Higher ground: new hope for the working poor and their children

Abstract

joins a growing literature de-picting the lives of economically disadvantaged families in the United States and proposing poli-cies to set them on a positive course. Authored by three leading social scientists who offer distinct academic perspectives, this book spells out in detail what it takes to create a package of policies that is responsive to the needs of poor families, cost-ef-fective, and politically palatable. At the heart of this analysis is a study of a bold employment-based initiative, called New Hope, that was implemented from 1994 to 1998 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Policy-makers attempting to develop effective strategies for tackling poverty are fortunate when evidence collected through the “gold standard” of random assignment design comes their way, and New Hope is an illuminating example of how such evidence is created. Hence, this book is valuable for what it tells us not only about strategies to fight pov-erty, but also about how to generate evidence on strategies to fight poverty.The book, structured like an academic paper, is essentially in five main parts, describing the circumstances that drove the need for an employ-ment program in Milwaukee, the program design’s technical details, the research component of the project, the findings of that research, and, finally, lessons for national policy. Although the findings that emerged from New Hope are not earth-shat-tering—the effects on employment, income, and children’s achievement reported here are quite close to those found for other comparable employ-ment programs that supplement earnings—the book is a worthy investment for readers who desire a close-up view of a program painstakingly built on the belief that “if you work, you should not be poor.” The richness and intimacy of this view are owing in large part to the authors’ choice, follow-ing the examples of several other investigations of poverty (such as David Hage’s

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