Leading American poverty researcher Mark Robert Rank joins the Utterly Moderate Podcast to discuss his Poverty Risk Calculator, the record-low poverty rates that the U.S. saw in 2021, Dr. Rank’s research on the risk Americans face of experiencing poverty throughout their lives, a new book he has coming out on luck, and more!

Rank has spent his career studying poverty, economic inequality, and social policy in America and teaching about these topics at Washington University in St. Louis, where he has been a faculty member since 1985.

Much of his research has focused on the life course risk of poverty in America. Using data from hundreds of thousands of Americans taken from a longitudinal study that began in the 1960s, Dr. Rank and his research collaborators have been able to estimate the likelihood that the average American will experience poverty at some point in their lives.

This research shows that around 59% of Americans will experience at least one year under the official poverty line at some point in their lives.

While Rank has published his research findings in a number of academic articles and books over the years, it occurred to him that it might be possible to use this body of poverty research in order to develop a tool that would allow individuals to estimate their own risk of poverty.

The idea is similar to a doctor’s ability to predict your risk of heart disease. Using several pieces of information (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.), your doctor can make a reasonable estimate of your chances of having a heart attack in the next decade. These numbers are based on statistical patterns derived from a very large sample of families that make up the Framingham Heart Study, the longitudinal study of cardiovascular health that began in 1948.

Could this be done with poverty data? Working with his colleagues over the course of hundreds of hours of programming and designing, Rank developed the Poverty Risk Calculator. You can try it for yourself.

Using the calculator, individuals enter background information on five dimensions (age, race, gender, education, and marital status), and receive a 5-, 10-, and 15-year probability that they will experience at least one year of poverty during these time periods. Individuals can also calculate their odds of experiencing near-poverty and extreme poverty.

The calculator is designed so that individuals can also easily compare their profile with others’ side-by-side in the same graph to examine how the risk of poverty varies by different characteristics. The impact of each variable is profound, and one can readily see how poverty is affected by, for example, changes to one’s race, education, or marital status. This allows users to observe the impact of key social dimensions on life chances. Try it for yourself and see how even a single change can drastically alter your personal risk of poverty.

By utilizing the calculator you can see that the risk of poverty for many Americans is significant. While the likelihood of poverty may be low during any single year, across multiple years, individuals observe that their risk can rise substantially. 

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)

• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)

• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)