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". Rank is considered to be an expert in poverty studies. He is the author of notable books such as 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[d] 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." He dismantled the "largely unsubstantiated claims about the belief systems or values of recipients (and the formative contributions of welfare payments to a "culture of dependency." She described how Rank had used an "ecelectic" mix of methods in his "longitudinal analysis of statewide caseload of 3,000 households" — statistics, subjective accounts with in-depth interviews with 50 families "on aid", fieldwork in welfare offices, and had drawn from Wisconsin statewide data for 1980-1988 from different sources.
One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All (2005)
One Nation, Underprivileged provided a "new understanding of poverty in America". One Nation, Underprivileged earned the "Honorable Mention for Outstanding Book Awards 2005 by The Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights". According to the University of Oxford Press, Rank provided "a new paradigm for understanding poverty, and outline[d] 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."
Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes (2014) The book titled Chasing the American Dream which Rank co-authored with two other social scientists — Thomas A. Hirschl from Cornell University and Kirk A. Foster — won the "2016 Society for Social Work and Research Book Award". The authors used a "multi-methodological approach to explore the nature of the American Dream and the economic viability of achieving the Dream". They "analyzed social mobility at the lower end of America's economic spectrum". They investigated the "percentage of Americans that "achieved affluence", "how much income mobility [Americans] actually have", home ownership, and why "nearly 80 percent of [Americans] "experience significant economic insecurity at some point between ages 25 and 60", and how "access to the American Dream be increased".
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". A second element of the Dream is "economic security and well-being" — "having the resources and tools to live a comfortable and rewarding life", "working at a decent paying job", "provid[ing] for your children", "owning a home", "having some savings in the bank, and being able to retire in comfort".
The third component of the American Dream, is having "hope", "confidence", optimism" and an "abiding faith in progress" that applies "to one's own life", the "lives of one's children and the next generation, as well as to the future of the country as a whole".