Another Poverty Huckster

There are some policy fights that focus on technical disagreements (for instance, how much do deadweight losses increase when tax rates go up?) and other policy fights that involve moral disagreements (for instance, should drugs be legalized when that may lead some people to harm themselves?).

Other policy fights, however, involve dishonesty.

Poverty hucksters might be the most irritating example. These are the people who push an utterly dishonest definition of poverty, which I first wrote about back in 2010. But this article from 2019 has the best summary.

…folks on the left have decided to use an artificial and misleading definition of poverty. One that depends on the distribution of income rather than any specific measure of poverty. Which is insanely dishonest. It means that everyone’s income could double and the supposed rate of poverty would stay the same. Or a country could execute all the rich people and the alleged rate of poverty would decline. No wonder the practitioners of this approach often produce absurd data, such as the OECD’s assertion that there’s more poverty in the United States than in basket case economies such as Greece and Italy.

Sadly, the many complaints from me and others have not stopped the poverty hucksters.

Here’s a chart I just downloaded from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, one of the organizations pushing the dishonest measure of poverty.

As you can see, they want people to believe that there’s more poverty in the United States than in nations such as Turkey, Italy, and Greece.

Heck, they also want people to think the wealthy nations of Luxembourg and Switzerland have more poverty than Hungary.

I’m sharing this information because it’s time to add a new member to our collection of poverty hucksters.

Timothy Noah of the New Republic has a column in the Washington Post that utilizes the OECD’s inaccurate definition of poverty. Here are some excerpts from his article.

How can the richest nation on Earth have so much poverty? …The Bible tells us that the poor are always with us. But devout resignation can’t explain why the United States, with the world’s largest economy (gross domestic product: $26.15 trillion) should house more poverty than many much poorer countries. In 2021, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked 37 member nations by poverty rate. Costa Rica had the highest rate, followed by Bulgaria, but way up there at No. 10 was the United States. …We may not have the means to eliminate poverty. But we can certainly do better than Estonia.

If you read Noah’s entire article, you’ll quickly see why he uses the OECD’s dishonest data.

Like Biden, he wants a massive expansion of class-warfare taxation and a big increase in the welfare state, so it is in his interest to portray America as a dystopian hellscape of suffering and deprivation.

It would be nice, however, if he relied on accurate data. Then again, accurate data would backfire on him.

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Government vs. Poor People

My Fourteenth Theorem of Government explains that when government intervenes for the ostensible purpose of providing help to poor people in the short run, it is all but inevitable that such policies will hurt poor people in the long run.

It is hardly a revelation that bigger government causes problems, but it is particularly discouraging when such policies victimize the least fortunate members of society.

I’m discussing this issue today because I recently discovered a 2018 article by Brian Balfour.

Published by the Foundation for Economic Education, the article lists seven ways that government traps people in poverty.

At the risk of over-simplifying, four of those policies directly hurt poor people.

1. The “quicksand effect” of the welfare state, which discourages self-advancement.
2. Minimum wage laws that remove the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.
3. Green energy policies that make basic utilities needlessly expensive.
4. Protectionist trade policies that increase the price of essential products.

And three of those policies indirectly hurt poor people.

1. Punitive tax policies that discourage job creation and productivity advances.
2. Regulatory policies that impose high costs and cause inefficiency.
3. Inflationary monetary policies by central banks that cause higher prices.

There’s nothing in the article that’s wrong, but I’m going to conclude today’s column by pointing out a big sin of omission.

The author’s list should have included the government education monopoly. Especially since poor families tend to live in the areas with the worst-performing government schools.

Failing government schools have a very direct and very negative impact on the life prospects of low-income kids.

So I’ll end by noting that I’m very excited that school choice is beginning to sweep the nation.

P.S. There are many other government policies that have a disproportionately negative impact on poor people. Everything from Social Security to revenue policing, but don’t forget government lotteries, licensing laws, and nanny state protections (all of which may help to explain why poor people are skeptical about the supposed benefits of bigger government).

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Government Intervention Hurts the Poor

A big argument for free enterprise over statism is that the former delivers growth while the latter leads to stagnation.

And that’s very apparent when you review decades of data.

The case for capitalism is especially powerful if you care about what’s best for the disadvantaged. As the chart from Economic Freedom of the World illustrates, poor people enjoy much higher levels of income in nations that have higher levels of economic liberty.

So why, then, do our friends on the left support bigger government?

There are several possible answers, but today let’s focus on their understandable desire to do things that seem compassionate. Particularly things that seem to offer immediate help.

I think that’s a big reason why some well-meaning leftists support a big welfare state even though there is plenty of evidence that poor people get trapped in dependency. They are so focused on doing something that ostensibly alleviates today’s problems that they do not appreciate the risk of harmful long-run consequences.

This problem is so pervasive that we need to create a new Theorem of Government.

If you want an example of this Theorem, we can look at a story in today’s New York Times.

Reporters Jeanna Smialek and Ben Casselman document how low-income people are being hurt by inflation and will probably be hurt by what will be needed to curtail inflation.

…data and anecdotes suggest that lower-income households, despite the resilient job market, are struggling more profoundly with inflation. That divergence poses a challenge for the Federal Reserve, which is hoping that higher interest rates will slow consumer spending and ease pressure on prices across the economy. Already, there are signsthat poorer families are cutting back. …The Fed might need to raise interest rates even more to bring inflation under control, and that could cause a sharper slowdown. In that case, poorer families will almost certainly bear the brunt again, because low-wage workers are often the first to lose hours and jobs. …America’s poor have spent part of the savings they amassed during coronavirus lockdowns, and their wages are increasingly struggling to keep up with — or falling behind — price increases.

The story is filled with anecdotes about poor people suffering from inflation.

And, as the above excerpts captures, it has plenty of fretting about how the less fortunate will suffer as the Federal Reserve tries to fix the mess.

But what you won’t find in the story is any acknowledgement that poor people would not be dealing with this hardship if the Federal Reserve had not made the mistake of creating too much liquidity in the first place.

Yet this is the big lesson all of us should learn.

The Federal Reserve wanted to offer short-run help to the economy, motivated in part by a desire to help poor people by propping up the economy during the pandemic.

Yet any short-run help has been swamped by subsequent negative consequences.

And this is not unique. The big lesson from the so-called War on Poverty is that poverty rates suddenly stopped declining. In other words, government tried to help, but wound up doing harm.

P.S. Here are the other 13 Theorems of Government.

• The “First Theorem” explains how Washington really operates.
• The “Second Theorem” explains why it is so important to block the creation of new programs.
• The “Third Theorem” explains why centralized programs inevitably waste money.
• The “Fourth Theorem” explains that good policy can be good politics.
• The “Fifth Theorem” explains how good ideas on paper become bad ideas in reality.
• The “Sixth Theorem” explains an under-appreciated benefit of a flat tax.
• The “Seventh Theorem” explains how bigger governments are less competent.
• The “Eighth Theorem” explains the motives of those who focus on inequality.
• The “Ninth Theorem” explains how politics often trumps principles.
• The “Tenth Theorem” explains how politicians manufacture/exploit crises.
• The “Eleventh Theorem” explains why big business is often anti-free market.
• The “Twelfth Theorem” explains you can’t have European-sized government without pillaging the middle class.
• The “Thirteenth Theorem” explains that people are unwilling to pay for bloated government.

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The OECD’s Despicably Dishonest Campaign for Redistribution

The past two days have featured columns about Estonia, with the first one focusing on the nation’s impressive rebound after decades of communist enslavement and the second one criticizing the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for suggesting tax-and-spend policies that would undermine the country’s prosperity.

