Research on Poverty, Opportunity, and Social Capital at AEI: A Brief History

One of the American Enterprise Institute’s most long-standing research areas is the study of poverty, opportunity, and social capital. In line with its mission to stand in solidarity with those at the periphery of society, AEI has consistently addressed the issues challenging the most vulnerable Americans through rigorous inquiry. Decades of research preceding the formation of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility (COSM) and its precursor, the Poverty Studies program, reflect this commitment.

As far back as 1945, the American Enterprise Association (as AEI was then known) addressed safety-net design as part of its National Economic Problems series. Edna Lonigan’s contribution to that series, Postwar Public Relief Policies (1945), explored alternative means of relief for struggling families that did not require the large and unprecedented expansion of federal involvement that the Roosevelt administration proposed during the Great Depression. Later, in Expanding Welfare in a Free Economy: A Commentary on the Ewing Report and Other Recent Government Publications (1949), Lonigan criticized the administration’s imprecise definition of poverty and its failure to strategically target aid to individuals most in need. These themes remain important in COSM’s research today.

By 1965, AEI had become the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. In that year, Rose D. Friedman critiqued the poverty measure developed as part of the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty in her book Poverty: Definition and Perspective. Two years later, AEI published a compendium of background information for college debates on universal basic income, a policy proposal that remains the subject of active debate and that Charles Murray would take up during his time at AEI four decades later.

In 1968, AEI President William J. Baroody Sr. organized a debate series on welfare programs that pitted Yale economist James Tobin against W. Allen Wallis, who had served in the Eisenhower administration. The following year, AEI Press published Employment Effects of Minimum Wage Rates, coauthored by John M. Peterson and Charles T. Stewart Jr., which emphasized the negative employment effects of minimum wage policies (a topic of study for AEI scholar Michael R. Strain today).

In 1971, Milton Friedman, then a member of AEI’s academic advisory board, debated Wilbur J. Cohen, former secretary of health, education, and welfare, on the topic “Social Security: Universal or Selective?” A 1973 analysis aiming to inform high school debate focused on the federal government’s role in extending public assistance to Americans living in poverty. The next year, AEI’s Seymour Martin Lipset delivered his lecture “Opportunity and Welfare in the New Nation,” which PBS broadcast.

In 1975, Kenneth W. Clarkson published Food Stamps and Nutrition with AEI Press, arguing that the federal food stamp program was failing to improve nutrition among the poor, an argument AEI scholars continue to make. In the same year, AEI published Edgar K. Browning’s Redistribution and the Welfare System, showing that welfare policy transferred nearly $80 billion to the poorest fourth of the population in 1973, nearly triple the amount from 1966. This work laid out a troubling lack of coordination and persistent flaws in the distribution of welfare benefits, themes echoed today in COSM research. In 1976, AEI and the Hoover Institution cosponsored a major conference analyzing material well-being, income redistribution, and inequality.

In the 1970s, AEI also elevated social capital and civil society as institutional research priorities. In 1977, Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus published their influential monograph To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy. The tractexamined the institutions standing between individuals and the impersonal spheres of the national economy and federal government, focusing on neighborhood, family, church, and voluntary associations. The authors believed these structures were a core element of democratic society, that government must not impede them or attempt to replace their roles, and that it should instead deliver benefits to people through them where possible.

To Empower People formed the basis of AEI’s Mediating Structures Project, directed by Neuhaus (a pastor and public intellectual) and Berger (like Lipset and Robert A. Nisbet—who joined AEI in the late 1970s after retiring from academia—a sociologist). The project benefited greatly from contributions from a range of thinkers and practitioners, including Nisbet, Michael Novak, Nathan Glazer (another sociologist), Leslie Lenkowsky, William A. Schambra, Irving Kristol, and Robert L. Woodson.

The Mediating Structures Project would host a number of conferences at AEI focused on the role that mediating institutions played (or could play) in areas as diverse as childcare, democracy, health care, welfare, and criminal justice. It also informed the Neighborhood Revitalization Project, which Woodson and Cicero Wilson led. That project held conferences on topics such as inner-city youth crime (1980), grassroots groups in urban environments (1981), and corporations’ relationships to neighborhoods (1984).

