Children born into poverty are far more likely to remain poor in adulthood in the United States than in other wealthy countries. Why?
The stickiness of poverty in the U.S. challenges the self-image of a country that prides itself on upward mobility. 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.
In a new study published in Nature Human Behaviour, my co-authors (Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Rafael Pintro-Schmitt, and Peter Fallesen) 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.
We also sought to understand why poverty is so much more persistent in the U.S., using more complete data on household incomes than past studies have generally used. 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. 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. We calculate that if the U.S. were to adopt the tax-and-transfer generosity of its peer countries, the cycle of American poverty could decline by more than one-third.
Imagine a resident of the U.S. and a resident of Denmark who each grew up spending, say, half of their childhood in poverty. Our study finds that both children will be less likely to pursue higher education or work full-time in adulthood compared with children who didn’t grow up poor. But the Dane is more likely to receive unemployment benefits, means-tested income support, or a child allowance and is therefore far less likely to live in poverty as an adult. This tax-and-transfer insurance effect—or the role of the state in reducing adult disadvantages that stem from childhood poverty—matters more than other oft-studied characteristics, such as parental education or marital status, in shaping the U.S. disadvantage compared with peer nations.
We were surprised by some factors that did not explain the U.S.’s outlier status—in particular, the role of racial discrimination. We and others have documented how historic and ongoing discrimination affects racial differences in poverty rates. But racial discrimination does not appear to explain why poor children in the U.S. are so much likelier to also be poor adults. Black Americans are much more likely than white Americans to experience childhood poverty, but the white children who do grow up poor are just as likely to be poor in adulthood.
We were also struck by the fact that, when it comes to escaping childhood poverty, the differences between the U.S. and its peer countries are much larger than the differences between places within the U.S. As the economist Raj Chetty and his co-authors have shown, growing up in a high-mobility city such as San Jose, California, confers significant long-term benefits compared with growing up in a low-mobility city such as Charlotte, North Carolina. Our study reveals, however, that even in the most economically mobile places in the U.S., poverty is stickier from childhood to adulthood than it is in the U.K., Australia, Denmark, or Germany.
It might seem tautological to say that poor American children would be less likely to be poor as adults if the government gave them more money. But Americans still tend to treat the distribution of government benefits as a symptom of economic deprivation rather than a potential solution to it. Many academic studies of intergenerational disadvantage have used welfare benefits as a direct proxy of poverty. Our study, in contrast, emphasizes that receipt of well-designed government transfers can directly reduce the persistence of poverty. As recent proof of this claim, Americans do not even need to look abroad. In 2021, the expanded child tax credit brought the U.S. poverty rate to its lowest level ever recorded and had the American welfare state temporarily reducing poverty at the rate of Norway’s. After the benefit expansions expired in 2022, poverty and food hardship predictably increased. Evidence from the other high-income countries in our study suggests that the U.S.’s return to a more restrictive and targeted welfare state is unlikely to promote upward mobility from poverty.
Some people might argue that self-sufficiency—giving people the means to overcome poverty without government income assistance—should be the aim of government policy. That is a defensible perspective and policy aim, yet it is inconsistent with the fact that all high-income countries include government taxes and transfers when measuring poverty. Moreover, it implies that it is better for American children who were born into poverty—through no fault of their own—to stay poor in adulthood than to escape poverty thanks to government transfers.
Breaking the cycle of poverty is not merely about increasing families’ child-care support or promoting higher education to wayward teenagers; it also requires direct state effort to improve the ability of disadvantaged adults to meet their basic needs. The United States’ reluctance to do so largely explains why its poor children are more likely to become poor adults.
A few months ago, I found myself in an unexpected conversation with a woman whose husband raises cattle in Missouri. She, however, had recently raised and butchered an ostrich for meat. It’s more sustainable, she told me. Sure, I nodded along, beef is singularly terrible for the planet. And ostrich is a red meat, she added. “I don’t taste any difference between it and beef.” Really? Now I was intrigued, if skeptical—which is, long story short, how my family ended up eating ostrich at this year’s Christmas dinner.
I eat meat, including beef, and I enjoy indulging in a holiday prime rib, but I also feel somewhat conflicted about it. Beef is far worse for the environment than virtually any other protein; pound for pound, it is responsible for more than twice the greenhouse-gas emissions of pork, nearly four times those of chicken, and more than 13 times those of beans. This discrepancy is largely biological: Cows require a lot of land, and they are ruminants, whose digestive systems rely on microbes that produce huge quantities of the potent greenhouse gas methane. A single cow can belch out 220 pounds of methane a year.