Both columns used data from a recent OECD report. Today, I’m going to write a third column using data from that report, but I won’t be focusing on Estonia. Instead, I want to address the OECD’s ongoing efforts to promote redistribution by lying about poverty.

Here’s a chart that ostensibly shows poverty rates in various member nations.

Any sentient person should immediately recognize that the chart is garbage. Notice, for instance, that that United States supposedly has the second-highest poverty rate among OECD nations.

Yet does any rational person actually think poverty is a bigger problem in America than it is in Mexico or Turkey? Or Italy, Hungary, or Greece?

Of course not. Heck, poor people in the United States often have incomes that are equal to or higher than average incomes in other nations.

So what’s going on?

Well, if you read the fine print, you’ll find that the chart doesn’t actually measure poverty. At all.

Instead, it’s a measure of income distribution. The OECD’s bureaucrats have decided that anybody who makes less than 60 percent of a nation’s average income is poor.

This is an absurd approach.

Heck, the OECD’s dishonest approach would show that there’s almost no poverty in the world’s poorest nations, such as North Korea, Haiti, Cuba, and Congo. After all, if almost everyone is equally destitute, then almost nobody will be below 60 percent of the median.

Here’s another example that exposes the OECD’s scam. Imagine that everyone in the United Sates suddenly had three times as much income as today. That would seem like great news, especially for lower-income Americans. Yet based on the OECD’s dishonest approach, the poverty rate would not change.

So why is the OECD publishing nonsensical and dishonest numbers?

I answered that question back in 2012.

The main thing to understand, though, is that this new approach is part of an ideological campaign to promote bigger government and more redistribution. Which is very much consistent with the OECD’s overall agenda.

The fact that this type of agenda hurts poor people doesn’t seem to bother our friends on the left. So long as rich people are hurt even more, that’s a good thing from their perspective.

Remember, they are motivated by equality of outcomes.

Good people, by contrast, seek policies that enable poor people to improve their lives (as captured by the Eighth Theorem of Government).

P.S. Here’s my collection of other hucksters that peddle dishonest poverty data.

P.P.S. Here’s a story from Sweden about what happens when the ideology of equality produces very bizarre outcomes.

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The Case for Economic Growth

As far as I’m concerned, the huge reductions in global poverty in recent decades are the only evidence we need about the benefits of economic growth.

This chart I shared in 2014 shows that output doubles much faster when annual economic growth goes from low levels (1 percent or 2 percent) to high levels (4 percent or above).

I call this the miracle of compounding.

Needless to say, I also argue that nations experience high levels of growth with the right policies and the right perspective.

But not everyone thinks policy makers should focus on getting more economic growth. Some of them (the “Okunites“) are willing to sacrifice some prosperity to achieve more equality, while others dislike growth because of the environment.

In a column for the Foundation for Economic Education, Saul Zimet points out that the people who downplay growth are no friends of the poor.

Economic degrowth is terrible for almost everyone, but it endangers the poor most of all. Therefore, it is remarkable that the problems with degrowth are appreciated least by those who claim to be most focused on the interests of the lower classes. …Socialist political commentator Ian Kochinski, who goes by the pseudonym Vaush, has said that, “One of the unfortunate truths of being a socialist is you have to accept that your nation will not get to enjoy the skyrocket GDP growth that capitalist nations get to enjoy. There is going to be a sacrifice of some economic efficiency, to the benefit of hopefully making life better for everybody.” Some growth critics go even further than to question the importance of growth as a policy target. …Naomi Klein calls economic growth “reckless and dirty” and advocates a policy of “radical and immediate degrowth”.

Zimet explains how this agenda is bad news for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

… those brought out of extreme poverty, which have mostly been in places like China and India, were largely not helped by massive social programs but by a growing global market for their labor. …George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen explains…that, “In the medium to long term, even small changes in growth rates have significant consequences for living standards. An economy that grows at one percent doubles its average income approximately every 70 years, whereas an economy that grows at three percent doubles its average income about every 23 years—which, over time, makes a big difference in people’s lives.”

Professor Glenn Hubbard, an economist at Columbia University, makes the case for growth in an article for National Review.

A slightly higher rate of economic growth, sustained over time, can make the difference between a big increase in living standards and relative stagnation. …Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Lucas famously observed that once economists think of long-term growth, it is hard to think of anything else. A pro-growth policy agenda is a good idea because growth is a good idea. …Higher output can come from growth in inputs such as labor and capital, but what determines their growth? Today’s economists highlight population growth and society’s willingness to work, save, and invest. Still more important is growth in productivity, or the efficiency with which inputs are used to produce goods and services. …McCloskey, an economic historian, has similarly identified the continuous, large-scale, voluntary, and unfocused search for betterment as the source of new ideas that can produce economic growth. She sees this “innovism” as primarily a cultural force, preferring the term to the more familiar “capitalism,” and connects innovism to economic liberalism.

Prof. Hubbard notes that economic growth requires creative destruction, but also acknowledges that this process causes pain.

And that politicians often respond to pain with bad ideas.

Forces that propel growth invariably leave a wake of economic disruption for people in many places… A serious discussion of pro-growth policy must account for that disruption. …growth is messy. It can push some individuals, firms, and even industries off well-worn and comfortable paths. …A gentle industrial policy devised by social scientists who are worried about jobs is not the answer. It results in state tinkering for special interests…it risks a vicious cycle: A little bit of tinkering becomes a lot of tinkering.

Instead of industrial policy, Hubbard suggests a couple of policies, most notably a better system of community colleges.

That would be a good outcome, of course.

From a big-picture perspective, though, I think net job creation is the best way to mitigate the political downsides of creative destruction.

It is not good news if 15 million jobs are destroyed in a particular year (especially for the people and communities that are directly harmed).

But if more than 15 million jobs are created the same year, that surely makes it easier for people to find new opportunities.

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Thomas Piketty: Bad Numbers and Bad Economics

Thomas Piketty is a big proponent of class-warfare tax policy because he views inequality as a horrible outcome.

But a soak-the-rich policy agenda, echoed by many other academics such as Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, is fundamentally misguided. If people really care about helping the poor, they should focus instead on reforms that actually have a proven track record of reducing poverty.

The fact that they fixate on inequality makes me wonder about their motives.

And it also leads me to find their work largely irrelevant. I don’t care if they produce detailed long-run data on changes in inequality.

I prefer detailed long-run data on changes in poverty.

That being said, it appears that some of Piketty’s data is sloppy.

I shared some evidence about his bad numbers back in 2014. And, in a column for the Wall Street Journal, Phil Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research and Professor Vincent Geloso of George Mason University expose another glaring flaw

…the Piketty-Saez theory is less a matter of history than an accounting error caused by their misunderstanding of World War II-era tax statistics. …It’s true that income inequality declined in the early part of the 20th century, but the cause had more to do with the economic devastation of the Great Depression than the New Deal tax regime. …they failed to account properly for historical changes in how the Internal Revenue Service reported income-tax statistics. As a result, their numbers systematically overstate the levels of top income concentrations by as much as a third …Between 1943 and 1944 the tax collection agency shifted from tracking “net income” to “adjusted gross income,” or AGI…a truer depiction of annual earnings… Yet Messrs. Piketty and Saez didn’t bring pre-1944 IRS records into line with AGI accounting standards. Instead, they applied a fixed and arbitrary adjustment to all years before the AGI accounting change that conveniently scaled upward to the highest income brackets. …They used the wrong accounting definition for personal income and neglected to adjust their data for wartime distortions on tax reporting. When we corrected these problems, something stunning happened. The overall level of top income concentration flattened, and the timing of its leveling shifted away from the World War II-era tax rates that Messrs. Piketty and Saez place at the center of their story.

Here’s a chart that accompanied the column, showing how accurate data changes the story.

