[wolfgke]

Exactly my kind of reasoning. To add a point: Since we don't know the exact kind of pathogen(s) leading to poverty, but we know that poverty of parents is a strong predictor of poverty of children, this delivers a way to at least partly quarantine the poverty disease.

[ptaipale]

Yes, poverty of parents is predictor of poverty of children, but for a large part, it isn't about money. It's about those contagious factors - for instance, how much the parents want their children to do well in school, how much they care about it. So fixing the poverty metric isn't going to change this, something else might.

At least what I read about the number of poor black American kids growing without a father: it's shocking. There seems to be a widespread collapse of culture of having a stable kernel family. What could be done about it?