Unsurprisingly the US has had a significantly higher poverty rate than comparable European nations, as can be seen in the following chart derived from the OECD Statistics Database:
Next we look at comparative aggregate data from LIS Working Paper #419:
"Poor People in Rich Nations: The United States in Comparative Perspective", by Timothy Smeeding. Taking the Figure 2 first, we see that, as expected, low pay is correlated with higher poverty rates: the higher percentage of workers making less than 65% of the median wage, the higher the rate of non-eldgerly poverty. The US represents the extreme high on both scales, but its poverty rate is even more divergent than its low-wage worker rate, as can be seen most strikingly in comparison with Canada, which has almost as many low-wage workers, but a significantly lower poverty rate:
Figure 1 shows another expected relationship: the higher the level of social expenditure, the lower the rate of poverty. Again, the US represents an extreme, even more of an outlier than in the previous chart:
Next, another paper by Timothy Smeeding, LIS Working Paper # 426, "Government Programs and Social Outcomes: The United States in Comparative Perspective", provides a more detailed look at how different sorts of families are affected. A major premise of conservative "welfare reform" was that poverty is primarily a product of family disintegration. (A contrary view is that the causation runs the other way: men don't get married when they can't support a family.) However, the data in Table 6 shows that the US does a dramatically worse job of reducing poverty for two-parent families as well as for single-parent families:
When it comes to single-parent families, the US barely reduces poverty half as much as Canada, the next-least effective country at reducing single-parent family poverty. The average poverty-reduction rate for such families is almost four times greater than the US manages.
But things are even worse, relatively speaking, when it comes to two-parent families. The overall poverty reduction for them is barely one-quarter what it is for the Netherlands, the next-least effective coutnry at reducing two-parent family poverty. The average poverty-reduction rate for such families is almost is almost nine times greater than the rate for the US.
Economic Data Conclusion
The LIS data described above--buttressed by OECD data--clearly indicates that the US is an outlier that provides a significantly less robust system of economic support for those on the bottom of the economy. It's wage rates are less able to keep people out of poverty, and its welfare state provisions are less capable of compensating for low wages. This is a condition that has changed significantly over time, and the US is even less capable of assisting those in two-parent families--compared to other nations--than it is assisting single-parent families.
Thus, everything in the comparative international data contradicts the claims of conservative "welfare reform" and those who call it "a success".
However, it's also instructive to look at comparative data about maternal employment and teenage childbearing, since that played such a significant role in the conservative narrative about welfare and "welfare reform." Hence, the next part of this diary
Family/Parenthood Data
We begin with date from the OECD Family Database. First, we look at comparative data on the relationship between maternal employment and child poverty. As expected, the general trend is that as maternal employment goes up, child poverty goes down. However, the US has very high rates of child poverty, despite a fairly high ratio of mothers in the workforce:
It's also worth noting that the countries with the most mothers in the workforce are the socialist bogeyman, Sweden, and its social democratic welfare state cousins, Finland and Denmark (data for Norway was not available.)
Next, we look specifically at teenage fertility rates (including live births, abortions and fetal loss), comparing data from 1980 and 2005. For clarity's sake, we present the data in three separate graphs, starting with all those who had 1980 rates over 40 per 1000, which includes the US. We carry the US over into the next two graphs as well, for comparison's sake:
Here we see that while the US was in the middle of the range of high-fertility countries in 1980, the other countries did a much better job of reducing teen fertility over the next 25 years.
Note that none of the other countries in this top tier of highest teen fertility in 1980 can be considered major industrial nations. They are primarily nations from the European perisphery: Eastern Europe, or the Mediterean. The only Northern European country is Iceland, also, in its own way, a peripheral nation. Nonetheless, by 2005, only Bulgaria had a rate comparable to the US--a rate that it had cut in half since 1980, while the US had only managed a much smaller decline.
The middle group, with 1980 teen fertility rates from 20 to 40 per 1000, includes a few more peripheral states, such as Poland, Latvia and Lithuana, along with more long-standing industrial nations, such as Austria, the UK, Norway & Belgium. The US both started, and finished with a much higher teen fertility rate than any of these nations. To the extent that conservative "welfare reform" was supposed to discourage teen pregnancies, it was significantly less effective in its end results than the social policies in any of these other nations:
Finally, we compare the US with nations that had teen fertility rates of 20 per 1000 or less in 1980. With the exception of Malta, which saw teen fertility rates rise significantly, all these countries started and ended with far lower rates than the US. These included Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland from the core of Europe, plus 2/3rds of the BeNeLux countries (Belgium just barely made it into the middle group), as well as all the Northern European social democratic welfare states except Norway, which was also in the lower end of the middle group:
For additional confirmation, and insight into some of the causal factors involved, we turn to a report from the Guttmacher Institute, "Teenage Sexual and Reproductive Behavior in Developed Countries: Can More Progress Be Made?"
First we see a somewhat different time-frame tracking changes in teenage fertility rates comparing the US with several other nations:
Once again, other nations started off significantly better, and ended up signiticantly better as well.
The rest of the data presented is snapshot data from the mid-1990s, and the US improved since then. Nonetheless it remained a relative outlier. First we see how dramatically the US differed both in terms of births and abortions:
And yet, despite higher rates of sexual activity before age 15 in the US, the overall profiles of teenage sexuality are relatively comparable between all the countries compared:
However, there are more significant differences in the use of contraceptives:
Family/Fertility Data Conclusion
The bottom line is that the US is significantly more invested in shaming teenage girls. When shame stops working as a way to prevent them having sex, the results are dramatically higher fertility, abortion and pregnancy rates than seen in other countries. This is all a part of the same underlying conservative mentality of blaming those with the least power, status, and capacity to exercise their own autonomy that was embodied in conservative "welfare reform." Put simple, it does not work, and it is downright dangerous and irresponsible to pretend otherwise.
General Conclusion
International comparisons are conclusive: US performance in fighting poverty as well as fighting teenage pregnancy is severely deficient compared to similar devloped countries. If we were genuinely interested in solving these problems, we would be paying a great deal more attention to how other coutnries deal with them. Not that we should necessarily copy them exactly, but we should be guided by the underlying principles that work for them, and by the hard data that tells us our chosen approach does not work.
Next & Last: We look at data comparisons between states, to see what is relatively success in the US. |
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