Since today’s column debunks sloppy class warfare, let’s travel back to 2014, when Deirdre McCloskey reviewed Pikittey’s tome for the Erasmus Journal of Philosophy and Economics.

She also thought his fixation on envy was misguided.

…in Piketty’s tale the rest of us fall only relatively behind the ravenous capitalists. The focus on relative wealth or income or consumption is one serious problem in the book. …What is worrying Piketty is that the rich might possibly get richer, even though the poor get richer too. His worry, in other words, is purely about difference, about the Gini coefficient, about a vague feeling of envy raised to a theoretical and ethical proposition. …Piketty and much of the left…miss the ethical point…of lifting up the poor…by the dramatic increase in the size of the pie, which has historically brought the poor to 90 or 95 percent of “enough”, as against the 10 or 5 percent attainable by redistribution without enlarging the pie. …the main event of the past two centuries was…the Great Enrichment of the average individual on the planet by a factor of 10 and in rich countries by a factor of 30 or more.

But she also explained that he doesn’t understand how the economy works.

The fundamental technical problem in the book…is that Piketty the economist does not understand supply responses. In keeping with his position as a man of the left, he has a vague and confused idea about how markets work, and especially about how supply responds to higher prices. …Piketty, it would seem, has not read with understanding the theory of supply and demand that he disparages, such as in Smith (one sneering remark on p. 9), Say (ditto, mentioned in a footnote with Smith as optimistic), Bastiat (no mention), Walras (no mention), Menger (no mention), Marshall (no mention), Mises (no mention), Hayek (one footnote citation on another matter), Friedman (pp. 548-549, but only on monetarism, not the price system). He is in short not qualified to sneer at self-regulated markets…, because he has no idea how they work.

And she concludes with a reminder that some of our left-wing friends seem most interested in punishing rich people rather than helping poor people.

The left clerisy such as…Paul Krugman or Thomas Piketty, who are quite sure that they themselves are taking the ethical high road against the wicked selfishness…might on such evidence be considered dubiously ethical. They are obsessed with first-act changes that cannot much help the poor, and often can be shown to damage them, and are obsessed with angry envy at the consumption of the uncharitable rich, of which they personally are often examples, and the ending of which would do very little to improve the position of the poor. They are very willing to stifle through taxing the rich the market-tested betterments which in the long run have gigantically helped the rest of us.

Amen. If you want to know what Deirdre means by “betterment,” click here and watch her video.

P.S. Click here, here, here, and here for my four-part series on poverty and inequality. Though what Deirdre wrote in 2016 may be even better.

P.P.S. I also can’t resist calling attention to the poll of economists at the end of this column.

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Dunking on Oxfam: 2022’s Tweet of the Year

There were many notable tweets in 2021.

• The tweet of the year
• The most morally reprehensible tweet
• The most depressing tweet (for the left)
• The best counter-tweet

I realize there are still more than 11 months left in 2022, but we may have a winner for this year’s best tweet.

The hack leftists at Oxfam have a new report with the laughable title of “Inequality Kills.” As part of the report, they grouse about “the recent 40-year period of neoliberalism” that supposedly helped only rich elitists.

Johan Norberg destroyed Oxfam’s sophomoric argument with a tweet showing that this era of free-market policy is associated with dramatic reductions in extreme poverty.

As Johan points out, if neoliberalism (in Europe, that’s the left’s term for people who support economic liberty) was a sinister plot by “rich, powerful, and corrupt elites,” their scheme failed.

They wound up enriching poor people instead!

In reality, of course, there was no secret plot.

What actually happened is that nations did shift toward free markets. And pro-market policies are the only effective way to reduce poverty.

Here’s a chart from the latest edition of Economic Freedom of the World. As you can see, economic freedom has increased over the past two decades, from an average score of 6.61 up to 7.04.

By the way, the above chart underestimates the policy improvement in poor nations.

That’s because the level of economic liberty has declined in the United States since 2000. It’s also declined in Western Europe. And it’s declined slightly in Japan.

So if we took the average score of developing nations, we would see an even bigger increase.

And that increase from 2000-2019 would be relatively small compared to the huge increase in the average Fraser Institute score the preceding two decades.

As you can see from this chart, we got a dramatic increase in economic liberty during the years of the Washington Consensus, with average scores increasing from 5.31 to 6.60.

So what’s the bottom line?

The developing world has enjoyed huge reductions in severe poverty thanks to improvements in economic freedom.

Which is exactly the opposite of the statist agenda being advocated by the kooks at Oxfam.

P.S. For those interested, Johan added a follow-up tweet to show that the reduction in global poverty was not just the result of what happened in China.

Since we shifted to China, I’ll augment Johan’s tweet by noting that China’s partial liberalization after Mao led to more inequality in addition to a giant reduction in poverty.

So even though poor people were big winners, Oxfam probably thinks this is bad news since rich people got richer faster than poor people got richer.

P.P.S. The cranks at Oxfam are not the only ones who are willing to hurt the poor so long as the rich get hurt even more.

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More Nonsense from the OECD’s Poverty Hucksters

I created the Eighth Theorem of Government to illustrate the difference between well-meaning people (who want to help the poor) and zero-sum people (who seem to think some people are poor because other people are rich).

This raises the interesting question of whether folks in the latter group are misguided or malicious?

For what it’s worth, I assume most people who fixate on inequality simply don’t understand the issue.

I like to think that they would change their minds if – for instance – they were shown Scott Winship’s devastating, slam-dunk response to Gabriel Zucman.

But there are others (like Zucman) who almost certainly know better, yet they push the inequality narrative for political or ideological reasons.

The bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development definitely also belong in the malicious category.

I first exposed the OECD’s disingenuous approach back in 2012, noting that the Paris-based bureaucrats used an utterly dishonest definition of poverty to make the laughably inaccurate claim that there was more poverty in the United States than in nations such as Greece, Hungary, Turkey, and Portugal.

Well, the OECD is still being dishonest. Here’s a look at the bureaucracy’s latest “poverty” measurement.

For those of us who actually pay attention to details, the data in the above chart have nothing to do with poverty.

Instead, the OECD is showing a particular way of measuring how income is distributed (in this case, the share of the population with less than half of the average income).

To see why it is profoundly absurd to measure poverty by looking at the distribution of income, consider these two examples.

1. Haiti is a wretchedly poor nation, with per-capita yearly income of $1729. But since almost everyone (other than the political elite) in the country is equally destitute, Haiti would have almost no poverty according to the OECD’s perverse definition.
2. Poor people in the United States have income equal to (or greater than) than middle class people in other developed nations, yet OECD bureaucrats want people to think poverty is a bigger problem in America than in a backward economy like Mexico’s.

I’ll close by pointing out the greatest absurdity of all.

If something miraculous happened and everyone in the United States somehow wound up with ten times as much income next year, guess what would happen to America’s poverty rate, as measured by the OECD? How much would it decrease?

Give yourself a gold star if you correctly answered that it would not change. At all.

What a crock of you-know-what.

P.S. The OECD is not the only guilty party when it comes to lying about poverty. Others who (willingly or unwittingly) misrepresent distribution data as poverty data include:

• The United Nations
• The New York Times
• The Equal Welfare Association
• Eduardo Porter of the New York Times
• Germany’s Institute of Labor Economics
• The Obama Administration
• The European Commission
• Professor Noah Smith
• The Economist

P.P.S. It’s also worth noting that poor nations aren’t poor because rich nations are rich.

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Counter-Tweet of the Year: Crushing the Inequality Narrative

I have a four-part series (here, here, here, and here) that explains why it’s much better to focus on fighting poverty rather than fretting about inequality.

I also think that our friends on the left who fixate on inequality are mostly motivated by an ideological desire for bigger government (or an ideological desire to hurt the rich).

