetera. Sensing addons for violence involving firearms et cetera. And there were a few other programs were investing in children had strong preventative effects like becoming a man program in chicago we need to see if therein is a lasting impt when you scale up. There is encouraging evidence there and increasing k12 School Spending in the poorest districts. It improves Educational Attainment and seems to reduce crime. Metheres a number of areas whee very hopeful in this realm. I will stop there and turn over to make colleague. Thank you harry. So, we are in the same bucket of the kinds of policies and programs we found that can reduce intergenerational poverty. So i will talk about housing. We only had one here and that is expanding the Housing Choice Voucher Program and coupling it specifically with customized counseling and Case Management this comes from especially a randomized controlled trial in seattle that found that some of the reasons why people do not move to high Opportunity Areas is really about the barriers to mobility, the lack of information, the inability to work with landlords and so on this customized counseling and casese Management Services could intervene there and the housing choice voucher is one that goes underutilized. Under funded and underutilized line about the quarter of the families who are eligible can get access to housing choice voucher there is the family stability andnd opportunity voucher act which was first introduced in 2019 on again in 2021 it has not yet passed it is an example of a bipartisan evidencebased legislation thats aimed at exactly this goal the vouchers plus counseling. So now im going to switch gears. Part of her statement of task was to focus specifically on racial ethnic disparities in intergenerational poverty you will recall in the first slide, heres her statement of task you will recall in the side greg showed white families are white children about 29 of white children who are low income as children are also low income as adults the rates are much higher especially black and native American Children. We were charged with applying a race and ethnic blend and analyzing the drivers and the policies and programs that would reduce these w gaps in intergenerational poverty. And so, only looked at this we first wanted to start with history. The committee reviewed the various practices of what we would call impoverished which has been experienced by black blackand native american famili. These are kinds of examples are illustrated by the taking of land, labor and cultural resources. And as we show in the airport as greg mentionedep theres a sizae appendix and indeed the racial and ethnic disparity chapter contributes a lot of pages to that appendix. We walked w through some of the contemporary ramifications of these historical experiences. And i will talk about too today. For example the act of 1887 allotted native American Lands for private ownership door to be held in federal trust this is what is called a fraction it creates was called a fractionated land pattern court land tenure and native american reservations. We look at the presentday effectiveness fractionated land pattern we find native americans who live currently and more fractionated reservations have Lower Per Capita incomes than their peers on reservations that are less fractionated. Put more plainly 19th century policy of land is correlated with economic wellbeing in the 21st century. If we take another example 1921 massacre that was an event where as many as 300 black people were killed roughly 35 acres of the green would from the city of tulsa were burned to the ground that section was called black wall street because of its concentration of black Business Owners and other black institutions. This event sent a message to black people upward mobility will be met with violence. 1920 race massacre had impacts on the homeownership rates black tool since into the 1940s and indeed hadad repercussions of hp ownership of black folks across the country into the year. 2000. Part of the mechanism was a black press. Cities that had greater exposure to report on the 1921 race massacre at lower black homeownership rate near 2000. So get we need to think historically we talk about the socioeconomic status of black and native americans today. So the report also covered all of the drivers harriet mentioned looked at that Racial Disparities in these drivers and how this might contribute to the disparities in intergenerational poverty that wees saw. I will talk again about three for time purposes. In the realm of education black and native American Students are disproportionally subjected to harsh School Discipline from very early ages so in preschool for example black toddlers are suspended at two and a half times that representation in the toddler preschool population native american toddlers are suspended at water and a half time suspension, toddlers we are talking toddlers. Suspension. Correlational quasiexperimental show to show harsh School Discipline is negative effects on standardized test scores. In high school and college graduation. Increases the chances of involvement in the criminal legal system and receipt of food assistance. In the realm of neighborhoods 30 of black and native American Children compared to just 4 of Nonhispanic White children live in neighborhoods that we might call a high poverty neighborhoods or neighborhoods were 30 of the residents are poor. We also know from that research growing up in high poverty neighborhoods and in counties with greater concentrations of poverty and in counties with greater racial segregation are all correlated with lower intergenerational mobility in thoseob neighborhoods. And then finally in the criminal legal system black and native American Children have greater rates of exposure to Community Violence. And, as i think harriet a thinkt mentioned exposure to Community Violence increases the likelihood of school dropout, increases the risk of offending and young adulthood reduces performance on standardized tests. Especially for black students. So that is the exposure to violence side we also look at the criminal legal systemri sid. And so we know that site Racial Disparity in incarceration rates for adults and children are stark and longstanding. Among youth, black youth are more than four times more likely than white youth