'spread the wealth around'

For those of you who missed it, the OECD put out a report last week called Growing Unequal?. The report focused on income distribution and poverty in OECD countries. In the midst, as we likely are, of a very serious recession, this report strikes me as particularly relevant. It shouldn't be surprising to most that according to the report, the gap between the rich and the poor has continued to widen over the past two decades. What concerns me is that I sense a very strong sense of apathy about this issue. Interestingly, I read about the report in the Financial Times (of London), but nobody has mentioned it to me here at home, nor have I seen any mention of it in the media.

I'll spare you a country by country breakdown (I was disaappointed to see that both inequality and rates of child poverty have gotten worse in Canada), but I found notable that many of the changes are attributed to demographic changes in the labor force. The bird's eye view is that people in obsolete jobs get left behind as economies increasingly shift into more valuable, often information-intensive roles. Here, it must be said, strong social programs such as education seem to be the key. Protectionism, even when it manages to keep obsolete jobs around, too often leads to stagnant wages that cause the workers' income to shrink over time (on a relative basis). Indeed, the authors make this very point, although certainly not exclusively.

Nordic countries and western European countries, such as
Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands. Social spending on people of working age
was 7-8% of national income in 2005 and the share of working-age people in
poverty was between 5% and 8%. At the other end of the spectrum, Korea, Mexico,
Turkey and the United States spent 2% or less of national income on benefits and
had 12-15% of the working age population in poverty.

I could go on for pages and pages about this, but instead, I'll just encourage you to go and read the report yourself.

The authors also emphasize that "Work alone is not sufficient to avoid poverty: more than half of poor people live in households where one or more members are in work." Sad, no? On this closing note, I would strongly urge all of you to read The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David Shipley.

NKW