- UNICEF’s “A League Table of Child Poverty In Rich Nations” (2000) reported that the percentage of US kids living below the level of income designated the “poverty line”was 13.9%. This was worse than Luxembourg (1.2%), Norway (3.0%), Denmark (5.1%), Sweden (5.3%), Finland (6.9%), Belgium (7.5%), Canada (9.5%), France (10.7%), the Netherlands (11.1%), or Germany (12.5%), but was better than Australia (16.2%), Ireland (21.4%), the UK (29.1%), Italy (36.1%), Spain (42.8%), the Czech Republic (83.1%), Hungary (90.6%) or Poland (93.1%).

- To the extent that I understand it, Smeeding’s Figure 2 states that in 2000, the median US household had a (per capita?) income of $24,416, and the poorest 10% of Americans lived on less than 39% of that. This was worse than Canada (45%), Belgium (43%), Germany (41%) and the Netherlands (41%), but was better than Sweden (38%), Finland (38%) and the UK (35%).

And whatever deficits the US has regarding the poorest 10%, Smeeding acknowledges that median US households have more real income than median households in other industrialized nations. In other words, Americans at the 10th percentile have lower real income than Canadians at the 10th percentile, but allegedly Americans at the 50th percentile have higher real incomes than Canadians at the 50th percentile. Where is the cross-over point?

Some of the differences in the data may not be statistically significant, so I won’t draw any big conclusions based on the rankings. To the contrary, I can’t see how this data supports any big conclusions at all. At most, I’d conclude that the US is kinda middle of the pack but shows room for improvement.

the Timothy Smeeding quote saying US poor kids lag everybody but UK poor kids. (Admittedly, I haven’t read the Smeeding stuff. Maybe he excludes Eastern Europe from his analysis?)

He does exclude former Eastern bloc countries, and he does specifically state that Russia (that lags the US) should be considered “developing”.

Economically, the US looks more like Ireland than Poland. In absolute terms, poor kids in the US are in the middle of the pack of industrialized nations. Yes, the circumstances of poor US kids lags further behind the circumstances of median-income US kids than the circumstances of poor Polish kids falls behind the circumstances of median-income Polish kids. Should I care?

Damn it, nobody.really! I was just researching whether the graphs were about national median income, rather than some universal median income.

Oh well. Go on, please.

As the basis for his remarks, Amp cites the 2000 UNICEF “report card” on child poverty. That report alludes to the effects of poverty: “…families that are so materially poor that normal health and growth are at risk,” “…poverty of expectations and poverty of opportunity…,” “physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.” But the report acknowledges the challenges of measuring all the dimensions of poverty, and defers this issue to future reports; the 2000 report would address only “income poverty” – that is, insufficient access to money. For purposes of this report, I understand UNICEF to evaluate the effect of wealth transfer programs largely in terms of (amount of money transferred)/(number of recipients).

Amp is understandably baffled by suggestions that racial or cultural factors could have any bearing on this strictly mathematical calculation. Amp’s conclusions seem pretty unassailable to me.

But two different concerns come to mind.

First, if we’re going to focus on income poverty,

Is poverty to be defined as an absolute condition – the inability to purchase and consume a fixed minimum package of goods and services? Or is it to be defined as a relative state – the falling behind, by more than a certain degree – from the average income and life-style enjoyed by the rest of society in which one lives?

This Report Card opts for the latter concept.

The UNICEF report discusses the differences: Ireland’s economy was booming, increasing the median national income, resulting in more children meeting the definition of “impoverished.” In contrast, the economies of the Eastern Bloc nations collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union, reducing their median national incomes, and hence reducing the number of kids deemed poor. Yet in absolute terms, the status of poor Irish kids was actually improving and the status of poor Polish kids was declining.

Economically, the US looks more like Ireland than Poland. In absolute terms, poor kids in the US are in the middle of the pack of industrialized nations. Yes, the circumstances of poor US kids lags further behind the circumstances of median-income US kids than the circumstances of poor Polish kids falls behind the circumstances of median-income Polish kids. Should I care?

