The Likelihood of Poverty across the American Adult Life Span

The dynamics of poverty in the United States: A review of data, methods, and findings

“…Typically used by demographers and medical researchers, they have been used in poverty analysis to examine the probability an individual enters poverty at each age, and the cumulative probability of entering poverty across the life span (Rank and Hirschl 1999a, 1999b …”

“…The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is the most commonly used data set in the poverty dynamics literature (Bane and Ellwood 1986;Duncan and Rodgers 1988;Iceland 1997a;McKernan and Ratcliffe 2002;Rank and Hirschl 1999a, 1999bStevens 1994Stevens , 1999Zick and Smith 1991). 4 The PSID is a longitudinal data set with a single panel that began with 4,800 households and their 18,000 members in 1968.…”

“…Examining poverty entry from a different angle, Rank and Hirschl (1999a, 1999b estimate the proportion of the population that will have experienced poverty by a particular age.…”

“…Using a life table approach, they find that 27.1 percent of adults will have experienced poverty by age 30, 41.8 percent will have experienced poverty by age 50, and 51.4 percent will have experienced poverty by age 65 (Rank and Hirschl 1999b), suggesting that the figure of four percent per year calculated above masks the tremendous number of people cycling through poverty over the course of a lifetime.…”

The “Vaguest Notion of Poverty” and the Blindness of Welfare State Histories

“…Scholarly discussion of "the State" has ignored the fundamentally different state experienced by the poorest Americans. This is more than a quibble over minority-group exclusion, I argue, for by virtue of the manner in which we've defined poverty, we have blinded ourselves to the fact that the majority of Americans will be officially poor at least once in their lives and that an even larger majority will receive means-tested welfare benefits, as a series of studies based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) by Rank and Hirschl have shown (Rank, 2004;Rank & Hirschl, 1999, 2001a, 2001b. Given that "official measures" understate poverty, the problem is undoubtedly even worse.…”