The Institute for Research on Poverty: A History, 1966-2008
Table of Contents
- Formative Years: 1966-1971
- Cumulative Research: 1971-1981
- Continuity and Change: 1981-1988
- New Directions: 1988-1995
- Stability and Expansion: 1995-2008
- Renewed Drive: 2008 Forward
Certainly one of the justifications for a large-scale grant to a single
institution as opposed to a whole set of small project grants scattered out
all over the place, is that you reach a critical mass of research interest
when you get a group of people together who have similar interests, but different
-- Robert Lampman, 1966
The Institute was created in 1966, when the University of Wisconsin–Madison reached agreement with the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity to establish a national center for study of "the nature, causes, and cures of poverty." A national center, located in Madison, was a logical response to the issues and the times.
When the federal government undertook new efforts to aid the poor in the 1960s, it also determined that social programs would be studied and evaluated to determine their effectiveness. In 1965 a presidential executive order directed all federal agencies to incorporate measures of cost effectiveness and program evaluation into their decisions. The guiding concept was that the policies and programs then being developed should be shaped by sound logic, firm data, and systematic thinking rather than by good intentions alone.
Charged with implementing the War on Poverty that President Johnson had declared in 1964, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) sought to establish a center where experts would perform basic research, provide counsel, and serve as a ready information source. To remove it from the arena of day-to-day issues and problem-solving, the center should be located outside of Washington. The University of Wisconsin was a likely site in view of its long tradition of applied social policy research and also because several of its faculty members had served on the staff of the president's Council of Economic Advisers when the antipoverty strategy was being formulated. Prominent among them was Robert Lampman, a member of the economics department, who became interim director of the new institute.
At first cool to the idea of becoming too closely involved with immediate government activities at the expense of more academic pursuits, the university accepted OEO's offer on condition that the Institute exercise full authority in allocating grant funds to researchers, selecting research topics, and publishing the results. The agreement signed in March 1966 describes the essential features that characterize the Institute today, even though the OEO has not existed for many years and the optimistic belief that poverty could be eliminated within one generation has faded.
The agreement specified that the Institute would embrace a number of the social science disciplines, would encourage new and established scholars to inquire into the origins and remedies of poverty, would promote sharing of knowledge among researchers and policy analysts by means of conferences held at periodic intervals, and would communicate its findings through a publications program.
Institute staff, then as now, consisted of a director, advised by an internal Executive Committee of faculty members and a National Advisory Committee of members outside the university; researchers holding university appointments and dividing their time between teaching and the study of poverty-related topics of their own choosing, subject to approval by the director and the advisory committees; and a support staff of research assistants, editors, administrative and clerical personnel. This support staff was soon joined by a new group of specialists--computer programmers. Harold Watts, an economics professor at Wisconsin, became the first director in June 1966.
Research at the Institute has illuminated the difference to
the poverty count of different definitions of poverty, factors behind black
and white income differentials, the impact of inflation on the poor, the
relationship of migration to poverty, the role of health and education,
and many other facets of the poverty problem. . . . The very strength of
the Institute in economics has almost defined the mainline of research on
the economics of poverty.
-- National Academy of Sciences, 1971
Once established, the Institute rapidly built up a research staff and began to address the basic questions of poverty research: Who are the poor, and how many are there? How should we measure economic well-being, poverty, and inequality? What are the particular causes of poverty--discrimination, lack of education, poor workings of the market system, cultural factors?
By the end of 1969 the Institute's research staff of thirty members included ten economists and nine sociologists. Other fields represented were political science, social work, law, education, rural sociology, agricultural economics, home economics, psychology, anthropology, and geography.
In addition to individual projects that covered the topics listed in the quotation above, a large portion of Institute energies during the Watts directorship (1966-71) went into a major, pioneering group effort: the design, conduct, and analysis of the New Jersey Income Maintenance Experiment, soon followed by the Rural Income Maintenance Experiment. These experiments studied the differential behavioral responses to varying minimum income guarantees between a randomly selected group of individuals who received benefits and a "control" group of randomly selected persons who did not. The experiments were important to the evolution of the Institute as well as to poverty research in general. The New Jersey experiment is regarded as an outstanding example of interdisciplinary research in close cooperation with government planners.