to be incarcerated the native American Youth are three times as likely. So again, as we have for theirs negative effects of juvenile incarceration. So, given what ive just mention we can imagine some of the programs that would be effective in reducing the Racial Disparities in other words targeting the kinds of drivers that i just mentioned. Overall we had 12 programs and policies that would reduce these kinds of disparities. This goes through the whole list which i am not going to talk about. I piggyback on something that harry already mentioned. Which is school funding. Initially we thought about desegregation as a policy or program that went reduce Racial Disparities in intergenerational poverty. That Research Byte record draws and shows its School Resources that is the mechanism that supports the reduction in disparities and racial intergenerational poverty. I can talk about some of the specifics on the panel if we get there. I will just to point out what is interesting if you look at number one and two weve already heard about the importance of the teacher Workforce Diversity. And here in particular their studies about the importance of black teachers for black student success. That might seem to go in the opposite direction sa at sai desegregation policy or program. But in fact went to healthy mechanisms. Again in the same way the mechanism of desegregation with school funding, the mechanism for the positive effect of black teachers is reducing exclusionary School Discipline for example. And higher expectations. These are things that we can teach. Not a black teachers. While it is important to increase the teacher Workforce Diversity its also important to teach the same kinds of strategies that we find black teachers utilizing in a classroom that will improve the outcome of especially black children. I will note we do not have any research on policies and programs to increase mobility for native American Children and that is an important area to begin to develop more research. Here are many of the other ones which we can get to will make it to the panel. I will just end the report ends with some ideas and priorities for future policy research. We are very much supporting long term studies that can connect various data sets. Here we have, the next side, so there is the foundations for evidencebased policymaking act which would increase the availability of administrative data for policy research, uses while preserving confidentiality we know this is super important number talk about data, extra important for the second one. So as greg mentioned we are using tax data for our base numbers on intergenerational poverty making more tax items and irs available would give us more leverage for following people for a long term without having to do the very expensive kind of panel studies the requires the survey work that go into those. And then funding data linkage projects. In the summer in the early part of the report we have a number of discussions of how we can combine health and education policies or education criminal legal policies and having data linkage project across these are water off the discrete policy domains would improve our capability of saving people longterm. And i will stop their think is my job to invite up all the rest of the panelists. And i think a move to q a day or hour panel then q and a. [background noises] [background noises] okay, now that we have enough chairs we are going to continue. I am Amy Goldstein i am joint by bookings and Bradley Hadley from georgia along the three Committee Members. We are going to pivot from a brief presentation to a wdiscussion that will include time for some audience questions at the end. So beat thinking about what you like to ask these folks. We are going to start the youtube telling us we think about what you just heard so bradley joined to go first . Quick sure, happy too. First off i think it is worth really emphasizing the Committee Members just top to bottom they really did a fantastic job with this report. They really emphasize a wide range of factors in a wide range of policyio solutions. I think in general the report is to be commended for that depth and breadth. We are talking well over 400 page report. I shouldve thought about that when i committed. But it is great too. I think i view the report as an opportunity to begin important policy conversation. Certainly data driven policy conversations. They really do emphasize this point around pushing Causal Research designs. My main comment and then im io go into sub examples is that if i were in the same position i would probably wind up trying to confine our evidence to the source of studies. But having not been in that position i can also say there ended up being a larger body of descriptive rigorous studies, that just did not make it into the. Report. And so, it may be the report features, i think there is stronger evidence that kind of supports underlying factors that drive intergenerational poverty. Just jump into it a few key points. Even attacked by the structure of a labor markets intergenerational poverty implications, we have sent really interesting recent evidence or partly, at le marsh and delia can the political economy. They look at moms and daughters who both received cash welfare. The old aid to families with dependent children and the predecessor program. And so on the one hand they find by construction, by design it was a bigger form of lot of work incentives. Relate you saw it far fewer daughters in receipt of the traditional cash welfare. We expand the definition to think about broader Government Support in fact you find moms and daughters are receiving benefits at roughly the same rates across a generation. It is an interesting concept to think about. Even amid these really, really stringentng work incentives, a more temporary cash supports in this program you are not necessary breakup intergenerational Government Support usage. I think that is consistent with what some of the report finds. There are some structural economic factors that are underlying the challenges of persistent poverty. This is a lot about labor markets and lower wages. We have that evidence. Some of it makes it into the report by think the report winds up maybe being cautious with respect to how to assess that evidence. Its worthwhile in a discussion we do have this in