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 s