In a new study published in Nature Human Behaviour, my co-authors and I quantify the persistence of poverty from childhood to adulthood in the U.S. We find that child poverty in the U.S. is more than four times as likely to lead to adult poverty than in Denmark and Germany, and more than twice as likely than in the United Kingdom and Australia. These findings hold across multiple measures of poverty.
Most scholarship on the issue tends, logically enough, to focus on conditions during childhood, including the role of government income transfers in promoting children's development. These studies have yielded important insights, but they overlook one major reason why poverty in the U.S. is so much stickier than in peer countries: Americans born into poverty receive far less government support during their adulthood.
When it comes to upward mobility from childhood poverty, what separates the U.S. from the U.K., Australia, Germany, and Denmark is a robust set of public investments to reduce poverty's lingering consequences for adults who were born to disadvantaged families.
Studies focused on the U.S. have found that strong social networks, high-quality neighborhoods, and access to higher education all facilitate social mobility, yet these factors also matter in other wealthy countries where mobility is notably higher.
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