Helping the less fortunate seems to be – at best – a secondary concern for them.

But let’s not worry about deciphering their real motives and instead look at why their approach is misguided.

Here’s a tweet from Gabriel Zucman, who (along with Thomas Piketty) is one of the most widely cited crusaders for class-warfare policy.

He is upset that the richest people in the world earn a lot more than the poorest people, and he obviously wants people to view these numbers as scandalous (and, with a reference to colonialism, maybe even subliminally racist).

If the economy was a fixed pie, maybe there would be something scandalous in Zucman’s data, but that’s not the case.

What we’re really seeing in these numbers is that some nations in the 1800s got much richer thanks to capitalism, and that meant their citizens enjoyed much higher levels of income.

But what about the rest of the world, you may ask?

This brings us to the counter-tweet of the year for 2021. Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute responded to Zucman and called attention to a statistic that deserves far more attention.

As far as I’m concerned, every decent and good person should celebrate the information in Swinship’s chart and view the information in Zucman’s chart as irrelevant.

Or, maybe those numbers are relevant, but only in that they tell us that some low-income countries still have lots of room to grow.

But I suspect Zucman would not be in favor of the good policies that would be needed to help poor nations converge with rich ones.

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Reduce Poverty with Free Enterprise

I’ve shared several videos (here, here, here, and here) that use rigorous data to show that grinding poverty and severe material deprivation was the norm for humanity – until capitalism gained a foothold a few hundred years ago.

Fortunately, as free enterprise has gradually spread around the world, there’s been a remarkable increase in living standards, leading to a stunning drop in poverty.

For today’s column, let’s look at some new academic evidence about the link between capitalism and poverty reduction.

Here the abstract of a new study by Colin Doran and Thomas Stratmann of George Mason University.

We study the relationship between economic freedom and poverty rates in 151 countries over a twenty–year period. Using the World Bank’s poverty headcounts of those living on less than $1.90 per day, $3.20 per day, and $5.50 per day, we find evidence that economic freedom, measured by the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, is associated with lower poverty rates. We also test the effect of various components of the Index of Economic Freedom. We find that a government’s integrity and a country’s trade freedom are associated with lower poverty rates.

Keep in mind that this study is looking at the relationship between free markets and extreme poverty (not the relatively comfortable type of poverty that exists in the United States).

More specifically, the authors were investigating the impact of public policy on people who live on between about $700-$2000 per year. In other words, poor people in poor nations.

And the big takeaway is that capitalism leads to less poverty, but what really makes a difference is to have open trade and less corruption.

The good news is that we know how to get free trade. Just get rid of protectionist policies.

The bad news is that corruption in government is a much more challenging topic. Yes, shrinking government would mean less opportunity for graft, but that doesn’t solve the problem of delivering “public goods” in a competent and honest manner.

P.S. Foreign aid makes things worse rather than better.

P.P.S. Click here is you want to learn about poverty reduction in rich nations.

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Economic Freedom and Income Mobility

Writing last week about the new edition of Economic Freedom of the World, I largely focused on the jurisdictions that got high scores (Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand) and countries that got low scores (Venezuela in last place, of course).

But I also included a chart showing that higher levels of economic liberty are correlated with higher levels of income.

That’s hardly a surprise for anyone who’s compared North Korea and South Korea. Or West Germany and East Germany.

But what about income mobility? Do free markets give low-income people an opportunity to climb the economic ladder?

Some new research from Vincent Geloso of George Mason University and James Dean of West Virginia University answers that question.

Here’s the abstract from their study.

Economic freedom is robustly associated with income growth, but does this association extend to the poorest in a society? In this paper, we employ Canada’s longitudinal cohorts of income mobility between 1982 and 2018 to answer this question. We find that economic freedom, as measured by the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of North America (EFNA) index, is positively associated with multiple measures of income mobility for people in the lowest income deciles, including a) absolute income gain; b) the percentage of people with rising income; and c) average decile mobility. For the overall population, economic freedom has weaker effects.

And here’s the part of the study that I found most interesting.

We learn that labor market freedom is most important.

When focusing on the bottom decile’s average decile mobility (see table 5), we must note this variable only measures upward decile mobility, as those in the poorest decile cannot move down a decile and the upper decile can only move down or stay put. As a result, the effect of economic freedom is likely somewhat understated because of these mathematical boundaries. Nevertheless, we see that greater economic freedom increases the lowest decile’s upward decile mobility. In essence, higher amounts of economic freedom improve the relative gains of those at the bottom of the distribution, allowing them to move to higher deciles. Here, again, we see that the labor market freedom component is key for the nation’s poorest, such that an additional point of labor market freedom allows those beginning in the poorest decile to move up an additional 0.145 deciles… To put that number into perspective, using the differences in economic freedom between Quebec and Alberta (i.e. the lowest and highest economic freedom units in our data) is again useful. The greater labor market freedom of Alberta entails that the poorest Albertans have 0.44 extra deciles of mobility on average than the poorest Quebeckers.

Wonky readers may enjoy the aforementioned Table 5.

The bottom line is that free markets and limited government are the recipe to help poor people climb the economic ladder, not class warfare and redistribution (as I explained here, here, here, and here).

It’s much better to focus on how to make poor people rich rather than trying to make rich people poor.

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The Negative Relationship between Welfare and Work

Ten days ago, I shared some data and evidence illustrating how redistribution programs result in high implicit tax rates and thus discourage low-income people from climbing the economic ladder.

Simply stated, why work harder or work more when an additional dollar of income only leads to a net benefit of 10 cents or 20 cents? Or why work harder or work more when you can actually wind up being worse off?

Or why work at all if the governments provides enough goodies?

But don’t ask such questions if you’re in the same room as Helaine Olen of the Washington Post. She is very upset that some people think welfare payments discourage work.

It’s a dangerous myth, this idea that government help causes some people to just loaf off. It’s also untrue. Reminder: Before the pandemic, most working-age people receiving benefits like food stamps worked. They just didn’t earn enough money. …the temporary child tax credit signed into law this year by President Biden demonstrates the opposite. It is an extraordinary success. Almost 90 percent of families with children under age 18 are eligible to receive a monthly check from the federal government through the end of the year. …Many other developed nations offer almost all residents a child allowance of some sort.

If you read the entire column, you’ll notice that she provides very little evidence, particularly considering her very bold assertion that a negative link between redistribution and labor supply is “a dangerous myth.”

Yet we know from the experience of welfare reform in the 1990s that work requirements did boost labor supply.

And don’t forget about the very recent evidence that turbo-charged unemployment benefits encouraged more joblessness.

We also have evidence from overseas showing that there’s a negative relationship between handouts and idleness.

Including research from the Netherlands and the Nordic nations such as Denmark. And the same is true in Canada. And the United Kingdom.

Ms. Olen seems primarily motivated by her support for permanent per-child handouts, as President Biden has proposed.

And she wants us to believe that everyone will continue to work, even if they can get $3000-plus for each kid, along with all the other goodies that are provided by Uncle Sam (often topped up by state governments).

For what it’s worth, I think she admits her real agenda toward the end of her column.

…an argument can be made that the children of the irresponsible deserve more support from us, not less. Children can’t push their parents to get with the work-and-education program. As a result, you’re not “helping” children if you insist on financially punishing their parents for not making an “effort.” …human infrastructure matters too.

In other words, Ms. Olen seems to share Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s view that money should be given to people “unwilling to work.”

Which is how some of our friends actually view the world. They think there is a right to other people’s money. Which is why they support big handouts, including so-called basic income.

The bottom line is that Biden’s per-child handouts and other expansions of the welfare state clearly would make work less attractive for some people.

