ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines whether evidence from the American Dream Demonstration on Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) supports the view that asset-based policy should include everyone. It focuses on saving and asset accumulation for homes, post-secondary education, microenterprise, and other developmental purposes. The book offers policy lessons from the first major demonstration of IDAs. It analyzes the saving by IDA participants in the American Dream Demonstration (ADD). ADD was the first detailed, systematic study of IDAs or of matched savings by the poor of any kind. The book suggests that the institutional features of IDAs are designed to promote saving and asset accumulation. It also examines saving and asset accumulation in ADD, a demonstration of IDAs in fourteen programs across the United States. The institutional package of IDAs matters because people are not the rational, omniscient beings assumed in economic theory.
