One of the most durable successes of the war on poverty was to dramatically reduce the number of elderly poor in America. That's still true today. But, by contrast, child poverty has shot up over the last few years: A decade ago, about 16 percent of children in America were poor - which is a shockingly high percentage. But it's not as shocking as today, when we see that 22 percent of kids live in poverty.

When I talk about an "empathy bank," I don't mean literally opening up a bank and putting in deposits. What I mean is that the more we can, as individuals and as members of a community, empathize with, understand the pain and uncertainty economic crisis causes other people, the more we lay the groundwork for political change.

I do think there are ways to increase wages significantly, even in a global era. But you have to take voters and consumers with you on this journey - and that involves a tremendous, and long-term, public education campaign.

Despite all of the civil rights gains of the past several decades, when it comes to economic opportunity, African Americans and Latinos still experience far more unemployment than do whites and Asians, average wages are lower, and household wealth is lower. A smaller percentage of African Americans and Latinos attend, and complete, college, than is the case with whites and Asians, and a higher percentage end up in prison. All of these are indicators of massive disparities in opportunity, and these disparities are mirrored in poverty data.

To really tackle poverty, politicians, activists, academics will all have to think outside their boxes, will have to start developing much more integrated approaches to these problems. And a large part of this will involve working out ways to push for living wages. Partly this will involve re-empowering the union movement, which has been massively weakened in recent decades. Partly it will involve a willingness to restructure tax codes to penalize companies that don't provide basic benefits and decent wages to employees.

The poverty we see in America is now too widespread, and too complex, for easy fixes. But I do think we can reimagine many of our institutions and can create new ones in ways that would be effective. We could, for example, create social insurance systems, similar to social security, such as that we went through in 2008-9. We could create a financial transaction tax, oil profit taxes and a fairer estate tax system, and we could plow much of the revenue raised from these into job training programs, into better education infrastructure, into an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit.

I argue that in the long run, the US would be on a far more financially secure footing if we recalibrate how we spend about two-to-three percent of the country's GNP, using state and federal taxes to create pools of money for spending on America's poor - which would, as numerous economists have argued in recent years, create virtuous spending circles, since those on lower incomes spend more of each extra dollar in their possession than do those on higher incomes.