The collection of proposals — from promoting strong and stable families to improving the quantity and quality of work — actually adds up to a coherent approach to improving an anti-poverty strategy that has fallen far short of its goals.

This raises a tantalizing prospect. Is it possible that combating America’s entrenched poverty — the deepest among advanced industrialized nations — may have finally become salient enough for the left and right to break through the ideological gridlock?

“The report took us longer than we thought,” Mr. Danziger told me. “But everybody agreed that even though there were things in it we didn’t like, the package together would be better than the status quo.”

A dose of skepticism is probably wise. Preserving the bipartisan balance — drafted over the course of 14 months, with New York University’s Jonathan Haidt in the role of ideological mediator — required a lot of vagueness that would never survive the rough and tumble of the real political arena. Touchy subjects like race were mostly left off the table. And though bipartisanship may have committed both sides to work from the same facts, it did nothing to alter how each side weighed them.

Consider the call to increase the minimum wage. The scholars made note of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s recent assessment that the Obama administration’s proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 from $7.25 and index it to inflation would provide higher pay to 16 million to 24 million workers and lift a million people out of poverty — at a cost of 500,000 jobs over three years and a slight uptick in consumer prices.