Not all people, of course, because it takes time to erode societal capital.

But why would we want a society where a growing number of people think it’s okay to live off of others?

P.S. There is scholarly research that redistribution programs lure older people out of the workforce.

P.P.S. There is also scholarly research showing redistribution programs discourage households from building wealth.

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When Capitalism Wins, Poverty Loses

Why do folks on the left support punitive policies such as high tax rates and a bigger burden of government?

Some of them are motivated by resentment against those who have achieved success. These are the people who support the hate-and-envy message of politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Others folks on the left, by contrast, are motivated by sympathy for the less fortunate.

That’s a noble sentiment. Where they go wrong is in thinking that the economy is a fixed pie. This leads them to the mistaken conclusion that some people are poor because other people are rich.

Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think these people can be convinced to support good policy if they learn the facts about how free markets and limited government are a proven recipe for prosperity.

This is why I shared data earlier this year showing how per-capita economic output jumped dramatically once capitalism was allowed starting a couple of hundred years ago.

Today, let’s look at how poor people have been the biggest winners. Professor Max Roser of Oxford University recently shared a profoundly important tweet about the dramatic reduction in global poverty. We see not only that poverty rates have plummeted, but also that falling poverty rates are correlated with increases in per-capita GDP.

In other words, everyone is getting richer. There’s no fixed pie.

As you might expect, regions that are friendlier to capitalism have enjoyed bigger increases in prosperity and bigger reductions in poverty.

The bottom line is that people who care about the poor should be the biggest advocates of free enterprise.

P.S. It’s worth noting that, according to both U.S. data and global data, the big reduction in poverty occurred before welfare states were created.

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Defending Bill Clinton’s Welfare Reform

Here are four things to understand about poverty and dependency.

• Throughout most of human history, harsh material deprivation was the norm for the vast majority of people.
• The development of free enterprise and economic liberty led to dramatic increases in living standards.
• The poverty rate declined significantly in the 1800s and early 1900s when there was no welfare state.
• After the welfare state was created, poverty and dependency stopped declining.

Now let’s add a fifth item.

• The United States adopted welfare reform in the mid-1990s.

Today’s column examines whether this was a bad development or good development.

We’ll start with a harsh critic.

In his column for the New York Times, Charles Blow wants Democrats to repeal Clinton’s welfare reform.

Clinton’s record, particularly with respect to Black and brown Americans and the poor, was marked by catastrophic miscalculation. …the welfare reform bill, …Clinton promised would “end welfare as we know it.” One of its central provisions was block-grant assistance to the states. …the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out in 2020, the block grant to states “has been set at $16.5 billion each year since 1996; as a result, its real value has fallen by almost 40 percent due to inflation.” …With the passage of the “American Rescue Plan,” the Democrats, alone, took another major step away from the mistakes of the Clinton legacy by increasing aid to families with children and to workers.

Reading the column, it seems like blacks must have suffered immensely because of the 40 percent reduction in the block grant.

But now let’s consider whether welfare reform was a good thing.

According to the data, the answer is yes. This chart, based on the Census Bureau’s data (specifically Table B-5), shows that the poverty rate for African Americans has declined since welfare reform was enacted.

To be sure, one could argue that the post-welfare reform decline was simply a continuation of a positive trend. But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s certainly no evidence that the 1996 legislation led to bad results.

Moreover, research from the Brookings Institution makes a persuasive case that welfare reform deserves credit for some of the post-1996 progress.

Why? Because it sent a message – both practically and rhetorically – that permanent dependence on Uncle Sam was a bad thing. As a result, more people entered the workforce and poverty dropped.

That seems like a result that should be celebrated.

Unfortunately, Biden’s so-called American Rescue Plan contains big per-child handouts that are not dependent on being in the workforce.

The only silver lining to that dark cloud is that the handouts are only for 2021.

But the pro-redistribution crowd already is clamoring to make that provision a permanent giveaway. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, they want to “restore welfare as we knew it.”

P.S. Based on what I’ve read in his columns, Charles Blow is a hard-core leftist on economic issues. But he’s semi-reasonable on gun rights, so that’s one point in his favor.

P.P.S. Welfare reform is just one example of the good policies that were enacted during the Clinton years.

P.P.P.S. We can learn lessons about welfare and dependency by looking at data from Europe and Canada.

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Part IV: Poverty Is a Problem, Not Inequality

My series on poverty and inequality (see here, here, and here) focuses on why we should try to help the poor rather than hurt the rich.

We’ll continue with that theme in Part IV, which begins with this video by Russ Roberts of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Russ makes some great points throughout the video about the importance of creating the conditions for upward mobility.

Here are some of the main takeaways.

1. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting richer as well.
2. Cronyism is bad, especially when it winds up subsidizing the rich.
3. We should focus on reducing poverty rather than fixating on inequality.

Regarding that final point, my favorite part is when he said that, “Focusing on inequality as something inherently bad can blind us to the problems of poverty. Inequality and poverty aren’t the same thing.  …I’m much more concerned about those at the bottom who are left behind.”

In effect, he was stating his version of the Eighth Theorem of Government. At least the first half of it (he’s probably too nice to impugn the motives of those who focus on inequality).

I also like the fact that he points out the need to get rid of licensing.

And he repeatedly argues that we need to improve the quality of education, though I wish he had explicitly stated that this means we have to replace the government’s failed education monopoly with a choice-based system.

But no need to nit-pick. The video is great, as are his other videos that I have shared over the years (see here, here, here, and here).

P.S. For those who have trouble believing that the poor, middle class, and rich can all simultaneously enjoy rising incomes, click here, here, and here for evidence.

P.P.S. I also think this data from China is very powerful.

P.P.P.S. The people who fixate on inequality favor policies that would make the United States more like Europe, so it’s worth noting that lower-income people in America are usually better off than middle-class people on the other side of the Atlantic.

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The World’s Most Economically Illiterate Statement

Back in 2014, I shared two videos, one narrated by Prof. Don Boudreaux and the other narrated by Prof. Deirdre McCloskey, making the point that grinding poverty and material deprivation were the norm for most of human history. It wasn’t until capitalism emerged a few hundred years ago that we made the jump from agricultural poverty to industrial prosperity.

I know at least one person who didn’t watch those videos.

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley isn’t as well known as other members the “The Squad,” especially Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar (jointly featured in this bit of satire), but she deserves some sort of recognition for being totally clueless about economics and history. Indeed, she may even deserve some sort of prize for uttering the year’s most economically illiterate sentence.

The two aforementioned videos illustrate why her statement is nonsensical, but let’s share some updated numbers to illustrate why she is profoundly wrong.

The Our World in Data site, maintained by Max Roser at Oxford University, is a great resource for researchers. If you go to the section on economic growth, you’ll find lots of information and many charts examining what has happened to living standards over long periods of time.

For instance, here’s a look at gross domestic product (GDP) over the past 2000 years. As you can see, per-capita economic output was very low (and very flat) until capitalism emerged in the 1700s and 1800s.

Thanks to capitalism’s emergence (along with the rule of law), we are vastly better off today than our ancestors.

Here’s another look at the data, but let’s focus on just the past 200 years. Yes, the 1800s was the era of the “industrial revolution” and so-called sweatshops, but that was a building block to our current prosperity.

To be fair to Congresswoman Pressley, it’s only the first part of her statement (“poverty is not naturally occurring”) that is grossly inaccurate and economically illiterate.

She then added that poverty “is a policy choice,” presumably because she wants people to believe that more redistribution can make it go away. That part of her statement also is wrong, according to both U.S. data and global data, but not quite as ludicrously erroneous.

