One of the benefits of reports such as the Brandeis study (Living Longer on Less in Massachusetts) is that it gets people thinking about the reality of their situation and hopefully, taking action to improve it.
Ann Hartstein
Executive Director
Massachusetts Association of Older Americans (MAOA)
This timely and incisive report [The Asset Security and Opportunity Index] documents the lack of financial capacity of families to weather tough times. In this financial crisis, millions of American families have used up their nest-eggs, with job and wage recovery nowhere in sight.
Robert Kuttner
Co-editor of The American Prospect
Senior Fellow at Demos
New measures and indicators are strategically supporting and positioning an important new national conversation on family financial well-being. Three complementary areas of research and analysis are being used to identify and understand more fully the characteristics that contribute to family financial well-being: (1) creation of indicators of stability and vulnerability; (2) refining, validating and expanding measures of asset poverty; and (3) analyses of federal and state tax codes for individual asset accumulation provisions and distributional impact.
The Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP), in collaboration with our partner organizations Dēmos and CFED, embarked on a three-year project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, on family financial well-being and the role of the social contract in creating opportunities for economic security and stability in this nation.
This project creates strategic data tools and evidence-based analytic measures--a middle class security index and a refined asset poverty index--to establish an integrated framework for identifying factors that contribute to family financial well-being and that most impact their stability and vulnerability. Additionally, the project frames out an examination of key federal and state wealth-building tax policies that may affect these measures to understand better the relationship between policy and financial security.
With these tools and measures, data will be analyzed to understand the impact of public policies on family financial well-being, and to inform policy decisions that build toward a new social contract addressing the security and opportunity needs of all families. Shifting the perspective from income poverty to examine family assets expands our understanding of the relationship between temporary poverty and the conditions for middle class security and the role of tax policy investments in wealth building. This work will contribute to identifying policy mechanisms that block mobility, make asset accumulation difficult, maintain wealth inequality, and most importantly, contribute to stability.
Together these new measures, indices, and analyses of policy initiatives will improve public understanding of economic vulnerability and its links to public policy, and will inform policy making and legislative agendas by making visible the cost-benefit value of social investments and variations of impact for different populations. This project aligns perfectly with the Institute on Assets and Social Policy's core mission of building knowledge and resources to support economic and social mobility.
For more information about this project please contact Tatjana Meschede or phone 781-736-8678.
By a Thread: The New Experience of America's Middle Class, Nov. 2007
Economic (In)Security:
The Experience of the African American and Latino Middle Classes, Feb. 2008
From Middle to Shaky Ground: The Economic Decline of America's Middle Class, 2000-2006 , Nov. 2008
Living Longer on Less: The New Economic (In)Security of Seniors, Jan. 2009
Living Longer on Less in Massachusetts: The New Economic (In)Security of Seniors, Mar. 2009
Statement on Better Understanding the Economic Security of Seniors, May 2009
The Asset Security and Opportunity Index,Nov. 2009
© 2009, Institute on Assets and Social Policy, The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University. All rights are reserved.
