Doing Right by Kids: Leveraging Social Capital and Innovation to Increase Opportunity

Material hardship among American children has never been lower. This seeming victory in the War on Poverty, however, has failed to loosen the connection between family origins and where kids end up. Children born to the most disadvantaged parents today are no less likely than in the past to become the most disadvantaged adults when they grow up. Indeed, because of the perverse disincentives in our safety net, policy may have simultaneously reduced hardship while impeding upward mobility. More generally, the progressive assumption that what poor children need to advance primarily involves more money is a dubious one.

But if progressive proposals to expand the opportunities of poor kids have disappointed, the challenges those children and adolescents face have never sufficiently preoccupied the right. Conservatives are appropriately skeptical of government’s ability to influence behaviors and values or to manage initiatives effectively. Their concerns about the federal government’s proper role in social policy are well-grounded. But the moral imperative to do right by kids--to affirm the American Dream--remains.

This volume provides a set of ideas to do just that. The proposals are grounded in the insight that greater opportunity requires shoring up the relationships of children and adolescents and the strength of the institutions to which they are connected--in short, rebuilding social capital. And they embrace a spirit of innovation. Expanding opportunity requires experimentation with new approaches, many of which will fail, to identify scalable effective policies. But identify them we must.

Scott Winship is a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute, where he researches social mobility and the causes and effects of poverty. He also focuses on economic insecurity and inequality, among other poverty issues.

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at the New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times.

Ryan Streeter is executive director of the Civitas Institute. Previously, he was the State Farm James Q. Wilson Scholar and director of Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he facilitated research in education, technology, housing, urban policy, poverty studies, workforce development, and public opinion.