The Durability Economy

Here’s what the data shows.

Moving to Opportunity (MTO) followed 4,604 households for ten to fifteen years, moving families from high-poverty neighborhoods to low-poverty ones and tracking adult earnings and employment.

No detectable effect on the adults.

The same experiment, reread through tax records years later, found that children whose families used a low-poverty voucher to move before they turned thirteen earned roughly 31 percent more in their mid-twenties. The effect surfaced only whe...

Every fair-chance hiring conversation stalls at the same place.

An employer sits across the table, interested but cautious, and asks the question underneath every other question: is this risky?

The field has an answer ready. Fair-chance hires perform as well or better.

They stay longer. The data is clear.

I went looking for that data.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

I ran a verification pass across seventeen candidate statistics, testing each against a basic standard: a named primary sour...

In October 1973, the United States Board of Parole adopted the Salient Factor Score as the risk axis of its parole guidelines.

It scored the person. Prior convictions, age at first commitment, employment history. A number came out, and that number helped decide whether someone went home.

More than fifty years later, the instruments are more sophisticated and the object has never moved. The LSI-R scored the person. COMPAS scores the person.

Every generation points the same direction: at the...

Last week, I changed my own instrument.

The Durability Index measures household stability across five domains. Until July 23, one of those domains was wage progression. It is not anymore.

Wage progression now lives one level down, as a sub-measure inside employment retention. Its old seat at the domain table belongs to Family Connection.

Here's the pattern across fifty years of workforce measurement: the instruments never change. They calcify. This issue is about why mine did, and what the ch...

Every workforce leader in America can recite the diagnosis by now.

Placements collapse. Retention leaks. The metrics count the wrong thing.

You have read it a dozen ways. You have read it from me.

Here is what almost no one puts in front of you. An employer who stopped diagnosing the problem and built the fix.

Not a pilot. Not a theory. A factory, with numbers.

The factory that stopped losing people

Nehemiah Manufacturing in Cincinnati staffs most of its floor with people who have criminal...

Your workforce program placed 200 people last year and never checked whether a single household survived the offer.

Here is the question nobody on your board asked: how many of those 200 workers earned enough to keep a roof over their family, child care covered, and food on the table at the same time?

Not sequentially. Simultaneously.

The answer was not in your report. The placement was the finish line. The household was never part of the equation.

And your annual report called it a success.

T...

Your retention metric is hiding a collapse.

 Every workforce board in the country has a 90-day retention number.

It sits in grant reports. It shows up in board presentations. It gets celebrated in press releases.

Here is what it actually measures: the minimum amount of time someone has to stay employed before a funder considers the placement "successful."

Not whether the worker is stable. Not whether the household is solvent. Not whether the job will last past month four.

Ninety days measur...

Somewhere in America, a reentry conference is giving a standing ovation to a person they will bar from the next session.

The next session is about funding, metrics, and program design.

Nobody asks why the person who navigated the system's failure mode is not in the room when the system gets redesigned.

Nobody asks why the most detailed diagnostic data in the building just walked out the door.

The field was not built to ask.

It was built to applaud.

Here is what the research confirms: organiza...

Most people still talk about public safety as if it begins after something goes wrong.

A crime happens. A call gets made. A case gets opened. A person gets arrested. A sentence gets imposed.

That is not where public safety begins.

That is where system response begins.

Public safety begins earlier. And closer to home.

It begins in the household.

It begins with whether rent is covered, transportation is reliable, child care holds, wages rise, and a family can absorb one disruption without fa...

Your retention dashboard says the hire was successful. But the worker never made it to Day 30.

You called it a pipeline problem. It was not. It was a child care problem that no one in your hiring process ever asked about.

Full-time child care in the U.S. averaged $13,184 in 2025, a 23% increase since 2021. For single parents, that is 33% of median household income. In high-cost metros, it climbs to $25,535 per child, per year. Hold that number next to your First-Chance Hire.

They are likely a...

Fair-Chance Hiring has expanded access to employment for justice-impacted individuals.

But hiring alone does not produce household stability. A 2Gen Workforce Economy goes beyond individual job placement to build the systems architecture: employer retention infrastructure, household stability measurement, and cross-sector coordination, that turns a hire into lasting economic mobility for the worker and their family.

This article explains why Fair-Chance Hiring programs need to evolve from acce...

Lived experience is one of the most underutilized assets in workforce development and criminal justice reform.

When organizations treat it as system intelligence rather than personal testimony, it transforms how programs are designed, how success is measured, and who holds decision-making power.

This article explores why centering lived experience in metric design produces more durable outcomes for justice-impacted households.

Most Systems Say They "Center Lived Experience." Here's What Tha...