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Four Major Problems with Senator Romney’s Plan for Universal Child Allowances

My late friend Walter Williams was a first-rate economist, an important public intellectual, and a truly great American. He also was an amazing communicator, with an unparalleled ability to make important points in a succinct and easy-to-understand manner.

My favorite Walter quote is about how capitalism enabled positive-sum wealth creation.

Today, though, I want to share Walter’s quote about the simple rules for life that basically eliminate poverty.

Sadly, the current welfare state undermines those rules and instead lures many people into self-destructive behaviors. Choices that are bad for them and bad for society.

• Have kids out of wedlock? No problem, Uncle Sam will take care of you with a plethora of handouts.
• Watch TV on the sofa all day rather than work? No problem, Washington will provide you with benefits.

As an economist, I’m especially concerned that redistribution programs discourage employment. That’s bad for the economy. Even more important, it’s very bad for people who get trapped in lives of dependency.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the welfare state also is a big burden on taxpayers.

The reason for highlighting these problems is that Senator Mitt Romney has unveiled a plan (the “Family Security Act”) to have the federal government provide universal child allowances.

The good news is that his plan will mitigate some of the problems with the current system. The bad news is that his proposal will exacerbate other problems.

Here are some excerpts from the Senator’s summary of the proposal.

The Family Security Act would provide a monthly cash benefit for families, amounting to $350 a month for each young child, and $250 a month for each school-aged child. …Promoting marriage; Providing equal treatment for both working and stay-at-home parents; and Reforming and consolidating outmoded federal programs, including by fully paying for the new proposal….a new national commitment to American families by modernizing and streamlining antiquated federal policies into a monthly cash benefit. …The bill consolidates overlapping and often duplicative federal policies into direct support for families. …deficit-neutral.

That description sounds nice, and the proposal would be beneficial in some ways.

Most notably, there would not be high implicit marginal tax rates on work (a big problem in the current system) since people would get the child allowances regardless of employment status.

But there are some serious drawbacks to the plan. Here are four things that cause concern.

First, it increases the burden of government.

Senator Romney (as well as proponents of the plan such as the Niskanen Center) highlight the fact that the plan is “deficit neutral.” But that doesn’t tell us whether the plan increases or reduces the size and scope of the federal government.

Unfortunately, if you take a close look at the Senator’s summary, it’s clear the proposal would be a net increase in the burden of spending.

Here’s the relevant table, which ostensibly shows Romney’s new spending along with the “spending offsets” that make the plan deficit neutral.

For what it’s worth, I’m disappointed that the Senator (his staff?) chose to be dishonest. Three of the “spending offsets” are actually measures that would increase tax revenue (circled in red).

And when you fix that dodgy bit of accounting, Romney’s plan would add more than $45 billion per year to America’s fiscal burden.

Second, why would anyone think it’s a good idea to copy Europe?

According to an article from HuffPost, “The U.S. is one of the only developed countries that doesn’t pay parents a child benefit or child allowance. Romney’s proposal shows there is bipartisan support for the policy.”

This is an accurate observation, but it’s hardly persuasive. Yes, European nations generally send people money simply because they have children.

But why on earth would we want to copy nations where living standards are far below American levels? Heck, poor people in America tend to be more prosperous than middle-class people in Europe.

By the way, some like Romney’s plan because they think it will boost marriage rates and fertility rates (i.e., lure people into having more children). Seems like that might be theoretically true, but the data show that European birth rates are very low, significantly below American levels.

In other words, don’t hold your breath waiting for more marriages and more children.

Third, it undermines federalism by giving Washington a bigger role rather than smaller role.

I’ve argued that the so-called War on Poverty has been very bad news. We have a Byzantine system of handouts that require an army of bureaucrats to administer dozens of handouts that subsidize bad behavior.

It’s created dependency and the data show it actually has had a negative impact on the trend of poverty reduction and self sufficiency (same thing has happened in other nations as well).

The right approach is to get Washington out of the business of income redistribution. We’re far more likely to get good outcomes if we let states decide (and learn from each other on) how best to reduce poverty.

Fourth, it is akin to a “basic income” that may have a very corrosive impact on societal capital.

I was very opposed to Andrew Yang’s plan to provide universal handouts, in large part because I feared it would undermine personal independence, the work ethic, the spirit of self reliance, and other traits that are critical for a successful society. And I also didn’t trust (for good reason) Yang’s claim that his scheme would replace other redistribution programs.

Well, Romney’s proposal is like a starter version of a basic income, but with the handouts based on the number of children.

I fear this will enable some people to decide they can drop out of the labor force.

Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute shares my concerns.

The Romney proposal would take us back to the bad old days in key ways, and policymakers are playing Russian roulette with low-income families’ wellbeing. …some people (including future people) who would choose single parenthood or non-work except that the current safety net makes it unaffordable would be able to afford these choices under child allowances. For them, child allowances are allowances for behavior that would be expected to hurt their own long-term prospects and, more importantly, the wellbeing of their children.

I’ll conclude by observing that Romney’s plan is nowhere near as bad as Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’s scheme for universal handouts.

But that’s hardly the test for good legislation. For those who prefer smaller government, less dependency, and less centralization, Romney’s plan is bad news.

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Economic Growth and the “Size of the Pie”

My recent three-part series (here, here, and here) explained why policy makers should seek to reduce poverty rather than inequality.

I want to expand on that point today by showing why growing the pie is more important than how it is sliced.

I’ve previously opined on why economic growth is important, showing that the United States today would be almost as poor as Mexico if our rate of economic growth since 1895 was just one-percentage point less than it actually was.

Moreover, I also showed in that 2017 column how much smaller increments of additional growth over time can mean thousands of dollars of additional income for an average household.

And, the previous year, I shared two excellent videos from Marginal Revolution University while writing about Hong Kong’s remarkable jump from poverty to prosperity.

For today’s column, I want to expand on this point using the economic growth page from Max Roser’s great site, Our World in Data. We’ll start with this chart showing how per-capita economic output dramatically increased a few hundred years ago.

This kind of data won’t be news to regular readers. I’ve already shared great videos from Deirdre McCloskey and Don Boudreaux that make the same point about the explosion of prosperity in the modern era.

And if anyone somehow thinks this growth doesn’t matter, Roser’s page shows that there are countless ways of graphing the relationship between economic output and good outcomes, such as how long we live, child mortality, access to electricity, hunger, and literacy.

The bottom line is that we are unimaginably rich compared to prior generations, largely thanks to the rule of law, expanded trade, and limited government.

That recipe for growth and prosperity works anywhere and everywhere it is tried. Here’s another chart showing how other parts of the world are being to prosper thanks to economic liberalization.

I want to cite two additional charts from Roser’s page.

First, here’s a chart showing productivity rates in selected nations. Why is this important? Because economic prosperity is basically driven by how much we work and how productive we are.

There are all sorts of interesting things embedded in the above chart.

• Productivity is vitally important, which is why it is so misguided to have tax systems that punish saving and investment.
• Nations such as China still way behind the western world, a point I’ve been making for a long time.
• The United States has a big income advantage over European nations, but it’s driven by hours worked rather than productivity.

Our final chart shows the importance of convergence.

Once again, there are some important observations embedded in the above chart.

• Very poor nations such as Botwsana and China can enjoy meaningful gains with partial economic liberalization.
• Western nations can enjoy more prosperity over time, but they won’t catch the United States so long as they are burdened with too much government.
• Singapore shows that full convergence is not only possible, but also that laissez-faire countries can even surpass the United States.

P.S. I can’t resist recycling my “never-answered question” in hopes of getting any of my left-leaning friends to cite a single example of their policies producing mass prosperity.

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Part III: Poverty Is a Problem, not Inequality

Ethical people, regardless of ideology, should be motivated by an empathetic desire to help the poor rather than a spiteful thirst to punish the rich.

