"Culture" and the intergenerational transmission of poverty: The prevention paradox

Future of Children

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 175-196

  Ludwig, Jens ^a,b   Mayer, Susan ^c,d  

^a GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH   (United States)

^c Department of Public Policy ^*  (United States)

^d UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL FACTOR; EDUCATION; EMPLOYMENT; FAMILY RELATION; HOUSEHOLD; HUMAN; HUMAN RELATION; LOWEST INCOME GROUP; MARRIAGE; PARENTAL BEHAVIOR; POLICY; POVERTY; RELIGION; REVIEW; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CLASS; SOCIAL INSURANCE; SOCIOECONOMICS; UNITED STATES; WORK CAPACITY;

ACHIEVEMENT; CULTURE; HUMANS; INTERGENERATIONAL RELATIONS; POVERTY; PUBLIC POLICY; RELIGION; SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS;

EID: 33748936138     PISSN: 10548289     EISSN: 15501558     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/foc.2006.0017     Document Type: Review

References (104)

1. Thanks to Philip Cook for this point.
2. Geoffrey Rose, "Sick Individuals and Sick Populations," International Journal of Epidemiology 14 (1985): 37.
3. For example, previous research suggests that a 1 standard deviation increase in cognitive test scores is associated with an increase in earnings of between 3 and 27 percent, with the best estimates in the 15 to 20 percent range; Christopher Winship and Sanders Korenman, "Economic Success and the Evolution of Schooling and Mental Ability," in Earning and Learning: How School Matters, edited by Susan E. Mayer and Paul E. Peterson (Brookings, 1999), pp. 49-78. Choosing the midpoint of the best estimates (18 percent), an intervention that increases children's cognitive test scores by 0.20 standard deviations, would increase adult earnings by 0.20sun sign18 = 3.6 percent. Child characteristics other than test scores, such as self-esteem, efficacy, and depression, have even weaker effects on future income than cognitive test scores;
4. Greg J. Duncan and others, "School Readiness and Later Achievement," manuscript, Northwestern University (2004).
5. For good reviews of this literature, see Christopher Jencks and Susan Mayer, "The Social Consequences of Growing Up in a Poor Neighborhood," in Inner-City Poverty in the United States, edited by Laurence Lynn and Michael McGeary (Washington: National Academy Press, 1991), pp. 111-86;
6. and Ingrid Gould Ellen and Margery Austin Turner, "Do Neighborhoods Matter and Why?" in Choosing a Better Life, edited by John Goering and Judith Feins (Brookings, 2003), pp. 313-38.
7. Gary Solon, Marianne E. Page, and Greg J. Duncan, "Correlations between Neighboring Children in their Subsequent Educational Attainment," Review of Economics and Statistics 82, no. 3 (2000): 383-92.
8. Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here (New York: Anchor Books, 1992);
9. LeAlan Jones and Loyd Newman, Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago (New York: Washington Square Press, 1998).
10. Technically the estimates discussed in this paragraph describe the effects of offering families the chance to move to less distressed neighborhoods through MTO - known in the evaluation literature as the "intent- totreat" effect (ITT) - since not all families assigned to one of the MTO treatment groups move under the program. But if assignment to one of the MTO treatment groups has no (or at least only modest) effects on families who do not actually move under MTO, then the ITT estimates will be proportional to the effects of MTO moves on those who do make such moves - that is, the "effects of treatment on the treated," or TOT - by the fraction of families assigned to the treatment group who move under MTO. For more details about these results and methods see Jeffrey R. Kling, Jeffrey B. Liebman, and Lawrence F. Katz, "Experimental Estimates of Neighborhood Effects," Working Paper 11577 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005);
11. or Jeffrey R. Kling, Jens Ludwig, and Lawrence F. Katz, "Neighborhood Effects on Crime for Female and Male Youth: Evidence from a Randomized Housing Voucher Experiment," Quarterly Journal of Economics 120, no. 1 (2005): 87-130;
12. and Lisa Sanbonmatsu and others, "Neighborhoods and Academic Achievement: Results from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment," Journal of Human Resources (forthcoming).