The unique awfulness of beef’s climate impact has inspired a cottage industry of takes imploring Americans to consider other proteins in its stead: chicken, fish, pork, beans. These alternatives all have their own drawbacks. When it comes to animal welfare, for example, hundreds of chickens or fish would have to be slaughtered to feed as many people as one cow. Meanwhile, pigs are especially intelligent, and conventional means of farming them are especially cruel. And beans, I’m sorry, simply are not as delicious.
So, ostrich? At first glance, ostrich didn’t seem the most climate-friendly option (beans), the most ethical (beans again), or the tastiest (pork, in my personal opinion). But could ostrich be good enough in all of these categories, an acceptable if surprising solution to Americans’ love of too much red meat? At the very least, I wondered if ostrich might be deserving of more attention than we give to it right now, which is approximately zero.
You probably won’t be shocked to hear that the literature on ostrich meat’s climate impact is rather thin. Still, in South Africa, “the world leader in the production of ostriches,” government economists in 2020 released a report suggesting that greenhouse-gas emissions from ostrich meat were just slightly higher than chicken’s—so, much, much less than beef’s. And in Switzerland, biologists who put ostriches in respiratory chambers confirmed their methane emissions to be on par with those of nonruminant mammals such as pigs—so, again, much, much less than cows’.
But Marcus Clauss, an author of the latter study, who specializes in the digestive physiology of animals at the University of Zurich, cautioned me against focusing exclusively on methane. Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas, but it is just one of several. Carbon dioxide is the other big contributor to global warming, and a complete assessment of ostrich meat’s greenhouse-gas footprint needs to include the carbon dioxide released by every input, including the fertilizer, pesticides, and soil additives that went into growing ostrich feed.
This is where the comparisons get more complicated. Cattle—even corn-fed ones—tend to spend much of their life on pasture eating grass, which leads to a lot of methane burps, but growing that grass is not carbon intensive. In contrast, chicken feed is made up of corn and soybeans, whose fertilizer, pesticides, and soil additives all rack up carbon-dioxide emissions. Ostrich feed appears similar, containing alfalfa, wheat, and soybeans. The climate impact of an animal’s feed are important contributions in its total greenhouse-gas emissions, says Ermias Kebreab, an animal scientist at UC Davis who has extensively studied livestock emissions. He hasn’t calculated ostrich emissions specifically—few researchers have—but the more I looked into the emissions associated with ostrich feed, the murkier the story became.
Two other ostrich studies, from northwest Spain and from a province in western Iran, indeed found feed to be a major factor in the meat’s climate impact. But these reports also contradicted others: In Spain, for instance, the global-warming potential from ostrich meat was found to be higher than that of beef or pork—but beef was also essentially no worse than pork.
“Really, none of the [studies] on ostrich look credible to me. They all give odd numbers,” says Joseph Poore, the director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Food Sustainability, which runs the HESTIA platform aimed at standardizing environmental-impact data from food. “Maybe this is something we will do with HESTIA soon,” Poore continued in his email, “but we are not there yet …” (His ellipses suggested to me that ostrich might not be a top priority.)
The truth is, greenhouse-gas emissions from food are sensitive to the exact mode of production, which vary country to country, region to region, and even farm to farm. And any analysis is only as good as the quality of the data that go into it. I couldn’t find any peer-reviewed studies of American farms raising the ostrich meat I could actually buy. Ultimately, my journey down the rabbit hole of ostrich emissions convinced me that parsing the relative virtues of different types of meat might be beside the point. “Just eat whatever meat you want but cut back to 20 percent,” suggests Brian Kateman, a co-founder of the Reducetarian Foundation, which advocates eating, well, less meat. (Other activists, of course, are more absolutist.) Still, “eat less meat” is an adage easier to say than to implement. The challenge, Clauss said, is, “any measure that you would instigate to make meat rarer will make it more of a status symbol than it already is.”
I thought about his words over Christmas dinner, the kind of celebration that many Americans feel is incomplete without a fancy roast. By then, I had, out of curiosity, ordered an ostrich filet (billed as tasting like a lean steak) and an ostrich wing (like a beef rib), which I persuaded my in-laws to put on the table. At more than $25 a pound for the filet, the bird cost as much as a prime cut of beef.
Ostrich has none of the strong or gamey flavors that people can find off-putting, but it is quite lean. I pan-seared the filet with a generous pat of butter, garlic, and thyme. The rosy interior and caramelized crust did perfectly resemble steak. But perhaps because I did not taste the ostrich blind—apologies to the scientific method—I found the flavor still redolent of poultry, if richer and meatier. Not bad, but not exactly beefy. “I wouldn’t think it’s beef,” concluded my brother-in-law, who had been persuaded to smoke the ostrich wing alongside his usual Christmas prime rib. The wing reminded me most of a Renaissance Fair turkey leg; a leftover sandwich I fixed up the next day, though, would have passed as a perfectly acceptable brisket sandwich.
