Child poverty since the 1960s

The availability of longitudinal data has had a profound influence on the way analysts view poverty in the United States. Prior to the availability of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which started in 1968, researchers and the press assumed that poverty was a relatively permanent condition from which few people managed to escape.

The pioneering work of Bane and Ellwood (1986) challenged these stereotypes by showing that a majority of spells were in fact quite short. For example, they found that 45 per cent of persons who were just beginning a spell of poverty (i.e. they were not poor last year, but were poor in the current year), would be in poverty for only one year; only 12 per cent would be poor for ten or more years. They also showed that most of those who are poor in a given year are in the midst of a long spell of poverty, that is about half of all persons identified as poor in a cross-sectional survey are in the midst of a poverty spell that will last ten years or more.

This new conventional wisdom viewed poverty (and welfare participation) as a transitory state for most, and a permanent situation for only a small percentage of the total population. Some analysts even questioned the importance of poverty as a social problem. They assumed that mobility would have two salutary effects.