Moreover, the amount of wealth transfers required to boost a kid’s circumstances up to 50% of Poland’s median income will be a fraction of the amount of wealth transfer required to boost a kid up to 50% of the US median income. Thus the US could be the most generous nation on Earth even on a per-poor-kid basis and still might not boost a higher percentage of its kids above its relative poverty line than Poland does. Again, should I care? Are these really the appropriate measures?

There are pros and cons to each perspective. I’m not entirely sold on the merits of the relative perspective.

Second, and more fundamentally, can we reduce the idea of poverty to a simple question of access to money? This question is by no means unique to Amp’s posting; it has bedeviled social scientists since the days of Marx, Weber and Durkheim. UNICEF tacitly acknowledges that the answer is no, but implies that measuring access to money is the best proxy we have for measuring poverty. I generally hold this view.

Yet I sense this question may have special relevance to Dignan’s argument. I understand Dignan to argue in part that money alone will never enable poor kids to transcend “poverty” more broadly defined. (And donating money alone will not save the souls of rich people, or something like that.) Amp ably rebuts Dignan’s concerns by noting that we can transfer wealth AND intervene in other ways as well. Nevertheless, I find it relevant to acknowledge (my understanding of) Dignan’s concerns in evaluating the relevance of the UNICEF report.

I agree with Amp: let’s find out which programs produce the best results. I’m just not sure that we should measure results in terms of $ transferred/kid. Maybe we should measure results in terms of life expectancy/$ sent, or average SAT score/kid/$ spent, or something like that. The conceptual challenge is in defining what results we want to produce, and how to measure them.

In other words: never mind.

Are the French better at transferring income, or are they better at starting out with fewer people in poverty?

As the huge chart in the middle of my post shows, before the effects of transfer programs the French have a higher rate of child poverty than we have here in the US. It is therefore impossible that their lower rates of child poverty, post-transfers, are due to “starting out with fewer [children] in poverty.”

In other words, if you want to know what effect transfer programs have, then you need to equalize the conditions of the groups you are comparing. Comparing white middle class Parisians to white middle class New Yorkers is going to give you a fair estimate, but if you compare a population that’s 95% bourgeoisie white and 5% desperately poor immigrant blacks to another population that’s 80% bourgeoisie white, 12% varying but mostly poor native blacks, 8% varying but mostly poor immigrant Hispanics, you’ll have no idea what you’re measuring. Are the French better at transferring income, or are they better at starting out with fewer people in poverty?

Is it the income trqansfer programs of those countries that reduced poverty, or is it the fact that they do not have large black and Latin American populations like the US does.

So you’re saying that two countries, France and the USA, started out with approximately equal levels of child poverty (before tax and transfer programs take effect).

Then, France transfers a lot of resources to poor French families. The US transfers less resources per capita to poor US families. The additional money brings a lot of French families above the poverty line, and a few American families above the poverty line.

Yet somehow you think it’s reasonable to ask if the problem might be blacks and hispanics. How on earth does the money being transferred know the color of the people it’s being given to?

Here’s my question to you: What possible mechanism could cause money transferred to black hands to be worth less than money transferred to white hands, when it comes to something as straightforward as measuring whether or not one has “X” number of dollars (where “X” equals the poverty line)?

Oops! Sorry – can’t ask racist questions like that – whether or not it’s true, it’s not polite to talk about.

Well, one way of looking at this is from identity politics/interest group angle — a homogenous culture shares common interests and thus can work for genuine common good instead of various interest groups simply lobbying for their own share from the big tax cake.

Oops! Sorry – can’t ask racist questions like that – whether or not it’s true, it’s not polite to talk about.

Dignan ignores the difference between the coercion of a dictatorship and the so-called “coercion” of a representative democracy.

So gang rape is not as bad as one-on-one rape, as long as the victim gets a vote?

It seems to me that the big reason why leftist feminists are so against the idea of looking at sex as a commodity (and why they see it as part of a “rape culture”) is because the sense of “entitlement to sex” that they so resent would then ever so neatly parallel their sense of entitlement to other people’s money.