This is the summary of a presentation given at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, January 10-13, 1996, Orlando, Florida.

In a recent paper (A Simulation of Family Income with Thomas Wong. Proceedings of ACM & IEEE. The 25th Annual Simulation Symposium. April 1993), we developed a strategy for studying problems involving how people fall into a ``poverty trap'' because income growth was not sufficiently high to account for random effects that put them into a poeverty trap. We now show how this could lead to another undergraduate research project by putting a cost function into the picture. We will show that one can develop a model to give a means of studying the value obtained by having social programs that assure income growth at the early stages prevent as a means of preventing family income from dropping below a certain poverty threshold.

David E. Tepper, Bernard M. Baruch College, City University of New York