Mark Robert Rank

Mark Robert Rank is a social scientist and Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare at George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, known for his work on "poverty, social welfare, economic inequality and social policy". He wrote One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All.

Publications Living on the Edge: The Realities of Welfare in America (1994) Living on the Edge "explored the conditions of surviving on public assistance". It was published at a time of heated "debate over welfare reform" — a central pledge of President Bill Clinton's campaign. Clinton was under pressure at the time from Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party to approve welfare reform legislation. In a 1996 review of Living on the Edge, Katherine S. Newman praised Rank's research and methodologies that "demolishe myths" about "fast-disappearing safety net we call the welfare system" composed of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Medicaid, and food stamps. Newman said that Rank revealed how much assumptions about the U.S. welfare population, such as ""who uses the system, for how long, and why", were "far off the mark." According to the University of Oxford Press, Rank provided "a new paradigm for understanding poverty, and outline an innovative set of strategies [to] reduce American poverty. One Nation, Underprivileged represents a profound starting point for rekindling a national focus upon America's most vexing social and economic problem."

The American Dream is "fundamental to the essence of America... It has captured the imagination of people from all walks of life and represents the heart and soul of the country". Three core components of the American Dream are the "freedom" and "opportunity" to "pursue one's interests and passions in life". Sporle cited their findings that the "American Dream [was] in reality harder for everyone than at any time over the past four decades of statistics examined, including the average white male. Median wages for this section of society peaked as far back as 1973." Men had "lost ground in terms of wages over the course of four decades, despite an increase in output per employee". Based on "44 years of longitudinal data regarding individuals from ages 25 to 60" Rank and Hirschl studied how many Americans would experience "different levels of affluence during their lives". However, the United States does not have "static, income-based social tiers... large majority of people will experience either wealth or poverty — or both — during their lifetimes. Using "hundreds of thousands of case records taken from a longitudinal study of Americans that began in 1968" — Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) — to study the "life course dynamics of relative poverty over time". He asserts that poverty in the U.S. is mainstream