By 1971 the Institute had become a focal point of long-run research. It had a seasoned staff, a list of publications that included Discussion Papers, Reprints, and books, and was building a computing staff familiar with the new cross-sectional data sets that provided information hitherto lacking on the characteristics of low-income households. On the horizon lay the promise of longitudinal data sets, permitting the study of individual behavior over time.
Because the Institute had been given a specific charge, to investigate the nature, causes, and cures of poverty, it evolved in a way that made it more than either a client of government or a program-oriented collection of researchers whose primary objective was, for example, to study antipoverty programs. Its dual purpose, to conduct basic research and to analyze government policy, was inevitably a source of tension, however: should the criterion for selection of a research topic be its advancement of academic knowledge--its contribution to a particular discipline--or its advancement of general knowledge about government social intervention? The two do not always or necessarily coincide. This tension has played a continuous part in the history of the Institute.
The existence at the Institute of more than 50 social scientists
with a large overlap of basic research interests is of itself a powerful
force, enabling the kind of close personal contact among researchers that
mutually educates and stimulates them.
-- National Academy of Sciences, 1979
In 1971 Robert Haveman, an economist, became director of the Institute. Although the IRP research program continued to build at an impressive rate, the 1970s were years when federal research budgets were tightened and enthusiasm faded for government action on economic and social fronts. The changing political climate in Washington momentarily clouded the Institute's future in 1973, when dismantlement of the Office of Economic Opportunity signaled the end of federal commitment to an institutional embodiment of the War on Poverty. OEO's research functions were transferred to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, reorganized in 1979 as the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). ASPE supported Institute work throughout the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, and the Institute increasingly supplemented that support with grants from other private and public agencies, notably the state of Wisconsin, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Labor.
To the regular Institute staff of faculty members with departmental appointments was added, through a postdoctoral program that began in 1973, researchers with full-time, two-year Institute appointments. The staff was further enriched by visiting scholars, who began to arrive from other parts of the United States and from other countries as well. It is probably fair to say that the graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting researchers who have spent time at the Institute over the past decades and have since gone on to pursue their studies elsewhere or to work in government currently constitute, together with the present IRP staff, the core of the poverty policy research community.
Irwin Garfinkel, a faculty member at Wisconsin's School of Social Work, served as director from 1975 to 1980. The studies that were undertaken in these years advanced the social science disciplines while evaluating public programs. Measurement of economic status and social mobility by sociologists and economists constituted a major body of IRP work. Sociological studies examined the relative significance of ability, family influences, and schooling on adult achievement, while economists examined financial aspects of aid to education for poor students. Development of data and improved econometric techniques expanded the Institute's original focus beyond absolute income poverty to include relative income measures, assessment of pretransfer poverty, measures of poverty that accounted for in-kind benefits, development of the concept of "earnings capacity," analysis of equivalence scales to account for the different sizes and circumstances of families, and work on income inequality.
Econometric studies of the income maintenance experiments continued, concentrating on the issue of whether providing an income guarantee lowers work effort and on the effects of experimental program administration. In the late 1970s, IRP affiliates became involved in the design and evaluation of the National Supported Work Demonstration. Other studies focused on the models of the inheritance of IQ and on the problems of selectivity bias that plagued the social experiments and which continue to be the subject of econometric work today. The development of nationally weighted data bases and the advancement of computer capabilities permitted creation of microdata simulation models designed to evaluate various effects of proposed income transfer and taxation programs.
Another group of studies dealt with welfare law and administration and with the possibilities for integrating income maintenance programs. Sociologists and political scientists analyzed the interconnections of race, segregation, discrimination, and political power. Work on disability policy in the United States led to a cross-national comparison of such policies in industrialized states, and in the same fashion a sociological analysis of class structure and factors affecting income in the United States led to a cross-national examination of social consciousness and class structure.
