{"id":50984,"date":"2012-09-14T11:00:24","date_gmt":"2012-09-14T16:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=50984"},"modified":"2012-09-14T14:22:14","modified_gmt":"2012-09-14T19:22:14","slug":"reducing-poverty-where-theres-a-will","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/09\/14\/reducing-poverty-where-theres-a-will\/","title":{"rendered":"Reducing Poverty: Where There’s a Will…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The poverty rate in the US in the mid-2000s was about 17%.\u00a0 In Sweden, the poverty rate was 5.3%; in Germany, 11%.\u00a0\u00a0 That was the rate after adding in government transfers.\u00a0 In Germany, the poverty rate before those transfers was 33.6%, ten points higher than that in the US.\u00a0 Sweden\u2019s pre-transfer poverty rate was about the same as ours.<\/p>\n

Jared Bernstein<\/a>\u00a0has this chart showing pre-transfer and post-transfer rates for the OECD countries (click to enlarge):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Three\u00a0 points:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 Governments have the power to reduce poverty, and reduce it a lot.\u00a0 European governments do far more towards this goal than does the US government.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 It\u2019s unlikely that America’s poor people are twice as lazy or unskilled or dissolute as their European counterparts.\u00a0 Individual factors may explain differences between individuals, but these explanations have little relevance for the problem of overall poverty.\u00a0 The focus on individual qualities also has little use as a basis for policy.\u00a0 European countries have fewer people living in poverty, but not because those countries exhort the poor to lead more virtuous lives and punish them for their improvident ways.\u00a0 European countries have lower poverty rates because the governments provide money and services to those who need them.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0 The amount of welfare governments provide does not appear to have a dampening effect on the overall economy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog. The poverty rate in the US in the mid-2000s was about 17%.\u00a0 In Sweden, the poverty rate was 5.3%; in Germany, 11%.\u00a0\u00a0 That was the rate after adding in government transfers.\u00a0 In Germany, the poverty rate before those transfers was 33.6%, ten points higher than that in the US.\u00a0 Sweden\u2019s pre-transfer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,260,1765,1766,1767,1811,1770,2055,2026,1776,1777,4128,1817,1819,1821,1790,1791,1802,1804,1805,1789,3920,304],"class_list":["post-50984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-international-comparisons","tag-nation-australia","tag-nation-austria","tag-nation-belgium","tag-nation-britainthe-u-k","tag-nation-canada","tag-nation-denmark","tag-nation-finland","tag-nation-france","tag-nation-germany","tag-nation-greece","tag-nation-ireland","tag-nation-italy","tag-nation-japan","tag-nation-new-zealand","tag-nation-norway","tag-nation-spain","tag-nation-sweden","tag-nation-switzerland","tag-nation-the-netherlands","tag-nation-united-states","tag-the-state"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50984"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51050,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50984\/revisions\/51050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}