The United States government greatly reduced poverty during the 1960s through a series of programs and policies. The poverty rate declined from 22.2% in 1960 to 11.1% in 2023, with some fluctuation in between. Other democracies have much lower poverty rates than the US because, as many scholars believe, they have better funded and more extensive programs to help their poor (Brady 2009; Russell 2011). Lessons from the 1960s-70s and the experience of other democracies are clear: It is possible to reduce poverty if a nation is willing to fund and implement appropriate programs and policies that address the causes of poverty and that help the poor deal with the immediate and ongoing difficulties they experience.
A major reason that the US poverty rate reached a low in 1973 is that the US began cutting back on the programs and services it had provided (Soss et. al. 2007). Another major reason is that changes in the national economy during the past several decades have meant that well-paying manufacturing jobs have been replaced by low-paying service jobs with fewer benefits (Wilson 2010). Yet this has also happened in other democracies, and their poverty rates remain lower than the US rate because, unlike the US, they have continued to try to help their poor rather than neglect them.
To renew the US effort to help the poor, it is essential that facts about poverty become better known so that a fundamental shift in thinking about poverty and the poor can occur. Rank (2011) says that one aspect of this shift must include the recognition that “poverty affects us all” because it costs so many tax dollars to help the poor and because a majority of the public can expect to be poor or near poor at some point in their lives. A second aspect of this shift in thinking, adds Rank, is the recognition (following a blaming-the-system approach) that poverty stems much more from the lack of opportunity, lack of jobs, declining government help for the poor, and other structural failings of American society than from individual failings of the poor themselves. A third aspect of this shift in thinking, he concludes, is that poverty must become seen as an “injustice of a substantial magnitude.,” or more simply put, a “moral outrage.”
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Something is seriously wrong when we find that, in a country with the most abundant resources in the world, there are children without enough to eat, families who cannot afford health care, and people sleeping on the streets for lack of shelter.
– Mark Rank (2011), poverty expert
Sociologist Joe Soss (2011) argues that a change in thinking is not enough for a renewed antipoverty effort to occur. What is needed, he says, is political protest and other political activity. Soss notes that “political conflict and mass mobilization played key roles” in providing the impetus for social-welfare programs in the 1930s and 1960s in the US, and he adds that the lower poverty rates of Western European democracies “are products of labor movements, unions, and parties that mobilized workers to demand more adequate social supports.” These twin histories lead Soss to conclude that the US will not increase its antipoverty efforts unless a new wave of political activity by and on behalf of the poor arises.
In the sections below, we discuss a variety of programs, policies, and practices that help address poverty and economic inequality. We end with a discussion of the role of individual agency and collective action.
Antipoverty Programs and Policies
What types of programs and policies show promise for effectively reducing poverty? A sociological understanding of poverty emphasizes its structural basis – poverty is rooted in social, political, and economic structures of society rather than in the lack of willpower, laziness, or other moral failings of poor individuals themselves. Individuals born into poverty face a lack of opportunity from their first months up through adulthood, and poverty becomes a self-perpetuating, vicious cycle.
This perspective suggests that efforts to reduce poverty must address first and foremost the structural basis for poverty while not ignoring certain beliefs and practices of the poor that also make a difference. An extensive literature on poverty policy outlines many types of policies and programs that follow this dual approach (Cancian & Danziger 2009; Greenberg et al. 2007; Iceland 2006; Rank 2004). If these were fully adopted, funded, and implemented, as they are in many other democracies, they would offer great promise for reducing poverty. As two poverty experts wrote, “We are optimistic that poverty can be reduced significantly in the long term if the public and policymakers can muster the political will to pursue a range of promising antipoverty policies” (Cancian & Danziger 2009: 32).
The following measures are commonly cited as holding strong potential for reducing poverty, and they are found in varying degrees in other Western democracies:
- Adopt a national “full employment” policy for the poor, involving federally funded job training and public works programs, and increase the minimum wage so that individuals working full-time will earn enough to lift their families out of poverty.
- Increase federal aid for the working poor, including higher earned income credits and child-care subsidies for those with children.
- Establish well-funded early childhood intervention programs, including home visitations by trained professionals.
- Provide poor families with enough income to enable them to pay for food and housing.
- Increase the supply of affordable housing.
- Improve the schools that poor children attend and the schooling they receive and expand early childhood education programs for poor children.
- Provide better nutrition and health services for poor families with young children.
- Establish universal health insurance.
- Increase Pell Grants and other financial aid for higher education.
To help reduce poverty, it is essential to help poor parents pay for child care.
