Isabel Sawhill's Blog

As a rhetorical ideal, greater opportunity is hard to beat. Just about all candidates for high elected office declare their commitments to promoting opportunity – who, after all, could be against it? But opportunity is, to borrow a term from the philosopher and political theorist Isaiah Berlin, a "protean" word, with different meanings for different people at different times.

Typically, opportunity is closely entwined with an idea of upward mobility, especially between generations. The Amer...

The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) is certainly an intriguing one, and has been gaining traction. Swiss voters just turned it down. But it is still alive in Finland, in the Netherlands, in Alaska, in Oakland, CA, and in parts of Canada.

Advocates of a UBI include Charles Murray on the right and Anthony Atkinson on the left. This surprising alliance alone makes it interesting, and it is a reasonable response to a growing pool of Americans made jobless by the march of technology and...

The Horatio Alger ideal of upward mobility has a strong grip on the American imagination (Reeves 2014). But recent years have seen growing concern about the distance between the rhetoric of opportunity and the reality of intergenerational mobility trends and patterns.

The related issues of equal opportunity, intergenerational mobility, and inequality have all risen up the agenda, for both scholars and policymakers. A growing literature suggests that the United States has fairly low rates of...

When Franklin Roosevelt delivered his second inaugural address on January 20, 1936 he lamented the “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” He challenged Americans to measure their collective progress not by “whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; [but rather] whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” In our new paper, One third of a nation: Strategies for helping working families, we ask a simple question: How are we doing?

In brie...

Employment among lower-income men has declined by 11 percent since 1980 and has remained flat among lower-income women. Men and women in the top and middle of the income distribution, on the other hand, have been working as much or more since 1980, creating a growing “work gap” in labor market income between haves and have-nots.

This paper simulates the effect of five labor market interventions (higher high school graduation rate, minimum wage increases, maintaining full employment, seeing...

At an event this past week, Hillary Clinton announced that, if elected, she planned to put Bill Clinton in charge of creating jobs. If he becomes the “First Gentlemen” -- or as she prefers to call him, the “First Dude,” – he just might have some success in this role. The country’s very strong record of job creation during the first Clinton administration is a hopeful sign. (Full disclosure: I served in his Administration.)

But assuming he's given the role of jobs czar, what would Bill Clin...

Senior Fellows and are the first joint recipients of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize from the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS).The prize is awarded each year to a leading policymaker, social scientist, or public intellectual whose career focuses on advancing the public good through social science. It was named after the late senator from New York and renowned sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The pairaccepted the award May 12 at a cerem...

Throughout the past year, we have heard paid leave debated in state houses and on the campaign trail. I am all in favor of paid leave. As I have argued elsewhere, it would enable more people, especially those in lower-paid jobs, to take time off to deal with a serious illness or the care of another family member, including a newborn child. But we shouldn’t stop with paid leave. We should also consider shortening the standard work week. Such a step would be gender neutral and would not discr...

In this tumultuous election year one wonders whether reasoned debate about education or other policies is still possible. That said, research has a role to play in helping policymakers make good decisions – if not before than after they are in office. So what do we know about the ability of early education to change children’s lives? At the moment, scholars are divided. One camp argues that pre-k doesn’t work, suggesting that it would be a mistake to expand it. Another camp believes that it...

Today marks Equal Pay Day. How are we doing?We have come a long way since I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the pay gap back in the late 1960s.From earning 59 percent of what men made in 1974 to earning 79 percent in 2015 (among year-round, full-time workers),women have broken a lot of barriers.

There is no reason why the remaining gap can’t be closed.The gap could easily move in favor of women. After all, they are now better educated than men.They earn 60 percent of all bachelor’s degree...