The Institute's special competence came to be quantitative studies of large bodies of data. The growing collection of such data bases as the Current Population Surveys and the 1976 Survey of Income and Education extended the possibilities for more refined cross-sectional studies and, as data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Longitudinal Surveys, among others, accumulated, longitudinal data gave insight into individual behavior and responses to social programs. Support from the National Science Foundation in 1978 made possible the production of microdata tapes from the 1940 and 1950 censuses that permitted, upon completion of the project in the early 1980s, comparability studies of social change over a forty-year span.
In 1976 the Institute began publication of a newsletter, Focus, whose first issue stated that its purpose was "to acquaint a wide audience with the work of the Institute for Research on Poverty by means of short essays on selected pieces of research." Focus and the other IRP publications reflect a theme that has pervaded its history--communication: among the representatives of the various disciplines that produce Institute studies, between the Institute and its sponsoring institutions, and between members of the academic community, the policymaking community, and the public at large.
In 1975 the Institute began collaborative research with the state of Wisconsin. The first project brought IRP staff together with state personnel to study the causes of error in the administration of Aid to Families with Dependent Children. In 1978 Robert Haveman was appointed chairman of the state's Comprehensive Welfare Reform Study, which spawned a number of joint ventures in the ensuing years. Among them was the Child Support Reform project, which under the direction of Irwin Garfinkel began to explore possibilities for improving the system and led to the major demonstration described below.
Eugene Smolensky, professor of economics at Wisconsin, became director in 1980. The beginning of his leadership, like that of Haveman ten years before, was marked by a change in political climate in Washington that generated uncertainty about federal support for the kind of studies that the Institute had conducted. In the period that began in 1981 the Institute diversified its sponsorship as well as its research interests.
Members of the Institute feel that because their organization
has a history of pioneering work of scholarly merit and practical value,
and because it is housed in a university which provides a rich mix of scholars--in
economics, sociology, social work, demography, political science, education,
psychology, and law--committed to the study of poverty issues, IRP should
continue to seek to understand and solve the many problems related to poverty--problems
that, however unfashionable, do not go away.
-- Focus, 1982
In 1980 the issue of poverty in America seemed on the verge of eclipse. An IRP document referring to the situation in the late 1970s stated that "income poverty, as officially defined, has decreased dramatically since 1965." And new methods that had been developed at the Institute for valuing in-kind transfers indicated that poverty under this measure had declined even more over the past fifteen years. The situation soon began to change. In the face of inflation, two recessions, and retrenchment in social spending, the proportion of the population in poverty rose sharply after 1979, and the topics that Institute researchers had probed for almost twenty years reappeared as priority items on the social policy agenda.
In 1981 the federal government relinquished the practice of dispensing core funding for the operation of a national center for poverty research, but Institute work continued with support from private, other public, and campus sources. In 1983 Congress, in part as a result of concern about increased poverty, partially restored funding by the Department of Health and Human Services for new IRP research projects. That support was subsequently renewed by congressional action at two-year intervals.
The Institute was directed from 1983 to 1988 by Sheldon Danziger, a professor of social work. Having undergone reductions in personnel after the federal core grant lapsed and the postdoctoral program ended, IRP began to draw on researchers at other institutions around the country. A small grants program, initiated in 1983, annually awarded funds on a competitive basis for research on poverty-related topics conducted by social scientists not in residence at Madison. In cooperation with DHHS, the Institute in 1984 sponsored a major conference that assessed past and future antipoverty policy. The tradition of measuring the level and trend of poverty continued with projects that utilized detailed information from the 1940 and 1950 censuses, making it possible to analyze changes in relative economic status among various demographic groups from 1940 through the 1980s. Other research moved forward in the areas delineated by IRP staff in earlier years: analysis of effects of the labor market structure on low-wage workers; examination of the relationship between disability and poverty; the role of demographic change in increasing or decreasing the risk of poverty among certain demographic groups, in particular the elderly and single mothers with children. The discrimination and segregation studies of the 1970s were complemented in the 1980s by a major analysis of economic discrimination in American society, tracing its effects on racial, ethnic, and gender groups over time.