That was the message in Part I and Part II of this series. That’s also today’s message, and we’ll start with this video.

There’s a lot of information in this video, broken down into five thematic points.

1. Profit (earned through voluntary exchange) is good, while plunder (obtained through government coercion) is bad.
2. Because people are different, it is important to distinguish between equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes.
3. People don’t understand inequality, and that leads many of them to overlook the important problem of poverty.
4. We are getting richer over time, meaning that the middle class is only disappearing because some are becoming rich.
5. Thanks to the spread of pro-market policies, the entire world is becoming more prosperous with better life outcomes.

For today’s column, let’s focus on item #3 and I want to specifically take this opportunity to explain why we should be aware of how a type of data known as the “Gini coefficient” is used (and sometimes misused).

By way of background, the Gini coefficient measures the distribution of income in a society. As seen in this illustration from Wikipedia, a high coefficient means some people have a lot more income than others and a low coefficient means most people have similar levels of income.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Gini coefficient for three reasons.

First, it’s often used by folks on the left who want higher taxes and more redistribution. Though that’s actually an indictment of how the coefficient is misused.

Second, it doesn’t tell us whether inequality is the result of something good (some people getting rich by providing especially valuable goods and services) or the result of something bad (some people grabbing undeserved loot thanks because of bailouts, subsidies, protectionism, industrial policy, and cronyism).

Third, it does not tell us whether a society is poor or prosperous.

Regarding that final point, Professor Davies pointed out in the video that the most equal nations in the world are Sweden and Afghanistan.

But having similar Gini coefficients is utterly meaningless because it turns out that the similar scores are for radically different reasons – i.e., people in Afghanistan are equally impoverished and people in Sweden are equally prosperous.

And I can’t resist pointing out that Sweden’s superior results are surely correlated with the fact that Swedes enjoy far higher levels of economic liberty (Sweden is #22 and Afghanistan is #136 according to the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom).

You could also do a comparison between nations with very different Gini coefficients.

The United States, for instance, is much more “unequal” than Afghanistan. But I can’t imagine anyone in America wanting to trade places. After all, almost everyone in the U.S. is far richer than almost everyone in Afghanistan.

Or, if you prefer comparing developed nations, I’ve previously noted that poor people in the United States have the same amount of income as middle-class people in nations with lower levels of inequality.

I’ll close with one final bit of data that shows why Gini coefficients should be viewed with caution. Here’s another visual from the Wikipedia page, this one showing how world inequality increased substantially between 1820 and 2002.

Was that increase in inequality a bad outcome?

Of course not. It was simply a result of the Western world becoming rich because of limited government and the rule of law.

And now that developing nations are finally shifting to market-oriented policies, their incomes also are increasing (which, as a side effect, means global inequality is decreasing).

In other words, we should pay attention to the recipe for growth and prosperity, not the Gini coefficient.

P.S. While I’m not a fan of the Gini coefficient, the so-called trade deficit will always be my least favorite statistic.

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Part II: Poverty Is a Problem, not Inequality

I began yesterday’s column with a short clip of me explaining why we should focus on reducing poverty, not reducing inequality.

Here’s a more thorough discussion of the same topic.

The video makes three central points, all of which are very sound.

1. The economy is not a fixed pie, the rest of us don’t become poor when someone else becomes rich.
2. In a free society, there will be unequal outcomes because we have all make different choices in life.
3. Fixating on the irrelevant issue of inequality distracts from addressing the real problem of poverty.

I want to focus on #3 because it’s very distressing that some folks on the left are more interested in hurting the rich rather than helping the poor.

Indeed, some of them are so motivated by spite that they even advocate for policies that will hurt poor people so long as rich people are hurt even more.

I normally try to avoid sounding judgemental, but that’s morally reprehensible.

The decent thing to do is figure out the policies that will help people climb the economic ladder.

With that in mind, here are some highlights from a recent FEE column by Gonzalo Schwarz. He begins with the common-sense observation that it’s best to focus on upward mobility.

…economic mobility, poverty, and income inequality…are not the same, and the policy responses to address them vary. …the income inequality narrative has come to dominate our current public policy discourse, especially in the United States. …The rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting richer too… Policies that aim to remove the barriers faced by people looking to climb the income ladder should be rigorously discussed and pursued.

He then points out that policies to reduce inequality often backfire.

Schwarz cites the minimum wage as an obvious example since it is a recipe for joblessness when politicians mandate pay levels that exceed the value of many low-skill workers.

But my interest in public finance leads me to share this excerpt.

Policy solutions aimed at reducing income inequality will not necessarily positively impact those looking to escape poverty… Quite often, these goals can come into conflict. …A…popular public policy “solution” to address income inequality is to raise the corporate income tax (CIT) and use the proceeds to fund government programs… A recent Harvard Business School working paper…find that a reduction in state corporate income taxes increases real investment, a key driver of economic growth. This is consistent with data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which published a wide-ranging 2008 paper that found that taxes on income tend to hamper economic growth significantly more than other tax instruments.

Schwarz’s conclusion is spot on.

Pursuing an agenda focused on boosting upward social mobility is more conducive to the discovery of the barriers in the way of human flourishing and wealth creation. Breaking down these barriers, both artificial and natural, is the best way to ensure that each and every person has the opportunity to achieve their American Dream. Certainly, we don’t need more income inequality to achieve broader prosperity but chasing the inequality red herring puts that goal at risk.

I’ll add my two cents to this discussion by noting that President John F. Kennedy was right to observe that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Data from the Census Bureau shows that all income groups tend to rise and fall together.

In other words, if you’re hurting the rich, you’re probably hurting the poor as well. And vice-versa.

And if you’re enacting policies that help the rich, then incomes for everyone else are probably rising as well.

P.S. Regular readers already know this, but I’ll make the should-be obvious point for any new readers that there are some types of government policy (bailouts, subsidies, protectionism, industrial policy, cronyism, etc) that produce unjust forms of inequality.

In other words, it’s good when people become rich by providing the rest of us with goods and services we value, but it’s not good for them to get rich by climbing into bed with politicians.

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Part I: Poverty Is a Problem, not Inequality

I have a couple of cameos in a new left-leaning documentary film, Race to the Bottom. I shared a clip two day ago with my views on corporate tax and the Laffer Curve.

Today, here’s what I said about the left’s mistaken views on inequality.

The fundamental problem is that I think some of our friends on the left are primarily motivated by disdain for the rich.

Indeed, their envy and resentment is so strong that they’re happy to support policies that hurt the poor, so long as the rich suffer a disproportionate amount of harm.

Consider this sarcastic visual.

I hope this visual greatly exaggerates the problem, but I’ve previously shared substantive research suggesting that the folks on the left are fixated on punishing success.

That agenda does not produce good results.

In a thorough article for Reason, David Henderson of the Hoover Institution explores the issues of poverty and inequality.

Most of what is framed as a problem of inequality is better conceived as either a problem of poverty or a problem of unjustly acquired wealth. …It’s important to distinguish the concepts of inequality and poverty. …Many people who worry about income inequality want to tax higher-income people more. Given what economists know about the harmful effects from raising already high marginal tax rates even higher, tax increases could certainly reduce measured inequality—because they would cause higher-income people to reduce their taxable income by working less, by taking more pay in the form of untaxed fringe benefits, or by investing more in municipal bonds, whose interest is not taxable by the feds. Of course, none of this would make lower-income people better off. Indeed, to the extent that higher taxes discourage capital accumulation, they slow the growth of worker productivity. One of the main ways to increase worker productivity is to increase the amount of capital per worker. With a slower growth rate of capital, worker productivity will grow more slowly—and so will real wages. This makes lower-income people worse off than they would have been.

