From the 1960s onwards, New Household economists like Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker shifted focus onto the poverty-alleviating impacts of family investment in human capital. This move was informed, first, by increased cultural and political awareness of what Becker referred to as an impoverished ‘underclass’ (1964/1993); second, by the social movements, including civil rights challenges to racial discrimination in schools and labour markets; and third, by government debates during the War on Poverty about the causes of Black family instability. Becker explained family instability as a rational response to price changes in the goods – including children – that families wanted. Given a set of preferences for basic commodities, and facing a defined range of choices, families were conceptualised as maximising utility, subject to constraints of income and time. This permitted hypotheses about how wages and human capital investment affected the cost of children, with effects on family formation and dissolution, fertility, and care-provision by women. As for poverty-alleviation, Becker favoured low-interest education loans. He rejected progressive income taxation and family welfare for incentivising underinvestment in education. Compensatory education programmes would fail by being offset. These policy positions were described by Nancy Folbre and Randy Albelda as a War on the Poor.