The Institute's expertise in managing and analyzing large bodies of national data broadened in the 1980s to embrace the longitudinal data sets that permit us to follow the experiences of individuals over time. The "Wisconsin idea" of academic service to the community continued in joint projects conducted by the Institute and the state of Wisconsin. In 1984 the Wisconsin Child Support Assurance Program began to be put to the test, piloting a comprehensive reform designed to increase equity in the system and to help single mothers achieve self-support. Features of the Wisconsin program were incorporated into the federal Family Support Act of 1988, and child support has retained prominence on the IRP research agenda through the years.
New topics in IRP work included studies of several minority groups that had not previously been featured in Institute investigations: Hispanics, Native Americans, and immigrants. A conference in 1986, sponsored by the Institute and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, examined the causes and consequences of poverty among all U.S. minority groups and compared changes in their status in relation to that of majority whites.
A large, multidisciplinary project that was supported by DHHS in the 1987-89 biennium examined the interrelationship of poverty, family structure, and reliance on public assistance. This work was complemented by a four-year study, supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, of the consequences of single parenthood for future generations.
Charles F. Manski, an econometrician on the Wisconsin faculty, served as IRP director from 1988 to 1991, a period in which the internal governance of the Institute was strengthened. The main theme of IRP work during his directorship concerned the intergenerational dynamics of poverty, seeking to enhance understanding of the ways in which the circumstances experienced by children and youth influence their well-being as adults.
In these years the research interests of the Institute and of its primary sponsor within DHHS, the Office of Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), grew closer. IRP and ASPE staff members together organized an annual series of conferences on evaluation of social programs, and IRP affiliates and Small Grants recipients regularly presented seminars in Washington. In 1992 a major conference, held in Madison and cosponsored by the Institute and ASPE, reviewed current knowledge and future directions for social policy regarding the low-income population.
Research for the 1991-93 biennium included a set of studies dealing with education and social welfare, ranging from the ecological context of schools to the needs of disadvantaged students and the diversity of approaches to intertwined educational and social problems. Other IRP studies examined the well-being of children under stress and the relation of poverty and disabilities. Consonant with the education theme was the appointment in 1991 of Robert M. Hauser as director. A professor of sociology, Hauser brought to the directorship considerable knowledge of the federal statistical system. Under his direction the research agenda for the 1993-95 biennium focused on poverty, welfare reform, and education, covering studies of the low-wage labor market, homelessness, welfare dependence, and the relation of family background to school attainment. In that period group activities covered issues relating to methodology and program evaluation.
In 1994 Barbara Wolfe, a professor of economics and preventive medicine, who initially came to Madison as an IRP postdoctoral scholar, became IRP director. Her appointment was accompanied by creation of the position of Associate Director, held by Thomas Corbett. The early part of their tenure was marked by new initiatives in outreach. In spring 1995 three briefings on welfare reform were held in Washington for government staff members, and IRP and ASPE collaborated in organizing a seminar on new methods of measuring poverty. IRP research attention in this period shifted toward child development, investments in children, and state welfare reform initiatives.
After a national competition in 1995, IRP was designated a National Poverty Center and received a core grant from ASPE that lasted until 2002, when another competition was held, resulting in IRP’s designation as an Area Poverty Center with a particular interest in poverty and family welfare in the Midwest. This core support for its infrastructure permitted IRP to leverage funds from a variety of other sources, resulting in a broad research agenda in subsequent years.
Landmark welfare reform legislation passed by Congress in 1996 brought IRP into an era of studies of methods by which to evaluate the various state welfare programs. This work resulted in several conferences: “Evaluating Comprehensive State Welfare Reforms” (1996), “Implementation Evaluation Methods” (1999), and “Evaluations of Nine State TANF Programs” (2002). IRP researchers also conducted a series of studies of the experiences of families who left the welfare rolls.
