'Ignore the Poor at Your Own Peril': Human Ecology Faculty Lend Their Expertise to Universitywide Initiative Examining Poverty Dynamics

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It was January of 1964 when President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty to address the fact that 19 percent of the citizens in the world's richest country were living' below the poverty line. Forty-five years later 20 percent still do so. And today the poor are even further behind when comparing their income to that of the "average" American.

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"We had a war on poverty and poverty won," said Daniel Lichter, the Ferris Family Professor in Cornell's College of Human Ecology and director of the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center.

Look around the world and the picture is similar, according to Christopher B. Barrett, the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. In other high-income countries, the numbers of poor people are large and have remained constantly so over the past generation. In the developing world, the number of Africans living on less than $1.00 a day has doubled in that time. There are more poor people in Latin America than a generation ago, and even the rapidly growing economies of south Asia have left hundreds of millions in extreme poverty. Only in east and southeast Asia have the numbers of people suffering abject poverty fallen in the past generation.

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Barrett is directing the Persistent Poverty and Upward Mobility Project, a three-year campuswide initiative in Cornell's Institute for Social Sciences (ISS) that is investigating "poverty traps" and how to transform ineffective programs aimed at releasing the poor from the bonds of ongoing deprivation. When Barrett began looking for individuals with the expertise and experience to join this effort and solidify Cornell's reputation as a preeminent place for research on poverty, he turned to faculty in the College of Human Ecology.

One of the first people he approached was nutrition professor Christine Olson.

"The idea of applying the best social science Cornell had to offer to this real-world problem fascinated me right from the start," said Olson, a nutritionist also trained in sociology who has spent 30 years addressing the dynamics of poverty in rural America--most recently the interrelationship between food …