By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, September 21, 2021
Americans love rags-to-riches stories, tales of people who transcended childhood poverty to achieve adult success. Unless you’re totally oblivious to reality, however, you surely realize that such stories are the exceptions, not the rule. The disadvantages of growing up in poverty — poor nutrition, poor health care, an impoverished environment, the cognitive burden that goes along with never having enough money — can and often do hobble children for the rest of their lives.
That much is or should be obvious. What you may not know is that economists have actually quantified the damage from childhood poverty.
You see, America’s anti-poverty programs, such as they are — notably food stamps and Medicaid — weren’t rolled out all at once. Food stamps became available in some parts of the country earlier than in other parts; so did Medicaid, which was also expanded in a series of discrete jumps. This stuttering, haphazard approach to helping poor children amounted to an unintentional form of human experimentation: We can compare the life trajectories of Americans who received crucial aid as children with those of their contemporaries or near-contemporaries who didn’t.
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