I wouldn’t mind having ostrich again, but the price puts it out of reach for weeknight meals, when I can easily be eating beans anyways. At Christmas, I expect my in-laws will stick with the prime rib, streaked through as it is with warm fat and nostalgia.
Data: Esgauge, Conference Board. Note: Includes proposals for employer information report disclosures and diversity in workplace, board and executive. Chart: Axios VisualsAnti-DEI shareholder proposals have
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This afternoon, after Kamala Harris certified Donald Trump’s 2024 electoral victory, the vice president had a curious choice of words: “Today, America’s democracy stood.” Although such a statement is meant to portray the durability of institutions, in reality, it showcased how volatile and fragile the American experiment has become.
This time around, no one is arguing over who won. Trump finished with 312 Electoral College votes, well over the 270 threshold needed to become president. (And unlike in 2016, he also triumphed in the popular vote.) Thus, today, amid a snowstorm, Harris and other officials entered the Capitol and carried out their constitutional duty, affirming those results and initiating the peaceful transfer of power. Like former Vice President Al Gore did 24 years ago, Harris personally confirmed the victory of the man who’d defeated her. For a moment, Congress was operating under a shared reality, one in which vote totals mattered, free and fair elections mattered, facts mattered.
In the weeks, months, and years after January 6, 2021, though, none of the above has mattered—not enough. You may recall that, after trying to overthrow the government, Trump was impeached in the House but acquitted in the Senate, which allowed for the possibility of his return. He embarked on a vengeance tour, vanquishing his GOP rivals in primaries and silencing virtually all dissenters into submission (or retirement). Democracy stood, as Harris put it, because democracy is a series of systems, and all systems can be shaped, bent, and exploited by human beings.
Trump had help with his attempt to illegitimately stay in power last time around. In 2021, 147 members of the GOP voted to overturn the recent presidential-election results. But after nightfall on January 6, Senator Mitch McConnell could theoretically have whipped his fellow Republicans into an anti-Trump bloc that might have persisted from that day forward. He didn’t. Senator Lindsey Graham, who, hours after the mob seized the Capitol, declared “Enough is enough,” has likewise decided that, in fact, he hasn’t had enough, and is among the many erstwhile Trump critics who have fallen back in line. J. D. Vance, who in an essay for this magazine once called Trump “cultural heroin,” will resign his Senate seat in order to serve as Trump’s vice president.
Trump’s historic comeback can be attributed to many things—inflation, immigration, the economy, grievance politics, his own charisma, his weak Democratic opponent(s)—but perhaps nothing has mattered more than his keen understanding of the nebulous nature of rules.
Decades ago, people in Trump’s orbit, such as Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, taught him that rules are malleable, that winning is all that matters. Democrats, however, are by and large a party of rule followers. Despite being forced out of the race by his own party, President Joe Biden is still an institutionalist. There he was, smiling next to Trump, the man whom he had characterized as an “existential threat.” Biden’s courtesies, his adherence to norms, extend all the way down. Susie Wiles, Trump’s former co–campaign manager, said that Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, has been “very helpful” to her, and that he has gone so far as to host a dinner for her and others at his home.
Opposition party this is not. The Democrats are playing one game, and Trump is playing another. Trump is winning.
“Today, I did what I have done my entire career, which is take seriously the oath that I have taken many times to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Harris said this afternoon. As was the case with Mike Pence four years ago, there’s no compelling argument for why she should have done otherwise. She had a job to do, and she did it.
Harris and everyone else in the Capitol today were supporting and defending a system that Trump has bent to his will—and all but broken. Trump takes his own oath two weeks from today. In his second term, he’s poised to remake the existing systems in his own image. Nobody quite knows what comes after that.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that he will resign as both prime minister and Liberal Party head once the country selects a new leader.
At least six people have died as Winter Storm Blair has hit several states across the United States.
What if there were a way to smush all your friends together in one place—maybe one with drinks and snacks and chairs? What if you could see your work friends and your childhood friends and the people you’ve chatted amiably with at school drop-off all at once instead of scheduling several different dates? What if you could introduce your pals and set them loose to flirt with one another, no apps required? What if you could create your own Elks Lodge, even for just a night?
I’m being annoying, obviously—there is a way! It’s parties, and we need more of them.
