Understanding the Social Safety Net: Lessons from the Work of Rebecca Blank

• Published date: 01 January 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00027162241291377
• Author: Paul N. Courant,Lucie Schmidt,Julia Yates
• Date: 01 January 2024
• Subject Matter: Poverty and Antipoverty Programs

ANNALS, AAPSS, 711, January 2024 57

DOI: 10.1177/00027162241291377

Understanding

the Social

Safety Net:

Lessons from

the Work of

Rebecca Blank

By

PAUL N. COURANT,

LUCIE SCHMIDT,

and

JULIA YATES

1291377ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYUNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL SAFETY NET

research-article2024

Over many years, the research and writing of Rebecca

Blank provided insightful analysis of poverty and the

social safety net in the U.S. A number of lessons can be

drawn from her work—about the social safety net and

about policy-relevant scholarship—that remain crucial.

Blank’s work shows us the importance of considering

heterogeneity among those who live in poverty. It high-

lights the patchwork nature of the social safety net as

well as the role played by both geographic variation and

race in determining antipoverty policy in the U.S. Her

lessons on scholarship include the value of measure-

ment and of high-quality research that considers both

benefits and costs of policies. Finally, Blank’s work

shows us that the perception that “nothing works” to

reduce poverty misinterprets history and ignores a

growing body of evidence.

Keywords: safety net; poverty; TANF; SNAP; EITC;

CTC; Medicaid

In 1997, Rebecca M. Blank published It

Takes a Nation: A New Agenda for Fighting

Poverty (henceforth referred to as ITAN). The

Correspondence: lschmidt@smith.edu

Paul N. Courant is Edward M. Gramlich Distinguished

University Professor Emeritus of Economics and Public

Policy, Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor Emeritus

of Information, faculty associate in the Institute for

Social Research, and provost emeritus at the University

of Michigan. Courant’s research covers tax policy, pov-

erty and income distribution, gender differences in pay,

and university budgeting systems.

Lucie Schmidt is Robert A. Woods Professor of

Economics at Smith College and a research associate at

the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is a

labor and health economist and has written exten-

sively on social safety net programs in the U.S. with a

particular focus on interactions between safety net

programs.

Julia Yates is an economics doctoral student at the

University of Michigan. Her research interests include

low-income households and the U.S. social safety net

with a focus on how program administration impacts

household behavior.

58 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

book provided a comprehensive treatment of poverty and associated public poli-

cies and a persuasive critical response to the misinformation that was common in

the discussions of welfare reform in the 1990s. The book built on Blank’s research

on the U.S. social safety net over a 20-year period and was favorably reviewed

when it was published.1 We revisited ITAN and the broader portfolio of Blank’s

work in preparation for writing this article and quickly came to the realization

that it is nearly impossible to have new insights about the safety net that she had

not already thought and written about more than 20 years ago. Recognizing the

breadth and depth of Blank’s contributions, we decided to center this article

around many of the lessons that can be drawn from her work—about the social

safety net and about policy-relevant scholarship—that are still important today.

Table A1 in the online appendix presents a sampling of Rebecca Blank’s work

on the social safety net in the 20 years after she received her PhD. It begins with

her first publication, in the Journal of Public Economics in 1985, and includes

many other papers published in peer-reviewed journals as well as edited volumes,

several of which she coedited. In addition to her original academic scholarship

about the safety net, Blank sought to distill the essence of the academic literature

to a broader audience, as evidenced by her overview articles in the Journal of

Economic Literature and the Journal of Economic Perspectives, as well as by her

work on ITAN. She was particularly skilled at effectively communicating the state

of poverty and the efficacy of antipoverty programs in ways that were persuasive

to both researchers and policymakers.2 The work highlighted here demonstrates

her dedication to research on the social safety net and the significant contribu-

tions she made to this literature over the course of decades.

Rebecca Blank’s Lessons About Poverty and the Safety Net

Lesson #1: Poverty cuts across demographic groups and neighborhoods.

Analyzing people in poverty as a homogeneous type impedes our under-

standing of the problem and our ability to find solutions

In the last decade, we have consistently misunderstood the nature of poverty in

America, believing that it is more behavioral, more ghetto-based, and more a problem

experienced by people of color. Hence, for many middle-income Americans, the poor

have come to seem alien and less “like us” than they actually are. (Blank 1997a, 5)

In order to assess the evolution of the social safety net in aiding households in

poverty, we must first understand the characteristics of those households as well

as the drivers of poverty. In the first chapter of ITAN, Rebecca Blank (1997a)

emphasizes that “there is no one ‘face’ of poverty in America” (13). Households

in poverty fall into every demographic group and live in most types of neighbor-

hoods, and a failure to understand this hinders both the development of public

NOTE: We are grateful to Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and to participants in the Authors’

Conference in Memory and Honor of Rebecca M. Blank for helpful comments and sugges-

tions and to Lily Smetzer and Kate Leafstrand for excellent research assistance.