13. These are speculations for which there is currently not much empirical evidence. On the other hand, data for MTO participants show that moving to a less disadvantaged neighborhood reduces arrests for violent crime among male youth in the first few years after randomization, an effect that dissipates by three to four years after assignment and gives way to a positive treatment-control difference in property crime arrests; Kling, Ludwig, and Katz, "Neighborhood Effects" (see note 7). There is no detectable evidence for age heterogeneity in MTO effects on scores on achievement tests conducted four to seven years after randomization for children aged six to twenty at the time of the tests;
14. Sanbonmatsu and others, "Neighborhoods and Academic Achievement" (see note 7). There is also not much evidence for age heterogeneity in MTO impacts on arrests among people who were fifteen to twenty-five in the period four to seven years after randomization;
15. Kling, Ludwig, and Katz, "Neighborhood Effects" (see note 7);
16. see also Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig, "Broken Windows Policing: New Evidence from New York City and a 5-City Social Experiment," University of Chicago Law Review 73 (2006): 271-320.
17. Data from the Gautreaux program in Chicago, which moved African American families in public housing to other suburban or urban neighborhoods in the Chicago area, yield suggestive evidence that mobility might have more beneficial effects over a longer term than has been observed for MTO to date; see, for example, the summary in Leonard S. Rubinowitz and James E. Rosenbaum, Crossing the Class and Color Lines: From Public Housing to White Suburbia (University of Chicago Press, 2001). One difference between Gautreaux and MTO is that the former generates more racial integration than does the latter. However, strong conclusions about Gautreaux's effect on families are complicated by the fact that assignment of families to neighborhoods may not have been random, and the set of families who remained in lower poverty, more racially integrated suburban communities at the time outcomes were measured may not have been a representative sample of all families initially placed in these areas.
18. The effects of increased income transfers to poor families on the life chances of poor children remain unclear; see Susan Mayer, What Money Can't Buy (Harvard University Press, 1997). A more recent study finds that randomized welfare-to-work experiments that offer income supplements together with work requirements yield bigger gains in children's achievement scores than do work-only programs;
19. Pamela Morris, Greg J. Duncan, and Christopher Rodrigues, "Does Money Really Matter? Estimating Impacts of Family Income on Children's Achievement with Data from Random-Assignment Experiments," Working Paper (New York: MDRC, 2004) These results are not necessarily inconsistent with those from Mayer, since the two studies consider different interventions (cash assistance versus cash assistance plus work requirements). Additional income with work may have beneficial effects by forcing (and enabling) low-income mothers to put their children into more structured child care settings, whereas extra cash in isolation may be devoted to things that improve family well-being but not necessarily child development. Unfortunately this hypothesis cannot be tested directly within the context of the welfare-to-work experiments examined by Morris and coauthors, since no experimental program changes income without changing labor supply (so experimental assignment cannot be used to instrument for an interaction of income with maternal employment). However, suggestive support for this interpretation comes from the fact that Morris and others find combined income and work effects only on children aged two to five and not on those already of school age (six to fifteen).
20. For example, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 begins as follows: "The Congress makes the following findings: (1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. (2) Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children. (3) Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children."
21. Douglas J. Besharov, "Welfare Reform - Four Years Later," Public Interest (Summer 2002) (emphasis added).
22. Michael Sokolove, "The Believer," New York Times Magazine, May 22, 2005.
23. Quoted in Dennis R. Hoover, "Charitable Choice and the New Religious Center," Religion in the News (Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.) 3, no 1 (2000).
24. To be clear, Raspberry goes on to note, "The difficulty for me is at the intersection of these [religious] things with government funding," but his remarks quoted above speak to the larger view that religious belief per se has important implications for people's life chances. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, "With Ben Franklin's Blessing: A Primer on 'Faith-Based Initiatives,'" www.pewforum.org/events/index.php?EventID=83 (accessed January 25, 2006).
25. For a good review of this literature, see Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Lisa Markman, "The Contribution of Parenting to Ethnic and Racial Gaps in School Readiness," Future of Children 15, no.1 (2005): 139-68.
