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Poverty

Our coverage of poverty in America, which policies help reduce it, and why it's so hard to achieve economic mobility.

Human progress has come at the expense of animals. It doesn’t have to.

By Bryan Walsh

Governments once imagined a future without extreme poverty. What happened?

By Bryan Walsh

We cut child poverty to historic lows, then let it rebound faster than ever before

By Oshan Jarow

The US hired a leading economist to fix how it allocates foreign aid. Here’s his plan.

By Dylan Matthews

Lots of Americans are in the global 1%. A tenth of their income could transform the world.

By Sigal Samuel

Poverty is a major public health crisis. Let’s treat it like one.

By Oshan Jarow

How abortion bans will strain an already failing foster system

By Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg

What a landmark new study on homelessness tells us

By Rachel M. Cohen

The brewing war over who goes hungry in America — and how to feed them

By Kenny Torrella

Why 70 percent of the world’s maternal deaths are in sub-Saharan Africa

By Rachel DuRose

Why even brilliant scholars misunderstand poverty in America

By Dylan Matthews

Homeless encampments — and the debate over what to do about them — explained

By Rachel M. Cohen

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Economist Chris Blattman has reshaped our understanding of violence and poverty

By Sigal Samuel

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Jamila Michener knows that fighting poverty means fighting for democracy

By Dylan Matthews

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Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak wants to find out what makes antipoverty programs effective

By Siobhan McDonough

The Mississippi welfare fraud involving Brett Favre, explained

By Jack Meserve

How effective altruism went from a niche movement to a billion-dollar force

By Dylan Matthews

How America fails children

By Dylan Scott

The simplest, most revolutionary approach to ending poverty

By Siobhan McDonough

22 things we think will happen in 2022

By Dylan Matthews, Kelsey Piper, and 1 more

22 predictions we made in 2021, and the 13 we got right

By Dylan Matthews, Sigal Samuel, and 1 more

Democrats may let the best weapon against child poverty fade away

By Li Zhou

The lie of “expired” food and the disastrous truth of America’s food waste problem

By Alissa Wilkinson

Biden has launched the second war on poverty

By Dylan Matthews

We tried to predict 2020. Here’s what we got right — and so very wrong.

By Kelsey Piper, Sigal Samuel, and 1 more

What Kenya can teach its neighbors — and the US — about improving the lives of the “unbanked”

By Kelsey Piper

How Canada lifted nearly 300,000 kids out of poverty in a single year

By Byrd Pinkerton, Dylan Matthews, and 2 more

The Nobel went to economists who changed how we help the poor. But some critics oppose their big idea.

By Kelsey Piper

Vouchers can help the poor find homes. But landlords often won’t accept them.

By Stephanie Wykstra

A generation of economists helped get us into this mess. A new generation can get us out.

By Jared Bernstein

Alaska’s universal basic income problem

By Robyn Sundlee

The Catch-22 for labor unions enjoying newfound public support

By Dylan Scott

How Trump used a centuries-old racist trope to attack Baltimore

By P.R. Lockhart

What economists have gotten wrong for decades

By Jared Bernstein

The Fed is doing something new: listening to low-income workers

By Jared Bernstein

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The 2020 Democratic primary debate over reparations, explained

By P.R. Lockhart

2020 Democrats share plans to fight poverty at presidential forum

By P.R. Lockhart

The GOP tax law’s lopsided giveaway to corporations, explained in one sentence

By Dylan Scott

Trump wants to change how poverty is calculated — to make fewer people eligible for benefits

By Dylan Matthews

India’s poor don’t want money — they want health care

By Kelsey Piper

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