Also in 1977, Douglas J. Besharov and Vincent J. Fontana published The Maltreated Child: The Maltreatment Syndrome in Children: A Medical, Legal, and Social Guide, an early marker of AEI’s scholarship on the child welfare system. In 1978, Kristol published Two Cheers for Capitalism, which included discussions of poverty and the perverse incentives of means-tested welfare benefits. Greatly concerned with family dependency on government benefits, Kristol argued that while the welfare state had served to statistically lift Americans from poverty, it failed to address the habits and institutions that support long-term stability. . In 1979, Colin D. Campbell and William L. Peirce published an analysis of the new earned income tax credit, four years after the policy’s enactment. These topics all remain pertinent today and are the focus of COSM research.

Reflecting the influence of the Mediating Structures Project, a group of 18 AEI scholars contributed to a 1982 report that President Ronald Reagan requested of AEI. Meeting Human Needs: Toward a New Public Philosophy, edited by Jack A. Meyer, explored the role an expanded private sector could play in social services.

The Reagan administration was also enormously influenced by Charles Murray’s landmark 1984 book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, arguing that federal safety-net policy had actually hurt poor families through its perverse incentives. Although Murray was not affiliated with AEI at the time, today he is AEI’s F. A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Social Studies. Today’s COSM scholars continue to emphasize the importance of the work and marriage disincentives that plague too many of our antipoverty programs.

The mid-1980s saw AEI conferences on “Changing Social Welfare Policies: An Update of Their Effects on State and Local Programs” and “The New Meaning of Poverty.” In 1987, AEI published The New Consensus on Family and Welfare: A Community of Self-Reliance, edited by Novak and John Cogan. The volume was the culmination of research by the bipartisan Working Seminar on the Family and American Welfare, a group composed of prominent scholars and practitioners including Murray, Glenn Loury, Besharov, Alice Rivlin, and Robert Reischauer. The group met with President Reagan to advocate work requirements in welfare programs to promote family independence.

The efforts of Murray and the other Working Seminar members paid off a decade later, in 1996, when Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed into law the landmark Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, better known as “welfare reform.” The legislation, which included greater state discretion over policy, a work requirement, and time limits, dramatically reduced the cash welfare rolls. More importantly, it reduced child poverty and increased the employment of the families who would have been dependent under the old status quo.

In addition to his focus on welfare reform, Besharov’s 1990s research continued AEI’s tradition of highlighting child welfare problems, in particular child abuse. AEI scholars also debated newly prominent issues such as inequality in a 1992 American Enterprise magazine issue focused on the topic and other works such as Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn’s Wage Inequality: International Comparisons of Its Sources and John C. Weicher’s The Distribution of Wealth: Increasing Inequality?, both published in 1996.

Nicholas Eberstadt, who became the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy in 1999 after years of affiliation with AEI, continued the Institute’s long-standing interest in the shortcomings of poverty measures. AEI published his book The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule in 1995, a forerunner of COSM scholars’ contemporary criticism of the official and supplemental poverty measures. Over a decade later, Eberstadt’s The Poverty of “the Poverty Rate”: Measure and Mismeasure of Want in Modern America (2008) explored similar themes, arguing that the official poverty rate understated progress in reducing hardship. Eberstadt subsequently highlighted the explosion in the share of Americans receiving government benefits. His Men Without Work (2016) focused national attention on the problem of male labor force dropout.

In 2007, AEI began collaborating with the Pew Charitable Trusts, Brookings Institution, Urban Institute, and Heritage Foundation on a multiyear research project focused on opportunity. Marvin H. Kosters served as AEI’s representative on the Economic Mobility Project, alongside luminaries such as Isabel Sawhill, Ron Haskins, Stuart M. Butler, William W. Beach, and C. Eugene Steuerle. Scott Winship (COSM’s current director) was Pew’s research manager on the project.

Nearly 30 years after  Losing Ground shifted the debate on welfare policy, Murray’s influential book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (2012) advanced research on social capital trends and inequality. This time, Murray highlighted class divergence in family and community connectedness and prosocial behavior. Later that decade, he would testify with AEI’s Yuval Levin and the eminent social capital scholar Robert D. Putnam before the US Congress Joint Economic Committee, kicking off Senator Mike Lee’s multiyear Social Capital Project. Winship initially directed the project, which conducted empirical and policy research on issues related to family and community life. COSM deputy director Kevin Corinth would run it after Winship joined AEI.