26. For a good review of early childhood programs, see Katherine A. Magnuson and Jane Waldfogel, "Early Childhood Care and Education: Effects on Ethnic and Racial Gaps in School Readiness," Future of Children 15, no.1 (2005): 169-96.
27. Evidence on early childhood programs' long-term effects during adulthood includes Eliana Garces, Duncan Thomas, and Janet Currie, "Longer-Term Effects of Head Start," American Economic Review 92, no. 4 (2002): 999-1012;
28. Frances Campbell and others, "Early Childhood Education: Young Adult Outcomes from the Abecedarian Project," Applied Developmental Science 6, no. 1 (2002): 42-57;
29. Jens Ludwig and Douglas Miller, "Does Head Start Improve Children's Life Chances? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design," Working Paper 11702 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005);
30. and Lawrence J. Schweinhart and others, Lifetime Effects: The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study through Age 40 (Ypsilanti, Mich.: High/Scope Press, 2005). On tutoring programs, most of what is known comes from a randomized experimental evaluation of perhaps the most famous such program,
31. Big Brothers/Big Sisters; Joseph P. Tierney and Jean Baldwin Grossman, Making a Difference: An Impact Study of Big Brothers/Big Sisters (Philadelphia: Public / Private Ventures, 2000). While this study found encouraging differences in self-reported behavior between tutored and control youth, there remains some uncertainty about whether this evaluation captures tutoring effects on youths' willingness to engage in or self-report problem behaviors. Very little is known about the effects of such tutoring programs on the long-term adult economic outcomes of participants.
32. David Brooks, "Dollars and Sense," New York Times, January 26, 2006, p. A23.
33. For example, the share of Americans claiming that they do not believe in God increased from 1.5 percent in 1988 to 2.9 percent in 2000, but the proportion who have no doubt that God exists also increased, from 64 to 66.2 percent, and the share reporting that they had no religion or denominational preference has been largely unchanged for a decade; Michael Hout and Claude Fischer, "Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations," American Sociological Review 67, no. 2 ( 2002): 165-90.
34. www.whitehouse.gov/government/fbci/guidance/charitable.html.
35. Calculations from the General Social Survey, http://sda.berkeley.edu/ 7507/quicktables.
36. This review of the research on the relationship between religion and economic well-being relies heavily on Lawrence Iannaconne, "Introduction to the Economics of Religion," Journal of Economic Literature 36, no. 3 (1998): 1465-95, which cites an extensive literature. We do not repeat the citations from that article but add relevant and more recent research.
37. Nigel Tomes, "The Effects of Religion and Denomination on Earnings and the Returns to Human Capital," Journal of Human Resources 19, no. 4 (1984): 472-88.
38. Todd P. Steen, "Religion and Earnings: Evidence from the NLS Youth Cohort," International Journal of Social Economics 23, no. 1 (1996): 47-58.
39. Iannaconne, "Introduction to the Economics of Religion" (see note 22).
40. Iannaconne, "Introduction to the Economics of Religion" Ibid.;
41. Alfred Darnell and Darren E. Sherkat, "The Impact of Protestant Fundamentalism on Educational Attainment," American Sociological Review 62, no. 2 (1997): 306-15.
42. Steen, "Religion and Earnings" (see note 24).
43. Bruce Sacerdote and Edward Glaeser, "Education and Religion," Working Paper 8080 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2001). A large body of research shows that social group membership increases with education and that religion is one of the most common forms of social membership. Greater education is not associated with private forms of religious expression, such as prayer and church attendance, but it is positively correlated with other forms of social membership. Thus any relationship between religion and economic outcomes is probably attributable to the fact that more social people are more likely to be religious and more social people are more likely to be successful, not to religion per se.
44. Tomes, using the General Social Survey, shows that about 60 percent of children raised in families with no religion claim to be members of a religion once they are adults, and about 10 percent of individuals who grew up in a family with a religion claim to have no religion once they are adults. This reduces our ability to conclude that the correlation between adults' religion and their income is a good proxy for the correlation between parents' religion and children's income. Tomes, "The Effects of Religion" (see note 23).
