America’s war on poverty turned 50 years old this week, and plenty of people have concluded that, as President Reagan put it: “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.”....

.....Yet a careful look at the evidence suggests that such a view is flat wrong. In fact, the first lesson of the war on poverty is that we can make progress against poverty, but that it’s an uphill slog.

The most accurate measures, using Census Bureau figures that take account of benefits, suggest that poverty rates have fallen by more than one-third since 1968. There’s a consensus that without the war on poverty, other forces (such as mass incarceration, a rise in single mothers and the decline in trade unions) would have lifted poverty much higher.

A Columbia University study suggests that without government benefits, the poverty rate would have soared to 31 percent in 2012. Indeed, an average of 27 million people were lifted annually out of poverty by social programs between 1968 and 2012, according to the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

The best example of how government antipoverty programs can succeed involves the elderly ... That’s because senior citizens vote, so politicians listened to them and buttressed programs like Social Security and Medicare.

In contrast, children are voiceless, so they are the age group most likely to be poor today. That’s a practical and moral failure.

I don’t want anybody to be poor, but, if I have to choose, I’d say it’s more of a priority to help kids ... because when kids are deprived of opportunities, the consequences can include a lifetime of educational failure, crime and underemployment.....

..... Early brain development turns out to have lifelong consequences, and research from human and animal studies alike suggests that a high-stress early childhood in poverty changes the physical brain in subtle ways that impair educational performance and life outcomes.....

.....Early education likewise has strong evidence of impact. Critics note that in Head Start, for example, gains in I.Q. seem to fade within a few years. That’s true and disappointing. But in the last five years, robust studies from scholars like David Deming have shown that graduates of Head Start also have improved life outcomes: higher high school graduation and college attendance rates, and less likely to be out of school and out of a job.....

..... Likewise, a program called Career Academies has had excellent results training at-risk teenagers in specialized careers and giving them practical work experience. Even eight years later, those young people randomly assigned to Career Academies are earning significantly more than those in control groups.

As that example suggests, we increasingly have first-rate research — randomized controlled trials, testing antipoverty programs as rigorously as if they were pharmaceuticals — that give us solid evidence of what works or doesn’t.

So let’s ... look at the evidence.

Critics are right that antipoverty work is difficult and that dependency can be a problem. But the premise of so much of today’s opposition ... — that government assistance inevitably fails — is just wrong. And child poverty is as unconscionable in a rich nation today as it was half a century ago.

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