Herald Post – Family Child Care – CC BY-NC 2.0
Economic security programs have been found to reduce poverty, and are increasingly doing so (Trisi & Saenz 2021). For instance, governmental programs lowered poverty among Black families by 16 percentage points and among white and Latinx families by 12 percentage points in 2017. These programs lowered poverty even further for children, by 35 percentage points for Black children, 32 points for Latinx children, and 10 points for white children. The authors explain:
"Economic security programs such as Social Security, food assistance, tax credits, and housing assistance can help provide opportunity by ameliorating short-term poverty and hardship and, by doing so, improving children’s long-term outcomes. Over the last half-century, these assistance programs have reduced poverty for millions of people – including children, who are highly susceptible to poverty’s ill effects" (Trisi & Saenz 2021).
Let's explore the The Child Tax Credit (CTC) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) as examples.
The CTC has been described as "one of the single best tools in our toolbox to fight child poverty" (Hamad, quoted in Sobotko 2024). The expansion of the program during the COVID-19 pandemic involved offering benefits to low-income families (rather than primarily to middle- and high-income families has it had for decades) and distributing funds on a monthly basis rather than in a lump sum after a tax return. After this expansion, child poverty rates declined dramatically, by nearly half, though they rose again once it expired at the end of 2021 (Sobotko 2024).
The EITC is an extensive antipoverty program that has been successful in raising many families out of poverty annually. It involves a tax credit for low- to moderate-income filers, which may reduce taxes owed and increase the annual refund, and varies according to whether the filer has children or dependents or is disabled (IRS 2025).
These tax credits reduce poverty. For instance, social scientist Rita Hamad's research team found that the expansion of the CTC was found to reduce anxiety and depression among low-income parents, which may also increase mental health for their children, and that the EITC is associated with positive outcomes for child development and childbearing (Sobotko 2024). Researchers at the Brookings Institute (Duncan & Holzer 2023) found that the EITC strengthens children's educational outcomes and chances of upward social mobility.
Applying Social Research
Unintended Consequences of Welfare Reform
Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was a major government program to help the poor from the 1930s to the 1960s. Under this program, states allocated federal money to provide cash payments to poor families with children. Although the program was heavily criticized for allegedly providing an incentive to poor mothers both to have more children and to not join the workforce, research studies found little or no basis for this criticism. Still, many politicians and much of the public accepted the criticism as true, and AFDC became so unpopular that it was replaced in 1997 by a new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which is still a major program today.
TANF is more restrictive in many respects than AFDC was. In particular, it limits the amount of time a poor family can receive federal funds to five years, and allows states to impose a shorter duration for funding, which many have done. In addition, it requires single parents in families receiving TANF funds to work at least thirty hours a week (or twenty hours a week if they have a child under the age of 6) and two parents to work at least thirty-five hours per week combined. In most states, going to school to obtain a degree does not count as the equivalent of working and thus does not make a parent eligible for TANF payments. Only short-term programs or workshops to develop job skills qualify.
Did welfare reform involving TANF work? Many adults formerly on AFDC found jobs, TANF payments nationwide have been much lower than AFDC payments, and many fewer families receive TANF payments than used to receive AFDC payments. All these facts lead many observers to hail TANF as a successful program. However, sociologists and other scholars who study TANF families say the numbers are misleading because poor families have in effect been excluded from TANF funding because of its strict requirements. The reduced payments and lower number of funded families indicate the failure of TANF, they say, not its success.
Several problems explain why TANF has had these unintended consequences. First, many families are poor for many more than five years, and the five-year time limit under TANF means that they receive financial help for only some of the years they live in poverty. Second, because the federal and state governments provide relatively little financial aid for child care, many parents simply cannot afford to work, and if they don’t work, they lose their TANF payments. Third, jobs are certainly difficult to find, especially if, as is typical, a poor parent has relatively little education and few job skills, and if parents cannot find a job, they again lose their TANF payments. Fourth, many parents cannot work because they have physical or mental health problems or because they are taking care of a family member or friend with a health problem; these parents, too, become ineligible for TANF payments.
Sociologist Lorna Rivera put a human face to these problems in a study of fifty poor women in Boston, Massachusetts. She lived among them, interviewed them individually, and conducted focus groups. She found that TANF worsened the situation of these women for the reasons just stated, and concluded that welfare reform left these and other poor women “uneducated, underemployed, underpaid, and unable to effectively move themselves and their families forward.”
Ironically, some studies suggest that welfare reform impaired the health of black women for several reasons. Many ended up with jobs with long bus commutes and odd hours, leading to sleep deprivation and less time for medical visits. Many of these new workers also suddenly had to struggle to find affordable day care for their children. These problems are thought to have increased their stress levels and, in turn, harmed their health.