body of rigorous r evidence may beat rit on the edge of a causal but caue nevertheless the evidence is there. Its not silent its how forceful to be on the evidence that we have. Relatedly i would say we have quite a bit of evidence the incidence of economic instability. The same households have low resources, a low wealth that resources are going to be far more m unstable. We believe across the social sciences this will have a whole host of consequences for Mental Health so on and so forth. Events that are occurring in the lives of the Household Health events, child loss so on and so forth harder to identify long run intergenerational consequencesth there in part tht instability is tangled up in the low baseline as well. Its low and unstable incomes. I do think we get into more datadrivendr set of hr practics to have the staff stocker inventory you might worry work scheduling instability some workers will face more per carry that could be profit maximizing but could put strain on households. Again moving at a decent pace because i want to allow for a time. I really like the report touched on housing. Obviously the role of neighborhoods after decades and decades of research is truly shaping a whole host of intergenerational outcomes. It is certainly where coauthors are may be standing on the shoulders of and extending the work of folks. We know about intergenerational persistence. We knew less about the role of neighborhoods. So, with that said i think the report can also benefit from grappling with what is consistent evidence on what the housing economist referred to. The u. S. Context they are pretty long run b preferences where blk families, a white families conditional and income a wealth tend to not live alongside each other. There are exceptions. This evidence has built up over decades. What that means them some of the promising moving to opportunity evidence. But how do you situatethat . Whos going to be tension with many of the policies that do not operate as entitlements that we want to expand. They might run up against him at level preferences with respect to who you want to live next year. That is a statement borne out from that data. Folks like francis of the Federal Reserve system conducting some of this work. Again the report touches effects of ahistorical drivers with respect to race. Just the fact the report engages with this is a very big deal its a very big deal to do that is not the kind of thing that is to be brushed off to the side. I think again the burden of evidence does maybe deny us the opportunity to admit quite a bit of innovative work in the domain of economic history. Im thinking about for example the work of what might coauthors he has a more natural generalizable Research Using some pretty incredible Research Design focused on reconstruction air of violence the back questions of black politicians. Many of the black politicians were pushing if i were to generalize, or public goods investment in the reconstruction era. That led to higher taxes. Now, the racial violence against a black politicians led to a lowering of the public goods investment. It is to put ace specific point estimate on the violence that murder it comes my reading of the evidence the murder rate against his black politicians or the reconstruction era is about 200 times the murder rate for black men today. So you think about long impacts reference to the riots that is the kind of thing you want to see an report like this and yet we have a growing body of Economic Research historyhi thas leveraging available data. How does that shape attitudes and investments . Certainly the work like giacomo williams picking up the role of lynchings and can temporarily lowering Voter Participation how does that linger in terms of civic participation today . I do not have a timekeeper but im pacing myself here. In the interest of allowing others to jump in here, the Family Structure section, i thought one of the pieces i appreciate in this section and again i encourage folks to go and read the report. There is a nice a point where this chapter sort of argues that look, we do not have strong causal evidence per se on the role of the absent of the second parent or the average per se the impact across so many different kinds of studies is strongly suggestive of a causal relationship. And so for me, i like that. I like that point and i actually think this is what we want our social scientist to do to say okay, help us situate with this description of evidence means if it adds up. And i think you can do that on topics like income, topics like 202021 Child Tax Credit. Look, realistically the Committee Members explained pretty clearly why they did not want to include too much on it when your intervention. Im probably in the camp of thing that makes sense. And yet we can also think about what it means to lower it Child Poverty to these historic low levels and what the potential impacts might be. So you give me 400 pages and im trying to be quick here at. [laughter] thank you brownlee. I, likee you really want to commend the report. I was blown away by the tie the truth. It is not only excellent in his got great in it. All well presented its got these rigorous standards which i really like. It does, it covers so many topics it is hard for mes too imagine how you guys got that all done. And as someone who has been in government like some of the rest of you and had to come up with the recommendations for a president in my case the president for what to put in the budget or what to spend billions of dollars on. Im talking hundreds of billions of dollars we are not talk about a small amount of money for the taxpayer perspective. Having had a report like this to rely on wouldnt have been a joy. But we did not have it. Now i want to now mention three dogs that didid not bark in this report. By that i mean program as many is manyelected officials and cey many advocates and even some researchers believe to be effective and they were not endorsed in this report. I dont point them out, the dogs it did not bark, i do not point this out to be critical. I have some sympathy with the decisions that were made to leave them out. I just think what a report does not recommend his is just as important as what it does. So, lets look at a couple of examples of the dogs it did not bark. First, Early Childhood education. Outside, myself, have