The New York Times has been publishing an excellent series on class in America. One quote in that piece particularly stood out for me. Berkeley economist David Levine told the paper that "being born poor in the U.S. gives you disadvantages unlike anything in Western Europe and Japan and Canada."
I decided to verify if that's true. One of the sources I used was the website of the Organization For Economic Cooperation and Development.
The numbers spoke for themselves.
In both the statistics for overall poverty and child poverty, the United States performed badly.
For overall poverty, the U.S. numbers (17.1 percent) for 2000 were significantly higher than for most European countries. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom had poverty rates of 7.0 percent, 9.8 percent, and 11.4 percent, respectively. Canada and Japan were lower than the United States, too, with a poverty rate of 10.3 percent and 15.3 percent, respectively. The organization average was just 10.2 percent.
For child poverty, the story was not much different. The U.S. rate (21.7 percent) was much higher than most members of the organization or the organization's average as a whole (12.1 percent). The Scandinavian nations had child poverty rates in the 2 to 3 percent range.
The Economic Policy Institute comes out with an excellent book every two years called "The State of Working America." The latest edition, "The State of Working America 2004/2005" contains a lot of very useful international comparisons.
A series of tables and charts lays out the level of inequality in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Canada. By a number of measures, the United States is the most unequal country of the lot, such as the ratio of the income of the bottom 10 percent of households to that of the top 10 percent.
When it comes to health indicators, the United States fares worse than most other industrialized nations. A table available at the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe shows that the life expectancy for American women in 2000 was less than for women in 11 of the 15 European Union countries, Canada, and even Israel, while for men, it was less than for all but one (Ireland) of the 15 EU members, Canada and Israel. When it came to death among infants and children, the patterns were the same. Both the U.S. child mortality rate (8.6 per 1,000 births) and infant mortality rate (6.9 per 1,000 births) was higher than those for Europe, Canada, and Israel.
All this should not be a surprise. The European and Canadian social democratic model does a better job of taking care of its vulnerable--the poor, the young, and the infirm--than the laissez-faire U.S. approach.
Amitabh Pal is Managing Editor of The Progressive.
© 2005 The Progressive
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