The classic promise of the American dream is that no matter where you grew up, no matter how poor you were as a kid, you can still have a path to financial stability in the United States as long as you work hard. But the truth is that poverty in the US is much more persistent than it is in other high-income countries. In fact, a poor American kid is much less likely to escape poverty in adulthood than a poor kid in Denmark or Germany or the United Kingdom. Obviously, thats not because Americans arent willing to work hard. Many studies have shown just how big a role your early years and things like the quality of the school you attended, the safety of your childhood neighborhood, and the social networks you had access to as a kid play in your future economic outcomes. So the hope has been that by focusing social programs on reducing childhood poverty, we can reduce adult poverty in the long term.But while directing government resources toward reducing child poverty is crucial, childhood poverty alone doesnt explain why poverty is so much more likely to follow you through life in the US than it is in peer countries. A recent study underscores one major factor that makes poor American kids so likely to stay poor, and its strikingly simple: Its not just that the US government doesnt provide kids with enough support, but that adults are also in need of a much more generous social safety net.To better understand the links between childhood and adult poverty and what can break that cycle, I spoke with the studys lead author, Zachary Parolin, an associate professor at Bocconi University and a senior research fellow at Columbia Universitys Center on Poverty and Social Policy. Here is our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.The US prides itself on being a place where theres a lot of upward mobility. But how does the US actually compare to peer countries when it comes to upward mobility?There are a lot of studies that focus on intergenerational mobility broadly defined, maybe based on your earnings in adulthood compared to your parents earnings. We know from that literature that, in general, the influence of your parental background tends to matter more in the US than other high-income countries. One slight difference in our approach of looking at this is saying, What if we just care about the intergenerational persistence of poverty? In other words, if youre born into poverty in the US, what are your chances of escaping poverty in your own adulthood relative to, say, children who grew up in poverty in Denmark, Germany, Australia, or the United Kingdom? And what we find is that poverty in the US is much, much stickier than in other high-income countries, and by a substantial margin. So if you grow up poor in the US, your odds of being poor in adulthood are a magnitude of two to four times higher than some of the other high-income countries we looked at.So the topline findings are that growing up poor in the United States is particularly consequential for your adult economic outcomes, undermining this idea that the US, relative to peer nations, is some land of great upward economic opportunity. We often focus on how important factors in childhood are to someones prospects of escaping poverty later in life things like zip codes, schools, social networks but what you found is that theres one thing missing from those conversations, and thats government support during adulthood, not just childhood. How did you reach that conclusion?I want to start by saying I dont want to undervalue the importance of income support provided during childhood. Reducing child property, direct income transfers, or other service-oriented provisions remains incredibly important. What we show is that if you want to explain why the US has a much higher persistence of poverty than other high-income countries, a really large part of that equation is that if you grow up or in the US and youre in adulthood and maybe you dont have full-time work, maybe you didnt get that college degree the state is doing much less to support you.Just to try to contextualize this a little bit more, imagine two people one in the US, one in Denmark. They both grow up spending maybe half their childhood in poverty. In both countries, theyre less likely to go get a university degree relative to other kids who didnt grow up in poverty. They might be less likely to work in full-time employment. But that Dane who still suffers the consequences of having grown up in poverty, in their adulthood, they still might get some generous social assistance whereas the similar adult in the US just isnt getting access to the same type of support. So the lingering consequences of child poverty for ones income in adulthood happen to be stronger in the US in part due to the reduced economic assistance provided by the state, and thats what we find explains the large part of the variation.One surprising thing your study found was that while Black kids are much more likely to grow up in poverty than white kids, racial discrimination doesnt actually make poverty persist more. White kids are just as likely to be stuck in poverty well into adulthood. Can you explain why that is?Yeah, we were actually surprised by this finding, and we try to be cautious in how we explain it. Its certainly true that Black children in the US are much more likely to be poor than white individuals. We see that clearly in our data. But the link between that child poverty and adult poverty is roughly similar. In our data, if you have a Black child and a white child who spend half their childhoods in poverty, the association of spending half your childhood in poverty and the likelihood that youre poor in adulthood is pretty much the same for those two kids. But it is in fact true that Black children and adults are much more exposed to poverty overall. Its absolutely true that discrimination still exists and discrimination is a big part of why Black individuals are exposed to more poverty both in childhood and adulthood. But what we find empirically is that, given a certain amount of exposure to poverty, its bad for you regardless, and its not just racial discrimination that explains why the US is so much worse relative to other countries, even if that, of course, is a factor in many other dimensions of economic opportunity in the US.So a lot of this seems pretty obvious: Its very logical to say that if you provide people with more public support in adulthood, then theyre less likely to be poor. So why is it important for people, and especially policymakers, to pay attention to your study? Whats the lesson here that we didnt already know? I think the big lesson is related to some of these intergenerational outcomes. In other words, understanding how the conditions you grow up in are going to influence the conditions you face in adulthood. Understanding how we think about that from the lens of fairness and equity concerns and then: What can we do about it? The reduction of poverty through income transfers [like unemployment insurance benefits] in itself is a good thing, but what we show is that beyond reducing hardship, these transfers have the ability to reduce that link between childhood poverty and adult poverty. In other words, they have the ability to reduce that link between conditions that you didnt choose, that you inherited as a result of your birth and your parents economic circumstances when you were young, and your ability to meet your basic needs in your own adulthood. Beyond the million other reasons to care about reducing poverty in the short run, here is another reason that some of those income transfers in adulthood are important, and in general, understanding why this link between childhood poverty and adult poverty is so much stickier in the US than in other countries.This story was featured in the Within Our Means newsletter. 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