written papers in the past or even books in which i said oh yes, Early Childhood education, great program. Wonderful benefit cost ratio. Had huge effects right into adulthood. Many of you know these programs are so famous most people who study social policy know their names by heart as well as their impacts. So, whats going on here . Mary a well respected researcher from the university of michigan writes an article that gives into the premier economic journal. The American Economic Association Primary journal. And so scott just recently this is a very good study that shows there were causal effects from the rollout of a head start over the years. So, what is going on here . I think what is going on here and this is a problem any time youre trying to look at long term intergenerational effects, any evidence you have has to beat 20 or 30 years old because otherwise the kids would not have got into adulthood yet. And yet if you have evidence that is that old you have the emproblem the circumstances thee children grew up in were very different 20 or 30 years ago. Their mothers were much less well educated i dived into this last year i had data on all these things. Mothers much less educated. Lack of outside of the home care. Nothing like the infrastructure of Childcare Centers that we have now. Nothing like the social safety net that we have now. As the report shows the social Safety Net Program reduce Child Poverty by about half. That did not exist when these kids were children in the early programs were evaluated. Also these programs were often small scale and run by people who not only for very vsophisticated but if you or areservant meat 123 children ate preschool should you really generalized on vat . And researcher language internal validity yes. External validity, very questionable. I wont go into that and all the other areas. Its basically a structural methodological problem the people on this committee faces think. Okay, second example of the dog but did not bark at. The Child Tax Credit has already been mentioned. Has someone who helped to make the child credit refundable back in 2001 the work on that was done here under my leadership. Bob greene site said it upfront here. We got into legislation. Ive come to low income families as a result that simple change. The answer is about 450 billion dollars getting more money to low income families. But if you ask me a limited dollars unlimited Political Energy and ability i would say if i had to expand something it would definitely be ei tc. For all of the reasons this report so nicely featured. It also increases parental employment. It leads to more selfsufficiency. It might lead to more role modeling of the child a better way to connect the family is a big discussion of that. I think the report was right to focus on that. I wont get into and in fact it gets really into the weeds we Start Talking about how to design the ei tc. And then theres a chapter on marriage and i believe that twoparent families in this trial i do have impacts on children. We have the Writer Center and characterizes this. Heres where i think a little bit different place where you are, i dont think we know how to get more. We can agree or maybe we cant weekend agree or maybe we cant agree but for those of us who agree that marriage is good for kids thats one thing that the evidence on programs that been tried most havent been found to be effective. Now related to this, my own view is that Reproductive Services could have an impact and they were discussed including the ones that have evidence behind them in the Health Sector and maybe there should have been and as i said this is an amazing report, maybe that should have been referenced anyway there are some very good evidence. You party hard about title x. Thereshe also a hot topic right now the Supreme Court cases that will be announced probably in june that are followups to the Dobbs Decision on abortion. Theres a study called the turn away study of rigorous study that does show when women have access to abortion it makes a difference not only for their lives but also for their childrens lives. My shirt Research Assistant are working on a paper on that right now. I will put in one final plug and then i am done. For a new paper by martha daily that i think is very published by the hamilton project here at brookings. Is that right . And it states an rct that was done in michigan its not in the reporter at least i didnt see it that shows investment in Title X Services would reduce unintended pregnancies by about one third. Thats a lie. A large increase for title x much cheaper than a lot of the other things that you could come up with. Although i cant prove it i cant help but believe that would have a lot of impact on childrens future lives. If there parents were able to make decisions. If they have a child, went to have a child and if they will have a child. So i will stop there. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you both for those critiques. Grand and mary and mary and me got nice kudos for the breadth and depth of your work specifically for including housing as an important factor for looking at historically how race and religious background that affects things currently but what did you think of and we also have a course so what do we think of what you just heard . My certainly heard the kudos. I appreciate those both raised especially bradley is the struggle we had with the evidence standard. They decided it was the only feasible way of moving ahead in coming up with evidence rigorous evidence that identify these programs and polities policies. We struggled with all of the issues but had to come up with a set of rules that would enable us to go forward and agree on something which is what we did but we completely acknowledged there is more work to be done. Especially in the ideas that you are talking about where bringing to bear the evidence would provide the kind of evidence we would need in our committee and i think thats where the recommendation about administrative data comes in, right . Its not as though we need to wait 20 years for programs because administrative data are available on the studies we used were just unlocking administrative data so people can take advantage. And they do these studies to get tenure and its a winwin situation and that the proviso you need