Poverty Abolitionists: Faith, Activism, and Hope for Difficult Times
David Beckmann
Bloomsbury Academic
May (2026)
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead
In a recent issue of the Washington Post, its Editorial Board provides an update (“Why poverty really plummeted in America”) on research conducted by Richard Burkhauser (Civitas Institute) and Kevin Corinth (American Enterprise Institute) that is compellingly relevant to the material in Poverty Abolitionists.
Burkhauser and Corinth have assembled the longest poverty data series that accounts for taxes, transfer payments, and health insurance, stretching 84 years from 1939 to 2023. It provides some astonishing good news. Over that entire time span, no matter what baseline they chose, the absolute poverty rate fell by at least three-quarters. When including the value of health insurance, poverty fell by up to 97 percent. The transformation was especially massive for African Americans. In 1939, 93.3 percent of Black children were in poverty. By 2023, it was 5.7 percent.
It provides some astonishing good news. Over that entire time span, no matter what baseline they chose, the absolute poverty rate fell by at least three-quarters. When including the value of health insurance, poverty fell by up to 97 percent. The transformation was especially massive for African Americans. In 1939, 93.3 percent of Black children were in poverty. By 2023, it was 5.7 percent.
The story most Americans are familiar with would credit the reduction to the modern welfare state after President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the War on Poverty in his 1964 State of the Union address.
Burkhauser and Corinth’s research allows this claim to be tested. They find that poverty was already in rapid decline from 1939 to 1963, before the federal government’s war against it began. That decline was almost entirely due to rapid economic growth causing incomes to rise.
And the massive expansion of the welfare state didn’t change the downward trajectory of the poverty rate. “Poverty fell no faster in the 24 years after the War on Poverty was declared than in the 24 years before,” they write.
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Be that as it may, David Beckmann acknowledges that serious problems remain throughout most of the world…but asserts that they can — indeed MUST — be solved.
In Poverty Abolitionists, here is what he offers:
o Five fundamental insights to guide and inform collective initiatives to abolish poverty
o Ten effective strategies to change the politics of poverty
o An analysis of the interactions between and among poverty, politics, and “The Golden Rule”
o Applications of that rule within fifteen major religions throughout the world
o Nature and Extent of Beckmann’s articles of faith, activism, and faith during these especially difficult times
As I read and then re-read Poverty Abolitionists, I was again reminded of these two questions posed long ago by Hillel the Elder, a prominent Jewish scholar who lived in the first century BCE:
“If not now, when?
‘If not you, who?”