The research by social scientists on the effects of TANF reveals that the United States took a large step backward when it passed welfare reform in the 1990s. Far from reducing poverty, welfare reform only worsened it. This research underscores the need for the United States to develop better strategies for reducing poverty similar to those used by other Western democracies.
Sources: Blitstein 2009; Mink 2008; Parrott & Sherman 2008; Rivera 2008
Researchers Ratcliffe and Kalish (2017) focus on how to improve the economic success of persistently poor children. They recommend utilizing hospitals to help connect families with resources, such as on-site staff connecting low-income patients to cash and food assistance or public health insurance. They also suggest expanding housing voucher programs, helping enroll parents into subsidized employment or education and training programs, basing Supplemental Security Income on the needs of whole families, and addressing conditions of poor neighborhoods through 'place-conscious' initiatives coordinated by community groups.
A report from the Brookings Institute (Duncan & Holzer 2023) also provides recommendations for improving the lives of children and reducing intergenerational poverty. Based on research, the authors recommend that strengthening our schools would help. More specifically, reducing harsh punishments of students of color (which we will return to in the Education chapter), increasing the diversity of the teacher workforce, and increasing access to college or high-quality occupational trainings for low-income youth would help reduce intergenerational poverty. For health, they recommend that Medicaid cover all low-income parents and children, that programs to provide meals to children be expanded such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
To learn more about recommended programs, policies, and practices to reduce poverty, you may read The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' testimony The Nation Has Made Progress Against Poverty But Policy Advances Are Needed to Reduce Still-High Hardship or the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's page Policy and Programs to Reduce Intergenerational Poverty.
Tax Codes and Wages
The degree of economic inequality has grown during the past few decades in large part to changes in the tax codes that greatly favored the wealthy. Restoring tax rates to their standards before the 1980s would help to lessen economic inequality and thus help lessen the problems arising from this type of inequality.
In a related area, many corporations pay a much lower percentage than required per law because of various loopholes and shelters in the federal tax code. From 2009 to 2011, 280 corporations paid an average of only 18.5% of their profits in federal taxes, despite that corporations were supposed to pay 35%, and 30 of these corporations paid no federal tax during this period (Kocieniewski 2011). The corporations’ effective tax rate was lower than that of corporations in many other democracies. For instance, in ten-year period beginning in 2002, General Electric paid only 2.3% of its profits in federal taxes.
Ending the loopholes and shelters that corporations enjoy will help greatly to increase federal revenue. As the advocacy group Citizens for Tax Justice observes, “Closing the loopholes will have real benefits, including a fairer tax system, reduced federal budget deficits and more resources to improve our roads, bridges and schools – things that are really important for economic development here in the United States” (Kocieniewski 2011: B1).
Additionally, the federal minimum wage has remained at $7.25 per hour since 2009, and has not adjusted for inflation. Raising the minimum wage would mean that households have more income to spend after paying rent or the mortgage, including heat for the home, nutritious food for children, and other necessities that help families survive and thrive.
Global Poverty
International aid programs may help reduce poverty worldwide, and help address its consequences such as providing medicine and food to families in low-income nations. One promising trend has been a switch from macro efforts focusing on infrastructure problems and on social institutions (such as schools) to micro efforts such as providing cash payments or small loans directly to poor people in poor nations – a practice called microfinancing – or giving them materials to improve health such as bed nets to prevent diseases from mosquitos (Banerjee & Duflo 2011; Hanlon, Barrientos, & Hulme 2010; Karlan & Appel 2011). However, the evidence on the success of these efforts is mixed (Bennett, 2009; The Economist 2010). Much more to help the world’s poor certainly needs to be done.
In this regard, sociology’s structural approach suggests that global stratification results from the history of colonialism and from continuing exploitation today of poor nations’ resources by wealthy nations and multinational corporations. To the extent such exploitation exists, global poverty will lessen if and only if this exploitation lessens. A sociological approach also emphasizes the role that social class, gender, race, and other forms of inequality play in perpetuating global poverty. For global poverty to be reduced, social inequality must be reduced.
Writers Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (2010) emphasize the need to focus efforts to reduce global poverty of women. We have already seen one reason this emphasis makes sense: Women are worse off than men in poor nations in many ways, so helping them is crucial for both economic and humanitarian reasons. An additional reason is especially illuminating: When women in poor nations acquire extra money, they typically spend it on food, clothing, and medicine, essentials for their families. This indicates that aid to women will help in many ways.