to guard against constitutionality concerns but i think weve been able to handle that in the studies we have done. I want to take they did a good job of presenting our side and why we came up where we did and there is positive evidence of more contemporary programs but theres enough uncertain evidence from other programs and another part of my work republished eight commentary earlier this week that i would encourage you to read which makes the case that evidence about Early Childhood effectiveness this mix of favorable programs but also some programs that are very well about a weighted when they were set up. They just didnt feel confident in making recommendations where we are now should investments be put into Early Childhood. Theres probably a program that we should be investing in do we dont know what they are. One comment though on marriage. We have a Family Structure chapter and we were very strong in saying there really are theres a strong likelihood that theres a Common Thread between growing up in singlefamily families. Thats the driver side and you can be certain about the driver evidence but on the program side just because you understand the problem doesnt mean you understand what the rams can address these problemsou and indeed it could look at the serious attempt in the george w. Bush administration to promote communitybased programs that try to build relationship skills among couples they were randomly assigned to valuations. They all seem to be good programs. They have some impact on increasing the quality ofmp coue relations no impact whatsoever on marriage. So we know whats probably important that we dont now know how to address that problem so thats why it ended up in our list of recommended recommendations because it was so diverse. But we agreed on ideas and that evidence for intervention was variable. I think id like to have ald rebuttal. Its not really a rebuttal but a clarification of things i didnt get around to saying before. First of all i think that head start which does not have rct financial programs positive results that last that doesnt mean it isnt a program because of highquality childcare and since i favor more childcare because i think most women especially low income women and by definition Single Parents have to work that we do need more highquality childcare and head start is great highquality childcare. The second that i want to clarify its its not that there was no evidence that the dog didnt bark. Doesntk necessarily mean that something might not work. It just means that we dont yet know whether or not. We dont havee the research because of the standard that greg talks about in his report in the emphasizes and i want to say when you are in government were even when you are an advocate or a practitioner you are going to say my gosh this generation of children is only with us once and then they are grown up and they are gone and after the research theres not much we can do. You have to make decisions if youre a policymaker on grounds other than evidence and i think we all know that but i wanted to really stress that. And i also think it does lead to a kind of pointing to Research Gaps in data gaps that was alluded to so thank you. First of all kudos to bradley for great insightful comments and ive heard nothing i disagree with from either of them. Let me talk about the Child Tax Credit because remember we have no choice over that. We have to focus only on longterm intergenerational effects. That was our charge. The evidence clearly isnt there. It hasnt been long enough but the evidence on shortterm poverty especially o shortterm Food Insecurity is actually quite strong so if you are a member of congress with those limited resources and if you think i really think that all this money should go exclusively to the factors affecting longterm poverty because thats the most important thing you want to spend those limited resources on the Child Tax Credit that to your other view is i care about shortterm as well a as longterm and im bothered by Food Insecurity for children and theirsit in direct evidence of toxic stress and what that does to kids but you can conclude that his somewhere to spend some of this money. Just because our hands were tied to what we had to consider doesnt mean it wouldnt be something to spend public funds on. We are limited by our charge. The other thing i will say on Family Structure and lot of good comments im inclined to believe Family Structure and having two parents around matters and we wish we had stronger evidence to make that case and how do you promote policy. Its very challenging but i want to point out one additional factor that none of us got to thats important and its a polittle bit related to the marriage issue. If you look onlyue at girls growing upir in poverty when thy become women their personal rates in terms of their earnings of escaping poverty are just as good as those of latino. Boys growing up in poverty becoming men were the real gap is and therefore that affects that possibly affects Family Structure that calls away and it certainly affects Household Income. So given that fact one way to focus on the Family Structure issue is to focus on really focus on the difficulties, the problems of black toys and black men in our society is just something that shameful and we have never figured out how to fix but thats another way to get at this Household Income issue from a slightly different angle. Now i have to respond quickly to that and mentioned all of that is true. We have a pretty detailed discussion of the gender differences there and kind of hypothesize about some of the things that might be going on. Yes the course the many challenges the black void space but also the work of black women have to do to compensate for their knowledge of lower earnings of lacked children who become black man that women dont have to because really the gaps that closer between black women and women but the gap that remains is between all women and all men so if you look at low income women and low income children, girl children who mightow go on to become lowince women we see that gender gap remains so black women knowing that they need to compensate for the outcomes of black men thats one possibility for explaining why black women look more like women when they become adults and black girls look more like women when