45. Jonathan Gruber, "Religious Market Structure, Religious Participation, and Outcomes: Is Religion Good for You?" Working Paper 11377 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005).
46. As noted above, many policymakers believe that religious parents will set a better example for their children because they will be more likely to marry and remain married. Evidence suggests that individuals who report no religious affiliation have higher divorce rates than individuals reporting any affiliation; Linda Waite and Evelyn Lehrer, "The Benefits from Marriage and Religion in the United States: A Comparative Analysis," Population and Development Review 29, no. 2 (2003): 255-75. Today, which denomination adults adhere to has little relationship with marriage or divorce rates, although historically fewer Catholics and Jews divorced than Protestants. Waite and Lehrer also present evidence that children's own religious participation is associated with a lower probability of substance abuse and juvenile delinquency, less depression, and delayed sexual debut. However, the relatively small effect of religion on these outcomes is unlikely to translate into much of an effect on income in adulthood.
47. This brief review of the literature draws from a review by Donna Ginther and Robert Pollak, "Family Structure and Children's Educational Outcomes: Blended Families, Stylized Facts, and Descriptive Regressions," Demography, November 2004.
48. Eng Seng Loh, "Changes in Family Structure, Attained Schooling and Adult Poverty Status," Social Science Quarterly 77, no. 1 (1996): 145-58.
49. For example, an influential study by Wallerstein and various colleagues (Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, Second Chances: Men, Women and Children a Decade after Divorce (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), revised edition;
50. Judith Wallerstein, Julia Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: The 25 Year Landmark Study (Hyperion, 2001) claimed that divorce was extremely detrimental to children, reducing their psychological well-being, their educational attainment, and their ability to form good relationships. This claim was based on a small sample of families in which the parents divorced and whom the authors followed over many years. They did not follow a control group of families in which the parents did not divorce, but they claimed that before the divorce their sample was representative of married-couple families. However, Andrew Cherlin notes that half the fathers and nearly as many of the mothers in this study suffered from a mental health problem for which they had been treated before the study began. These mental health problems probably contributed to both the divorce and the problems experienced by the children and controlling parents' mental health would have reduced the estimated effect of divorce. Of course there could have been other differences between the families in the sample and the average married-couple family that also could have contributed to both divorce and children's outcomes, and these too would have to be controlled to produce unbiased estimates of the effect of divorce.
51. Andrew Cherlin, "Going to Extremes: Family Structure, Children's Well-Being and Social Science," Demography 36, no. 4 (1999): 421-28.
52. Charles Manski and others, "Alternative Estimates of the Effect of Family Structure during Adolescence on High School Graduation," Journal of the American Statistical Association 87, no. 417 (March 1992): 25-37.
53. Timothy Biblarz and Greg Gottainer, "Family Structure and Children's Success: A Comparison of Widowed and Divorced Single-Mother Families,'" Journal of Marriage and Family 62 (2000);
54. Kevin Lang and Jay L. Zagorsky, "Does Growing Up with a Parent Absent Really Hurt?" Journal of Human Resources 36, no. 2 (2001): 253-73;
55. Miles Corak, "Death and Divorce: The Long-Term Consequences of Parental Loss on Adolescents," Journal of Labor Economics 19, no. 3 (2001): 682-715.
56. P. R. Amato and B. Keith, "Parental Divorce and the Well-Being of Children: A Meta-Analysis," Psychological Bulletin (1991) 100: 26-46;
57. Timothy J. Biblarz and Adrian E. Raftery, "Family Structure, Educational Attainment, and Socioeconomic Success: Rethinking the 'Pathology of Matriarchy,'" American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (1999): 321-65;
58. Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Harvard University Press, 1994);
59. Andrew J. Cherlin, P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, and C. McRae, "Effects of Divorce and Mental Health through the Life Course," American Sociological Review 63 (1998), 239-49.
60. Anne Case, I-Fen Lin, and Sara McLanahan, "Educational Attainment of Siblings in Stepfamilies," Evolution and Human Behavior 22, no. 4 (2001): 269-89.