In 1997 IRP launched a major, five-year evaluation of the innovative child support component of Wisconsin Works, the state’s welfare reform program. Under the program, families entitled to child support generally retained all of the amount paid on their behalf. Wisconsin's experiment with “passing through” and “disregarding” all child support to resident-parent families is unique among the states. The Wisconsin experience offered an opportunity to evaluate the potential advantages and disadvantages of this new approach to child support and to increase knowledge concerning the way the child support system works for low-income families. Among the findings of the evaluation were that the full pass-through and disregard increased both paternity establishments and child support amounts received by low-income families. The evaluation was subsequently extended to the period 2003-2006 in an effort to examine long-term effects of the policy and additional issues, including multiple partner fertility.
The death in 1997 of Robert Lampman, founding director and guiding spirit of the Institute, resulted in establishment of an annual distinguished lecture series in his name, featuring eminent U.S. poverty scholars.
A Visiting Scholars program, initiated in 1998 and continuing thereafter annually, brought to IRP young social science scholars from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups for week-long visits. The program’s purpose is to enhance the research interests and resources available to visitors, to foster interaction between resident IRP affiliates and a diverse set of scholars, and to broaden the corps of poverty researchers.
IRP with ASPE support in 2000 again held a comprehensive conference reviewing what research has revealed about poverty in America and assessing future directions for social policy regarding the low-income population. As was true of the earlier comprehensive conferences on poverty knowledge, revised conference papers were published in a monograph (Understanding Poverty, ed. Sheldon Danziger and Robert Haveman, Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press, 2001).
John Karl Scholz, professor of economics and a scholar with practical experience as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Office of Tax Analysis, assumed directorship of IRP in 2000. His tenure featured expansion of the corps of young poverty scholars on the Madison campus as a result of the University’s “cluster hiring initiative,” which enhanced interdisciplinary faculty hiring in the area of poverty research. This expansion brought new energy and vitality to the IRP research agenda. It was during his directorship that IRP began a training initiative for doctoral students, the IRP Graduate Research Fellows Program.
In 2004 Maria Cancian, professor of public affairs and social work, became director of the Institute. Under her leadership IRP launched a new seminar series, New Perspectives in Social Policy, featuring distinguished scholars from around the country and organized around such themes as inequality in America and welfare reform in Wisconsin. Also under Cancian's watch, the Graduate Research Fellows (GRF) training and mentoring program for future poverty researchers expanded dramatically, with 40 students participating in the rigorous program in 2006–2007.
In 2006, IRP completed a major study of the Wisconsin Works program's innovative child support pass-through. Maria Cancian and IRP affiliate Daniel R. Meyer were the principal investigators of the research project, titled the Child Support Demonstration Evaluation (CSDE). President George W. Bush cited the influence of CSDE findings on related sections of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005.
A number of conferences were held in 2005 and 2006, on topics ranging from qualitative research methods to the politics of poverty and inequality and to welfare reform evaluations in the upper Midwest. A fall 2006 working conference on multiple-partner fertility attracted prominent scholars from across the country. And the fall 2006 meeting of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management included two panels of top scholars reflecting on 40 years of poverty research and policy in honor of IRP's 40th anniversary. The sessions attracted standing-room-only crowds.
IRP governance was expanded in 2004 by adding another associate director position, Associate Director for Training and Research, held by Carolyn Heinrich, who ran the GRF program; Thomas Kaplan, who had held the title of associate director since 2002, then became Associate Director for Programs and Management.
Research topics addressed by poverty scholars at IRP in these years include, in addition to the ongoing work on child support in Wisconsin, welfare reform, child and family well-being, the measurement of poverty, health and poverty, and education and poverty. These themes—enduring aspects of the poverty problem—have run throughout the history of the Institute.