theyll become adults. A lot of variables. Children and adults in race engendered a lot of things. So i want to piggyback on harrys point that its size important to say that some things in a is effective if its for intergenerational property poverty. Housing choice vouchers are very effective for creating Housing Affordability for the families to get them but thats not our outcome variable in this particular report. There is renew research by tamara leventhal on reducing parental stress. Maybe longerterm outcomes might show success in child that comes in children becoming adults and we just dont have that yet but there are clearly allow the short f outcome benefits and bradley u. Could have been in the room with us when youre talkinge about the kind of evidence standards that we might have considered that we didnt and here i point out for all of us who are researchers of some sort the challenges of doing disciplinary research. As a sociologist on the committee were evidence is not what you need to get into our top journals we might think that there are other kinds of evidence that could be strong evidence and we come to consensus and move through that consensus but i think a course its always important to question what the we can and cannot do and the weaknesses of the weaknesses other than the limitations of it in those kinda of things and if you have not just strong ongoing body of coordinate corridors evidence how can we move on that while thinking about the issues of our research. Before opening to the audience i have a couple of questions. The first is having done this exhaustive piece of work what do we know now that we didnt know before. I was thinking what does this say about the contemporary value or persistence of the mythology of the american dream. As i tried to point out the very beginning mobility is surprisingly favorable but that said its by no means complete and there are important problems withed what intergenerational immobility remains so that was the purpose of the report. I think its hard to remember what i thought coming into the report process but one of the things i ended up i think well i havent thought about whether this is important or not but the task of thinking about all the differenttta drivers here really depressed us all at the beginning and we worked through all of that. Back depressing because . So many pieces of literature. But just as there are many diverse areas that drive intergenerational poverty if you the collection of policy ideas that we have they are divided across all the areas to. So its not as though there is one particular policy that stood out as being the most important for intergenerational poverty. We have available a variety of options across a variety of policy and Program Areas and we dont know that you could think of addressing the problem in either a comprehensive approach if we want to invest a lotan of money or more piecemeal. One time in the cycle versus another but you always have these ideas that have been proven with research on the shelf available on the shelf and to consider and you hope that theree would be various congressional committees and berries kinds of committees taking place that would proceed simultaneously with each of them making a dent in the problem of intergenerational poverty. I came away from the airport pleasantly surprised at the number of things that work and i will highlight two rounds especially. Number one in the American Labor market education is extremely important of the countries that higher rates of unionism in things like that and the role of education is not quite as pronounced. We found it all different phases except Early Childhood for k12, postsecondary training we found the love of things that worked. Again refuting that earlier conventional wisdom that throwing money at these things doesnt work and nothing matters in this areas is not what we found. So in america lot of people go to college and dont finish and there are often questions if you dont go to college what can you do to enhance your skills and we have answers for both. What kind of programs raise completion leads to fouryearo schools but also provide a highquality Occupational Training and on the crime side, crime is very costly to American Society both the crime itself and the consequences in terms of confinement and incarceration. They found a lot of things that worked well with Crime Prevention which we can imagine bipartisan agreement. On the one hand putting more on the streets that clearly works but also investing in some of these different prevention programs that have a lot of promise. I think the one hesitation that i have is that in some ways the report says if you wantha to really make progress you have to be willing to spend money and a fair amount of money and with some other hacks we have fiscal issues in america. The political reasons weme are t willing to raise taxes to pay for the programs that americans truly want and need so theres that difficult conundrum do we then spend money even though we are going to finance things or not and how do you get the two sides to come together around that so the Politics Around implementing these suggestions onnt the one hand one can imagie bipartisan agreements but then they havee to wrestle with these fiscal issues as well. I think for me the interesting thing was how many of our programs and policy ideas were in the education round and not that its surprising that, too conformed to our understanding of go to school, go to school, go to school but whatsl. Interesting is the policies and programs are really abouts ways to make schools and engines of upward mobility rather than you know, it highlights some of the ways that our schools aren, not now as god engines of mobility as they could be and ways to improve their workings as engines of mobility. Did my microphone just go off . Okay, reducing reproduction. At the same time i think its interesting its not quite clear if our mantra necessarily is borne out by the fact that thats what the studies are or thats where you can do it most efficient they efficiently. Schools are like little laboratories and you can easily create control groups. Its harder in the world that i work in and housing to treat them like little laboratories and to manipulate people on the same way we can do in school so im not sure its just her