Martha Bailey is breathing history into data. The UCLA economic historian, demographer and labor economist is stitching together the rich tapestry of American life across four generations through her visionary leadership of LIFE‑M, a unique data infrastructure project linking millions of birth, marriage and death records with census information on everything from household size and wages to educational attainment.

The goal? To help researchers across the country better ask and answer big questions about how economic, educational, health-related and environmental circumstances and policies have shaped people’s lives from the cradle to the grave since the dawn of the 20th century.

“The biggest changes in our society and economy don’t play out over a decade,” says Bailey, who also directs the California Center or Population Research at UCLA and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “They play out over multiple generations as part of ongoing, slow-moving transformations.”

That’s why the datasets of LIFE-M (short for Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-database) are so revolutionary. With the help of machine learning, the project compiles reams of intergenerational public information that present a grand survey of life changes — from great-grandparents born at the turn of the century to their grandchildren born in the 1970s.

For instance, Bailey says, LIFE-M data clearly reveal how government investment in education has boosted economic opportunity — from the early 20th century, when public funding of K–12 schools allowed lower-income children to escape the circumstances of their birth, to the later years of the century, when investment in public higher education further encouraged mobility, reducing the role of family privilege.

Similarly, by compiling data over multiple generations in a particular community, the project offers an expansive picture of people’s quality of health and aging. This can be particularly helpful, Bailey says, when scholars are assessing how environmental exposures may contribute to cognitive conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s over time or when they’re tracking the evolution of a cancer cluster in a newly industrialized area.

“Like roads and bridges,” she says, “data infrastructure is foundational for answering fundamental questions about health and social policy.”

LIFE-M, which has been used by hundreds of social scientists, took a decade to set up and was seeded with National Science Foundation funding. Yet just as the project planned to expand its dataset from two states to nine with the help of a National Institute on Aging grant, that funding was frozen. Important research projects have been put on hold, Bailey notes, but it’s the state’s larger educational enterprise that is really in peril.

“The funding and expertise of our researchers spills over into a top-notch education for students, who go onto all types of professions. It’s one big package; research and teaching are deeply interrelated. Losing funds leads to losing the best faculty and best graduate students to other universities and countries, which is a huge loss for California’s public higher education.”

This post was originally published via https://www.ucla.edu/research.

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Learn more about Martha Bailey’s visionary LIFE-M project at UCLA.

Visit the California Center for Population Research at UCLA

New UCLA research reveals Head Start’s long-term impact.

Participants in social safety net programs had higher rates of employment, were less reliant on public assistance

Citlalli Chávez-Nava

As federal social safety net programs face elimination or budgetary reductions under the new administration, a UCLA report has found some of the boldest War on Poverty programs launched in the 1960s and 1970s reduced poverty and improved upward mobility and well-being.

Launched in 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, the War on Poverty represented one of the largest and most comprehensive attempts to improve well-being in United States history. The administration invested billions of dollars in education, health, employment and community development initiatives — including Head Start, an expanded food stamp program, family planning programs and community health centers. The campaign targeted the roots of poverty, seeking to provide a “hand up, not a handout.”

The study, recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, looks at how access to these programs for children in the 1960s and 1970s shaped the outcomes and living circumstances of tens of millions of adults today, using newly available large-scale data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Social Security Administration. The decades-long research was led by Martha Bailey, professor of economics and director of the California Center for Population Research at UCLA. 

Head Start, which aimed to reduce poverty and still serves 1 million children today, offers early education to preschool and kindergarten-aged children, nutritious meals and referrals to health and other social services. But for decades, evaluating the program’s success in helping children escape poverty was difficult since researchers faced data challenges in identifying valid comparison groups.

Using the newly available data, researchers measured Head Start’s success in terms of children’s later-life educational attainment, work in professional occupations, participation in the labor force and wage earnings. Researchers compared children who were born a few months too soon to enroll during Head Start’s initial rollout with children who did enroll. Head Start children were significantly more likely to finish high school and enroll in and finish college than peers who entered first grade without access to the program (Figure 1). The results also show that cohorts with access to Head Start experienced lower rates of adult poverty, had higher rates of employment and were less likely to have received public assistance.

“It’s important to consider the long-run consequences of public programs,” Bailey said. “Investing in children is like planting a seed. Many of the programs starting in the 1960s are still having measurable effects today.”

Based on analyses of hundreds of on-the-ground programs across the U.S., the report also found:

• Greater access in a child’s early years to the Food Stamps Program, known today as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, was associated with significant increases in educational attainment, economic self-sufficiency, and neighborhood quality and reductions in physical disability. The timing and duration of early food stamps access also impacted outcomes. (Figure 2)
• Federal family planning programs affected children’s resources and long-term outcomes. The programs allowed parents to delay childbearing and to find more stable partners and better-paying jobs, reduced their dependence on public assistance and decreased their likelihood of being in poverty.
• Community health centers located in disadvantaged neighborhoods resulted in significant declines in age-adjusted mortality, particularly from cardiovascular disease among adults over 50. These reductions in mortality were highly persistent, decreasing the gap in mortality between the poor and non-poor by 20% to 40% for 25 years. Today, these programs continue as federally qualified health centers.

“The data show that U.S. poverty rates, health, human capital and employment outcomes would have been worse today without the substantial investments made under the War on Poverty,” Bailey said. “In many cases, the benefits of the programs well exceeded their costs.”

This story was originally published in UCLA’s Newsroom, here.