IRP researchers continue to explore new approaches to poverty as well. For example, in September 2007 the "Pathways to Self-Sufficiency" conference examined how to help people who were moved into the low-wage economy by recent welfare reform into better paying and more stable jobs. Carolyn Heinrich and John Karl Scholz organized this conference, and they coedited a monograph comprising the papers presented, and published Making the Work-Based Safety Net Work Better: Forward-Looking Policies to Help Low-Income Families in 2009 by the Russell Sage Foundation. An April 2008 IRP working conference, "Measuring the Role of Faith in Program Outcomes," brought together faith-based service providers, policymakers, and evaluators interested in faith-based services for hard-to-serve populations. Participants discussed how the effectiveness of social services delivery by faith-based organizations could be measured.
In May 2008, IRP held the "Changing Poverty" conference, which brought together authors and discussants of commissioned papers that consider trends and determinants of poverty and inequality, the evolution of poverty-related policy, and the consequences of poverty for families and children. IRP Director Maria Cancian and National Poverty Center Director Sheldon Danziger coedited a subsequent volume, Changing Poverty, Changing Policies (Russell Sage Foundation, 2009), which complemented the seminal poverty series that comprises Fighting Poverty (1986), Confronting Poverty (1994), and Understanding Poverty (2001).
IRP activity continued into the summer of 2008. In June, the annual Summer Research Workshop (invitation-only) brought together a small group of social scientists to consider a variety of issues affecting low-income families and individuals. In July, the research conference "A State of Agents? Third-Party Governance and Implications for Human Services" addressed issues raised by public policy and management scholars regarding the growing number of third-party entities that play increasingly central roles in the design, management, and execution of public policy.
In August, IRP hosted an Applied Microeconometrics Workshop, which was taught by Guido Imbens, Harvard University, and Jeffrey Wooldridge, Michigan State University. Imbens and Wooldridge discussed developments in microeconometrics over the last decade and a half. The focus was on methods that are relevant for, and ready to be used by, empirical researchers, at whom the workshop was aimed.
Maria Cancian ended her term as IRP director with word that IRP's application for continuation of ASPE funding was approved.
Timothy Smeeding, an alumnus of the University of Wisconsin (Ph.D. in economics, 1975) and student of former IRP director Robert Haveman, assumed the directorship of IRP on August 1, 2008. Smeeding came to Madison from Syracuse University, where he ran the Center for Policy Research, which he founded in 1994. Smeeding is known internationally as the founder and director of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), an independent nonprofit research center and cross-national database of income, wealth, labor market, and demographic information of citizens from more than 30 countries.
While at IRP, Smeeding's projects include spearheading the establishment of a new cross-national income database, for rapidly growing middle-income countries such as China, India, and Brazil, with support from the National Science Foundation. As does the LIS, the new database will harmonize household income and net worth datasets and make the data available to researchers worldwide, but for middle-income countries. Smeeding hosted the September 2009 conferences on the role of low-income men as partners and as fathers, and on learning about intergenerational mobility from cross-national research.
Smeeding notes, "This is an exciting time to be at IRP. We have learned a great deal about how to reduce poverty in our nation and in our state, and I believe that now is the time to apply that knowledge to overcome the negative effects of the economic recession we are experiencing so that we emerge from these difficult times with a renewed drive to reduce poverty and enhance social and economic mobility for those who are less fortunate."
More than 40 years after its founding, the Institute is energized to build on past accomplishments and forge new approaches to the fight against poverty and social inequality in the United States, in Wisconsin, and throughout the world.
2. Publications of the Institute can be accessed electronically on the World Wide Web at this address: http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications.htm.
3. Policy and Program Research in a University Setting: A Case Study, report of the Advisory Committee for Assessment of University-Based Institutes for Research on Poverty (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1971), p. 17.
9. This work resulted in a series of journal articles and a book, Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), by Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur.
10. A part of this work is represented by the monograph, Succeeding Generations: On the Effects of Investments in Children (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994), by Robert Haveman and Barbara Wolfe.
11. The 1990 evaluation conference resulted in an IRP book: Evaluating Welfare and Training Programs, edited by Charles F. Manski and Irwin Garfinkel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
12. The edited proceedings were published by Harvard University Press in 1994 as Confronting Poverty: Prescriptions for Change, edited by Sheldon H. Danziger, Gary D. Sandefur, and Daniel H. Weinberg.