61. McLanahan and Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent (see note 37);
62. Biblarz and Raftery, "Family Structure" (see note 37);
63. Roger Wojtkiewicz, "Simplicity and Complexity in the Effects of Parental Structure on High School Graduation," Demography 30, no. 4 (1993): 701-17;
64. Scott Boggess, "Family Structure, Economic Status, and Educational Attainment," Journal of Population Economics 11, no. 2 (1998): 205-22.
65. Put another way, we would expect the interaction of indicator variables for married mother and employed mother to be negative, and the coefficient on married mother and employed mother to be positive. Estimates like these would, of course, require one to address all the problems associated with the meaning of "married" and "single" parents discussed above.
66. A few studies estimate the effect of maternal employment on children's educational outcomes during adolescence. One finds that among white children in married-couple families, "upper-class" and "middle-class" boys got lower grades when their mothers worked, and their grades were lower still if the mother worked when the boy was of preschool age. The effects of maternal work were much less for girls and for children of lower social classes. See Karen Bogenschneider and Laurence Steinberg, "Maternal Employment and Adolescents' Academic Achievement: A Developmental Analysis," Sociology of Education 67, no.1 (1994): 60-77. Another finds no relationship between maternal employment and the school achievement of a small sample of eighth-grade children who lived with two (not necessarily biological) parents;
67. see Sharon Paulson, "Maternal Employment and Adolescent Achievement Revisited: An Ecological Perspective," Family Relations 45, no. 2 (1996): 201-08. Controlling parents' marital status, another study finds that children whose mothers were not employed had higher math scores than children whose mothers were employed full time. Children whose mothers worked part time had higher math scores than children whose mothers were not employed or who were employed full time.
68. See Chandra Muller, "Maternal Employment, Parental Involvement, and Mathematics Achievement among Adolescents," Journal of Marriage and Family 57 (1995): 85-100. These studies all control some family background characteristics, but none tries to control unobserved heterogeneity or to distinguish the effect of maternal employment for married and unmarried mothers.
69. Suzanne James-Burdumy, "The Effect of Maternal Labor Force Participation on Child Educational Attainment" (Mathematica Policy Research, December 1999);
70. Wen-Jui Han, Jane Waldfogel, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, "The Effects of Early Maternal Employment on Later Cognitive and Behavioral Outcomes," Journal of Family and Marriage 63 (2001): 336-54;
71. Jennifer Hill, Jane Waldfogel, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, "Assessing the Differential Impacts of High-Quality Child Care: A New Approach for Exploiting Post-Treatment Variables," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 21, no. 4 (2002): 601-27;
72. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Wen-Jui Han, and Jane Waldfogel, "Maternal Employment and Child Cognitive Outcomes in the First Three Years of Life: The NICHD Study of Early Child Care," Child Development 73, no. 4 (2002): 1052-72;
73. Jane Waldfogel, Wen-Jui Han, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, "The Effects of Early Maternal Employment on Child Cognitive Development," Demography 39, no. 2 (2002): 369-92;
74. Charles L. Baum, "Does Early Maternal Employment Harm Child Development? An Analysis of the Potential Benefits of Leave Taking," Journal of Labor Economics 21, no. 2 (2003): 409-48;
75. Christopher J. Ruhm, "Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development," Journal of Human Resources 39, no. 1 (2004): 155-92.
