Market-Based Development to Win the War on Poverty

Prepared for the Chicago Federal Executive Board, this presentation assesses the nation’s progress over the last 50 years and suggests a new framework for winning the “War on Poverty.” Finding that welfare programs have significantly reduced absolute poverty but are inadequate to combat rapidly growing relative poverty, the presentation proposes a new market-based approach that leverages, rather than supplants, next-economy markets to bring under-invested people and places back into the economic mainstream. The presentation concludes with principles for designing the federal government’s role in this new effort.