Isabel V. Sawhill, , a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, said it’s easier for individuals to become successful at the various stages of life if they’ve had success all along.
The model is officially known as the Social Genome Project. Its architect is Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution.
Sawhill introduced Wednesday what she referred to as “1.0” of the project, which she began in 2009 in her capacity as co-director of the Center on Children and Families as an effort to figure out how to increase economic opportunity for disadvantaged children.
Sawhill readily admitted that the project’s metrics of “success” at various life stages—from before birth to age 40—are arbitrary. For instance, at birth, those metrics include being born to a “non-poor married mother with at least a high school diploma.”
At the latter stage of the model is earning a family income of 300 percent of poverty—that would be $71,550 for a family of four—by age 40.
In between those two endpoints are a host of other stages and metrics, but perhaps of most interest—and possibly the most difficult metric to reach if earlier benchmarks are not met—is one that defines success for an adolescent as graduating from high school with a 2.5 or better without being convicted of a crime or becoming a parent.
“That doesn’t seem like a really high bar to get over, but you’ll be surprised how many kids don’t make it,” Sawhill said.