76. Some studies find that mother's work is associated with higher cognitive test scores; see Debrah Vandell and Janaki Ramanan, "Effects of Early and Recent Maternal Employment on Children from Low-Income Families," Child Development 63, no. 4 (1992): 938-49;
77. Toby Parcel and Elizabeth G. Menaghan, "Early Parental Work, Family Social Capital, and Early Childhood Outcomes," American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 4 (1994): 972-1009;
78. Kristin Moore and Anne K. Driscoll, "Low-Wage Maternal Employment and Outcomes for Children: A Study," Future of Children 7, no. 1 (1997): 122-27. Others find that it is associated with lower scores;
79. see Arleen Leibowitz, "Parental Inputs and Children's Achievement," Journal of Human Resources 12, no. 2 (1977): 242-51;
80. Frank Stafford, "Women's Work, Sibling Competition, and Children's School Performance," American Economic Review 77, no. 5 (1987): 972-80;
81. Frank Mott, "Developmental Effects of Infant Care: The Mediating Role of Gender and Health," Journal of Social Issues 47, no. 2 (1991): 139-58;
82. Jay Belsky and David Eggebeen, "Early and Extensive Maternal Employment and Young Children's Socioemotional Development," Journal of Family and Marriage 53 (1991): 1083-110. Some of the studies find that the estimates differ depending on the timing of work or the specific group or outcome analyzed;
83. see Sonalde Desai, P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, and Robert T. Michael, "Mother or Market? Effects of Maternal Employment on the Intellectual Ability of 4-Year-Old Children," Demography 26, no. 4 (1989): 545-61;
84. Nazli Baydar and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, "Effects of Maternal Employment and Child-Care Arrangements on Preschoolers' Cognitive and Behavioral Outcomes: Evidence from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth," Developmental Psychology 27, no. 6 (1991): 932-45;
85. Francine Blau and Adam J. Grossberg, "Maternal Labor Supply and Children's Cognitive Development," Review of Economics and Statistics 74, no. 3 (1992): 474-81;
86. Parcel and Menaghan (cited above in this note);
87. Theodore Greenstein, "Are the 'Most Disadvantaged' Children Truly Disadvantaged by Early Maternal Employment?" Journal of Family Issues 16, no. 2 (1995): 149-69;
88. Peter Barglow and others, "Developmental Follow-up of 6-7 Year Old Children of Mothers Employed during Their Infancies," Child Development and Human Development 29, no. 1 (1998): 3-20.
89. One study finds that the negative impact of first-year employment is temporary; see Elizabeth Harvey, "Short-Term and Long-Term Effects of Early Parental Employment on Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth," Developmental Psychology 35, no. 2 (1999): 445-59.
90. Others suggest that some effects persist; see Han, Waldfogel, and Brooks-Gunn, "The Effects of Early Maternal Employment" (see note 42);
91. and Waldfogel, Han, and Brooks-Gunn, "The Effects of Early Maternal Employment" (see note 42).
92. This calculation assumes that having a mother who works in the first year of a child's life reduced cognitive test scores by about a quarter of a standard deviation (Waldfogel, Han, and Brooks-Gunn, "The Effects of Early Maternal Employment") (see note 42) and that a 1 standard deviation decline in test scores is associated with a 16 percent increase in wages
93. (Winship and Korenman, "Economic Success") (see note 3).
94. Joseph Altonji and Thomas Dunn, "An Intergenerational Model of Wages, Hours and Earnings," Journal of Human Resources 35, no. 2 (2000): 221-58.
95. Rebecca Blank, "Evaluating Welfare Reform in the United States," Journal of Economic Literature 40 (2002): 1105-66;
96. Bruce Meyer and Dan Rosenbaum, "Welfare, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Labor Supply of Single Mothers," Quarterly Journal of Economics 116, no. 3 (2001): 1063-114.
97. See for example the review in Robert Moffitt, Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
98. Jeffery Grogger and Lynn Karoly, Welfare Reform: Effects of a Decade of Change (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
99. For details, see Jens Ludwig and Susan Mayer, "Ending Poverty by Changing 'Culture': The Poverty-Prevention Paradox," Working Paper, Georgetown University (2006).
100. For example, Greg J. Duncan and Saul Hoffman, "Teenage Underclass Behavior and Subsequent Poverty: Have the Rules Changed?" in The Urban Underclass, edited by Christopher Jencks and Paul Peterson (Brookings, 1991), pp. 155-74. Note that encouraging women to complete high school and delay fertility until marriage can greatly reduce their own chances of living in poverty, particularly among African Americans.
101. www.childtrendsdatabank.org/indicators/75UnmarriedBirths.cfm (accessed February 22, 2006).
102. Isabel Sawhill and others, "Results to Date," in Welfare Reform and Beyond: The Future of the Safety Net, edited by Sawhill and others (Brookings, 2002), pp. 9-19.
103. www.religioustolerance.org/us_rel1.htm (accessed February 22, 2006).
104. Christopher Jencks and others, Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (New York: Basic Books, 1972).