Individual Agency and Collective Action
As Soss (2011) argues, “History suggests that major antipoverty victories can be achieved. But they won’t be achieved by good will and smart ideas alone. They’ll be won politically, when people – in poor communities, in advocacy groups, in government, in the academy, and elsewhere—mobilize to advance antipoverty agendas in ways that make politics as usual untenable.” In other words, we must engage in collective action to achieve social change. One major national social movement attempted to address economic inequality by positioning 'us' against the richest people.
In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement gave national attention to extreme economic inequality by emphasizing the differences between the “1%” and the “99%.” Proclaiming “We are the 99%,” they decried the concentration of wealth in the richest of the rich and the growing inequality of the last few decades. Social movements like this can bring global attention to the issue of economic inequality and its ties to capitalism, discussed further in the Work and Economy chapter.
Social Movement Profile
Occupy Wall Street
Before 2011, economic inequality in the United States certainly existed and in fact had increased greatly since the 1970s. However, although economic inequality was a topic of concern to social scientists, it was not a topic of concern to the general news media. Because the news media generally ignored economic inequality, it was also not a topic of concern to the general public.
That all changed beginning on September 17, 2011, when hundreds of people calling themselves “Occupy Wall Street” marched through the financial district in New York City before dozens encamped overnight and for weeks to come. Occupy Wall Street took these actions to protest the role of major banks and corporations in the economic collapse of 2007 and 2008 and to call attention to their dominance over the political process. Within weeks, similar Occupy encampments had spread to more than one hundred cities in the US and hundreds more across the globe. “We are the 99%,” they said again and again, as 'occupy' became a verb heard repeatedly throughout the nation.
By winter, almost all Occupy encampments had ended either because of legal crackdowns or because of the weather conditions. By that time, however, the Occupy protesters had won news media attention everywhere. In a poll by the Pew Research Center (Pew 2011), 44% of Americans supported the Occupy Wall Street movement, while 35% opposed it. Almost half (48%) said they agreed with the concerns raised by the movement. In the same poll, 61% said the US economic system “unfairly favors the wealthy,” while 36% said it was fair to all Americans. In a related area, 77% said “there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.” In all these items, there was a notable difference by political party preference. For example, 91% of Democrats agreed that a few rich people and corporations have too much power, compared to 80% of Independents and 53% of Republicans.
Regardless of these political differences, Occupy Wall Street succeeded in bringing economic inequality and related issues into the national limelight. In just a few short months in 2011, it made a momentous difference.
Sources: Pew Research Center 2011; vanden Heuvel 2012
However, taking collective action through social movement activities is not the only way that individuals can help. Any one person can change the lives of people in poverty, for instance, if they choose to use their individual agency. A person with some free time can volunteer at a shelter or community clinic, call or write lawmakers, or attend town hall meetings. A person with extra income can develop a program to feed hungry children or adults, donate to organizations working toward eradicating poverty, or provide microloans such as those discussed above or gift funds through Mutual Aid programs. Though these actions may not necessarily address the root causes of the problem, they do address the consequences of the problem such as hunger or lack of medical care, and they can help move the needle in the right direction.
Below is one example of a single person who developed a program to feed hungry children experiencing houselessness. What else can individuals do?
People Making a Difference
Feeding “Motel Kids” Near Disneyland
Just blocks from Disneyland in Anaheim, California, more than 1,000 families live in cheap motels. Because they cannot afford the deposit for an apartment, the motels are their only alternative to houselessness (discussed further in the next chapter). As Bruno Serato, a local Italian restaurant owner, observed, “Some people are stuck, they have no money. They need to live in that room. They’ve lost everything they have. They have no other choice. No choice.”
Serato learned about these families back in 2005, when he saw a boy at the local Boys & Girls Club eating a bag of potato chips as his only food for dinner. He was told that the boy lived with his family in a motel and that the Boys & Girls Club had a “motel kids” program that drove children in vans after school to their motels. Although the children got free breakfast and lunch at school, they often went hungry at night.
Serato soon began serving pasta dinners to some seventy children at the club every evening, a number that had grown by spring 2011 to almost three hundred children nightly. Serato also pays to have the children transported to the club for their dinners, and he estimates that the food and transportation cost him about $2,000 monthly. His program had served more than 300,000 pasta dinners to motel kids by 2011.
Two of the children who eat Serato’s pasta are Carlos and Anthony Gomez, 12, who live in a motel room with the other members of their family. Their father was grateful for the pasta: “I no longer worry as much, about them [coming home] and there being no food. I know that they eat over there at [the] Boys & Girls Club.”
Bruno Serato is merely happy to be helping out. “They’re customers,” he explains. “My favorite customers” (Toner, 2011).
For more information about Bruno Serato’s efforts, visit his charity site at www.thecaterinasclub.org.
