Thirteen Lessons from Fifty Years of Anti-Poverty Policy and Research

Abstract

In the War on Poverty era, poverty was typically understood to be a thing that happens to other people. In the 1964 Economic Report of the President, which laid out the budget for the War on Poverty, the Administration suggested that poor people lived in “a world apart. . . isolated from the mainstream of American life and alienated from its values.” People living in poverty were them, not us, and poverty itself was an anomaly, an aberration, a deviation from the norm. As a result, part of the mission of the Great Society was to incorporate them into “mainstream” institutions and culture, through education, job training, housing, medical care and so on. But we now know that poverty in the U.S. is not an anomaly or something experienced by a small minority of people. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 34.5% of all Americans were poor at least once for two months or more between 2009 and 2012.