During the 2010s, AEI became known for a distinctly conservative approach to anti-poverty policy, under then-President Arthur C. Brooks and current President Robert Doar, who joined AEI in 2014 to start the Institute’s Poverty Studies program after transforming New York City’s welfare system. In 2013, AEI awarded then-Representative and House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan the Irving Kristol Award for his contributions to improving government policy and social welfare. The next year, Ryan returned to AEI to unveil a new antipoverty proposal, which a panel of experts moderated by Doar debated. Today, Ryan is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Practice of Public Policy at AEI, where he specializes in opportunity, mobility, the social safety net, and entitlement reform.

In 2014, Senators Marco Rubio and Rob Portman spoke on poverty at separate AEI events. (Today, Portman is also a Distinguished Visiting Fellow.) The next year, Brooks participated in a panel on poverty at Georgetown University with Putnam and President Barack Obama. Doar chaired the National Commission on Hunger from 2014 to 2015.

In 2014, AEI published Poverty in America—and What to Do About It. In 2015, the AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity—co-led by Doar and including Strain—published Opportunity, Responsibility, and Security: A Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream. The report of the bipartisan group emphasized the importance of stable families and work, among other themes.

More antipoverty compendiums followed. In 2017, AEI published A Safety Net That Works: Improving Federal Programs for Low-Income Americans, edited by Doar. The contributors argued that the safety net requires emphasizing work and family formation for disadvantaged Americans to thrive. This volume was followed in 2018 by This Way Up: New Thinking About Poverty and Economic Mobility, a collaboration with Opportunity America that launched with a conference featuring an array of distinguished researchers.

Doar became AEI’s 12th president in July 2019. During the COVID-19 pandemic, COSM scholars argued for a more considered approach to federal safety-net spending. They pushed back against claims of soaring food insecurity and resisted the unprecedented nature of program expansions in unemployment insurance, child tax credits, and other areas. COSM scholars were central to the defeat of the misguided Build Back Better legislation in 2022.

In 2023, Winship, Doar’s successor as director of Poverty Studies, refashioned the program into COSM as part of AEI’s new American Dream Initiative. COSM scholars continue the vital work they pursued under Poverty Studies, but the center’s scope has widened to include an emphasis on economic mobility and social capital. The center launched with a daylong event on the state of social capital in America. In 2024, it published Doing Right by Kids: Leveraging Social Capital and Innovation to Increase Opportunity, a volume on policies to expand poor children’s upward mobility edited by Winship, Levin, and Ryan Streeter (who had previously built up AEI’s Domestic Policy Studies program, within which COSM sits, as its director).

COSM scholars have led and continue to lead a variety of collaborative efforts. These include

• The 2022 policy volume American Renewal: A Conservative Plan to Strengthen the Social Contract and Save the Country’s Finances, edited by Paul Ryan and Angela Rachidi with contributions from Howard Husock and a number of other COSM scholars and affiliates;
• The Lives Cut Short initiative on child abuse and neglect, organized and co-led by Naomi Schaefer Riley;
• Ian Rowe’s FREE Initiative, advocating the primacy of family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship for social mobility;
• The Workforce Futures Initiative venture, co-led by Brent Orrell;
• A benefit cliffs working group co-led by Rachidi and Matt Weidinger to address work disincentives; and
• Land of Opportunity: Advancing the American Dream, a forthcoming policy handbook edited by Corinth and Winship.

In 2026, the center unveiled a new Opportunity Book policy catalog, which highlights policies offered by COSM affiliates across AEI to increase upward mobility.

As this cursory review suggests, COSM is part of a storied tradition of research in poverty, opportunity, social capital, and public policy. COSM will continue its dedication to researching and developing evidence-based policies aimed at expanding opportunity by reducing entrenched poverty, increasing upward mobility, and rebuilding social capital.

Special thanks to Karlyn Bowman, Santiago Leiton, Brady Nichols, Tim Sprunt, and Jessie Wall for their help producing this history.