then buy or Research Possibilities in school or if its really that school can be effective. I think you have some thoughts on that. I was thinking about all of these different domains and the fact that we really dont just do one thing. Theres no magic bullet here and we should be in different domains although i agree with you marry that education and mary is absolutely critical. I want to point out that we have a model that i helped build and some of you know about. It uses longitudinal data to trace children from birth to adulthood. It matches the nls 197 for those of you who are data hawks and its not h an rct obviously although controls for a very extensive set of variables and it leaves out anything that doesnt have, meet significant test very end. But it shows that if you intervene early and often in a childs life using a set of six programs that have been shown to be effective by an rct or other rigorous evidence and you intervene at every different lifestage with 11 of thosene affected programs you can close, think its about 60 and i to look up the exact number off the gaps between low income which we define as less than 200 of poverty by all of their children to adulthood and you can narrow the gap in part because race and poverty are highly correlated as well. I think that i just want people to know about this modeling. The partnership between brookings the urban institute the urban institute and they are doing new research with it and its come up with Interesting Data based on in the last couple of years. I dont think very many people know about them and they havent done anything like we do atth brookings to really work dissemination but i think and by the way theres a public interfacing piece of the model so if you are researcher you dont have to be at one of the reorganization is to use the model. If you have a good question for the model you can go and test it against the available data and available modeling. And by the way its aggregated by Race Ethnicity and gender. Its a separate model for each of those groups. Eyes to teach this back in my social policy class. We do like it. Thats a different conversation. A quick point when i talked about Family Structure is trying to make the point that the committee showed a t willingness to say descriptive evidence could bee compiled together to e interpreted as plausibly causal. We are making a subtle point that there was a willingness of the social scientist to interpret the compendium of evidence in that chapter. Myth own view on this as a is te way of good news contained within the airport. Economic stress and economic insecurity is one of the tangled factors thats interacting with Family Structure. I donthe think theres much ofn argument around whether or not it matters. I dontt think thats the argument that there might be an argument around the magnitude, that is the driving factor so does it matter differently for different groups, rightclick so nevertheless we have got this interesting work from new scholars like kristine across. She engages with economic stress and thats an important mediator of this descriptive relationship with things Like High School graduation and College Enrollment so particularly so for black children that the Family Structure piece its not to say that its completely unimportant butr but this does r across groups and in fact there are some keys there that there is some evidence that look some of these economic factors are tangled with familyct structure. That might be one pathway to solving some of these challenges and directly speaking to how to get folks together, thats challenging. I would say my own work looking at somebody some of the economic factors that drive High School Graduation and college one of the things we found once we count account for wealth. I worked with Dave Marcotte of the american studies. It doesnt mean that marriage doesnt matter and thats not the point but its a complex, the complex fact. I also just want to clear that by saying mechanisms matter. I probably lost some eyesight on income and the longrange outcomes i think you could potentially think about income processes and how it shapes Health Outcomes. It may not necessarily always be causal certainly its a strong compendium of evidence there c d finally i love the point that mary made about teacher diversity. We actually have some interesting evidence. Look, its great to have diversity in your workforce and its great to get more black men. In the classroom. I dont know the buttons we are going to push to boost those numbers immediately but we do have evidence that nonblack teachers including teachers who are trained in historically black collage education there is some evidence that they are roughly as effective as some of their counterparts and may be more effective than other black counterparts. Theres this notion that theres something in the the instruction in the training that might matter. Thats something we can do in terms of thinking about curriculum and how people are implementing the course. We have about 10 minutes left. And someone will be running around with a microphone. Thank you. Im wondering if the committee has thought of adding another appendix that would show possible costs and combinations of programs and links to that im wondering if you came across any studies that would estimate the cost that they dramatically expanded earned income tax credit. Maybe would match the first 50,000 o of earnings. Anything like that . T . Thank you. We did try to quantify costs which wasnt easy for some of the programs in the appendix. For aspiration complete data and we have a do a section about programs. We didnt even try to come up with costs for those so thats clearly a task. The eitc ideas there are three different ideas one is for a 40 increase along the whole scale. The other is to have a speaker runup that are 40 plateaued that higher and in a shorter black. Max we have the same phase ou o. Then theres this idea of combining it with the cpc type payment for families that have zero or very low income. You could start at 1000 you could still have a runup at 40 for a family of three so that work incentives are preserved. And in the same kind of fades out. But that was the extent of our we are somewhat selfdiscipline in keeping costs somewhat modest. Although 40 million is a modest amount. We didnt really speculate if the same is true in the 2019 report that i was part of. You want to stay anchored in the evidence of the can. The evidence isnt there to say there wont be disincentives. So youre naturally cautious in thisal Committee Process but i think for good reason because you dont want to go beyond that. I have two comments on yourha questions. In the model that i described we have estimated Lifetime Income increases from the programs that we have implemented to the present time and compare that to the cost of the program that we implemented and it should pass as best we can tell with some caveats. Rob ducker and i want to thank you for all the work greg duncan first introduced by jim hedman years ago and thank you for the all that youve done for the committee. Great outfit of research. Imes anticipating this fiscal complex revenues versus spending. And asking in the work that was done, was there an effort to convert the gains from whether its prenatalro counseling or prekindergarten or whatever into a fiscal advantage and im hopeful and i want to talk to you about whether that can be done with the data you just mentioned. Im familiar with that program and im an admirer of the but i feel that all of us who are focused on Human Capital of americas problems have to have a stronger argument. We have to have a fiscal argument for why spending on these kinds of investments make more sense than yet another tax cut for which there has been no randomized controlled trial and no oneol ever asked for it. Wewe agree with you at least in principle that l its importanto mention. We didnt do it in the study for all the reasons that greg outlined the uncertainty about cost and inferences about much bigger experiments that we found so before we can even get to the important questions its important to focus on it that we are unable to do that. Bob weiman. Its noncontroversial in the longterm evidence that wealth and income is increasingly contemplated at the top. Because thats happening essentially the pool of wealth in the share of wealth and income available to people who are now p in poverty is shrinkig as least in relative terms. It seems to me that one thing we might consider is at the flip side of reducing intergenerational poverty may be programs to reduce intergenerational as least extreme wealth to reduce the accumulation of the top so thats the level of inequity in the system isis reduced. You all talked about eitc, minimum wage, unionization baby bonds in a couple of other things. These are things that can directly focus on the those in poverty but at lease than what youve said and scanning through i see nothing about what we should do about essentially reducing this force where the wealthy is and its trickling down. Should the expand views to look at the flip side of this issue . I think again within the parameters of our charge, i mean you might be correct that truly redistributive policies and income taken taken from the top and transferring to the bottom short certainly in the short term would reduce poverty and exactly how to do that we are not clear on so there is a lot of literature on income transfer programs andnc their impact on labor supply. The question is how you would take that wealth at the top and translated in a way and we just dont have the evidence one way or the other. We are dismissing it. We are saying the Available Evidence for and since we have virtually no causal impact on wealth w at all in our study. And study. Insofar as it affects intergenerational poverty but also the think about the interesting things in the report is there her studies looking at lottery winners which is a random thing when it happens. You can study it and you can study it empirically and winning thee lottery does not improve te outcomes of children in those families. I wouldnt dismiss your suggestion but i would hesitate to embrace it without much stronger evidence about how to do it and what it would result in. One of the things we did do was to provide an updated Income Distribution over time information that take into account in kind transfers that are broadened tremendously over the last 50 years. 5if you add in the value of the itc and the Child Tax Credit and food stamps and other kinds of transfer you end up, you certainly end up with the top 20 of Income Distribution growing very rapidly but the growth rate over the last 30 years between the bottom 20 in the middle 20 those growth rates are very similar. I was surprised to see that and its really from the growth in these in kind programs which typically dont get counted in Income Distribution so its not a fundamental critique of your point its something in a the report that people want to look too because its a different way of explaining data that in a child based we should have had in her mind about the child based trends and Income Distribution. Spend just a quick note on that, if you compare the bottom fifth to the middle 60 that income in the bottom fifth that you put these transfers and grows faster than income in the middle class. I think unfortunately we are outt of time. We have more questions than time sod maybe we can find some of these people afterwards and thank you all and thank you all for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] decide they are going to flee for freedom and they dont do this through the underground railroad and not by hiding and traveling by night but they go out in the full light of day disguised as master and with ellen posing as a mr. William playing the role of the. That story gripped me from the beginning. Something i saw firsthand was not a surprise to me it was the outpouring of love from you my colleagues both republican and democrat. And right after the shooting. The democrats are practicing and we were practicing on her public that my colleague and friend and sometimes archrival and baseball from back home in new orleans unfortunately to start the game too many times said rick richman somehow figured out which hospital i was sent to and got there probably the first person there on the scene in his baseball uniform to check on me. So many others of you again both republican and democrat reached out in ways that i cant express the gratitude and how much it means to me jennifer and her whole family. It really does show the warm side of congress that very few people get to see