Henderson uses Lydon Johnson as an example of how some people use government favoritism to line their pockets.

But he wisely notes that any inequality that arises from “unjustly acquired wealth” is a symptom of the real problem of cronyism.

Great wealth, meanwhile, is a problem only to the extent that it is unjustly extracted. Government favoritism to politically powerful people may increase income and wealth inequality, as it did in the case of Lyndon Johnson and his wife. But it is the government favoritism, not inequality per se, that is the true problem.

As a quick aside, Lyndon Johnson almost certainly ranks as one of America’s worst presidents (along with failures such as Hoover, Roosevelt, Nixon, and Wilson).

And, having read Henderson’s article, I now have an additional reason to despise LBJ.

I’ll close by recycling my Eighth Theorem of Government, which is simply another way of expressing my oft-made point that we should try to improve life for the poor rather than worsen life for the rich.

Indeed, I sometimes think this theorem is a good way of discerning who is a good person and who is a bad person.

Regarding the latter, we should recognize that some people are simply misguided. These are the folks who actually think that there’s a fixed amount of income and wealth, so they mistakenly believe that if someone like Bill Gates gets rich, the rest of us somehow lose.

Smart folks on the left know that’s not true, so I give them credit for that, but I also think they are reprehensible for being motivated by a desire to hurt the rich, even when that means the rest of us suffer as well.

The bottom line is that market-driven growth is good for everyone, especially the poor.

P.S. The most accurate political analysis of inequality came from Margaret Thatcher.

P.P.S. Here’s the world’s best-ever tweet about inequality.

P.P.P.S. For more wonky readers, I suggest this data and this data about China and this data about the world.

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Does Trump Deserve Credit for Strong 2019 Economic Data?

Regular readers know that I give Trump mixed grades on economic policy.

He gets good marks on issues such as taxes and regulation, but bad marks in other areas, most notably spending and trade.

Which is why I’ve sometimes asserted that there has been only a small improvement in the economy’s performance under Trump compared to Obama.

But I may have to revisit that viewpoint. The Census Bureau released its annual report yesterday on Income and Poverty in the United States. The numbers for 2019 were spectacularly good, with the White House taking a big victory lap.

Here are the three charts that merit special attention.

First, we have the numbers on inflation-adjusted median household income. You can see big jumps for all demographic groups.

Next, here’s a look at whether Americans are getting richer or poorer over time.

As you can from this chart, an ever-larger share are earning high incomes (a point I made last month, but this new data is even better).

Last but not least, here’s the data on the poverty rate.

Once again, remarkably good numbers, with all demographic groups enjoying big improvements.

We’ll see some bad news, of course, when the 2020 data is released at this point next year. But that’s the result of coronavirus.

So let’s focus on whether Trump deserves credit for 2019, especially since I got several emails yesterday from Trump supporters asking whether I’m willing to reassess my views on his policies.

At the risk of sounding petulant, my answer is no. I don’t care how good the data looks in any particular year. Excessive government spending is never a good idea, and it’s also never a good idea to throw sand in the gears of global trade.

But perhaps we should rethink whether the positive effects of some policies are stronger and more immediate while the negative effects of other policies are weaker and more gradual.

I’ll close with two cautionary notes about “sugar high” economics.

• First, Trump’s fiscal policy of tax cuts and more spending could be viewed as textbook Keynesianism. I definitely don’t think that approach creates more long-run growth, but it can lead to some illusory short-term prosperity as an economy consumes more than it produces.
• Second, I worry that some of last year’s good economic data may have been the result of the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policies. As I’ve previously noted, bubbles always feel good when they’re expanding. They don’t feel so good when they pop.

For what it’s worth, we’re not going to resolve this debate because coronavirus has been a huge, exogenous economic shock.

Though if (or when) the United States ever gets to a tipping point of too much debt, there may be some retroactive regret that Trump (along with Obama and Bush) viewed the federal budget as a party fund.

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Help Reduce Poverty With Capitalism

Back in 2017, I shared this video explaining why capitalism is unquestionably the best way to help poor people.

I’m recycling the video today because it’s a great introduction for a discussion about how best to help poor people.

As part of my Eighth Theorem of Government, I made the point that it’s wrong to fixate on inequality. Instead, the goal should be poverty reduction.

And the best way to help the poor, as I noted when criticizing Pope Francis’ support for statism in a BBC interview, is free markets and limited government.

Now we have additional evidence for this approach thanks to a new study from the Hoover Institution.

Authored by Ed Lazear, former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, it uses hard data from Economic Freedom of the World and the Index of Economic Freedom to see how poor people do in capitalist nations compared to socialist nations.

If you’re pressed for time, here are the key passages from the introduction.

This study analyzes income data from 162 countries over multiple decades, coupled with measures of economic freedom, size of government, and transfers to determine how various parts of society fare under capitalism and socialism. The main conclusion is that the poor, defined as having income in the lowest 10 percent of a country’s income distribution, do significantly better in economies with free markets, competition, and low state ownership. More impressive is that moving from a heavy emphasis on government to a free market enhances the income of the poor substantially. …Changing freedom from the Mexico level to the Singapore level is predicted to raise the income of the poor by about 40 percent. All income groups benefit from the change, but the change typically helps the poor more than other income groups.

For those interested, let’s now dig into the details.

The study specifically looks at the degree to which state ownership (i.e., textbook socialism) has an impact on income.

As one might suspect, more state ownership means lower income.

A number of measures of free-market capitalism and socialism have been suggested. The analysis starts by examining the metric that most closely matches the dictionary definition of socialism, namely, the amount of state ownership of capital… The basic approach in this section is to examine the relation of income of three groups to state ownership. …All coefficients on the state ownership index are positive, strong, and statistically significant. For example, using the coefficient in column 4, a one standard deviation increase in private ownership increases median income by about 19 percent of the mean value of the log of median income. Also interesting is that the lowest income groups benefit as much or more from private ownership as the highest income groups. …The cross-country correlation between private ownership and income ten years in the future is positive and strong. It is also true that median income seems to rise over time within a country as the country moves toward more private ownership and less state ownership.

The study highlights several interesting examples.

For instance, it shows that poor people immensely benefited from China’s partial shift to capitalism, even though inequality increased (something I pointed out a few years ago).

Here’s the data on Chile, which shows both rich and poor benefited from that nation’s shift to capitalism.

By the way, I have several columns (here, here, here, and here) documenting how poor people have been the big winners from Chile’s pro-market reforms.

Next we have the example of South Korea.

That data is especially powerful, by the way, when you compare South Korea and North Korea.

Last (and, in this case, least), we have the data from the unfortunate nation of Venezuela.

Chavez’s family personally gained from socialism, but this chart shows how the rest of the nation has stagnated.

So what’s the bottom line?

Lazear summarizes his results.

…there is no evidence that, as a general matter, high-income groups benefit more from a move toward capitalism than low-income groups. The effect of changing state ownership and economic freedom on income is not larger for the rich than for the poor. Second, income growth is positively correlated across deciles. The situation is closer to a rising tide lifting all boats than to the fat man becoming fat by making the thin man thin. Finally, there is no consistent evidence across the large number of countries and time periods examined of any strong and widespread link between income growth and inequality. There are examples, like China, where income growth was coupled with large increases in inequality, but others like Chile, where strong income growth came about without much change in inequality, and South Korea, where inequality declined slightly as economic freedom and income grew over time.

Amen. This analysis underscores my oft-made argument that inequality is irrelevant and that policy makers instead should have a laser-like focus on economic growth.

Assuming, of course, that they want poor people to climb the economic ladder to prosperity.

P.S. The Lazear study points out that Scandinavian nations are definitely not socialist based on measures of state ownership.

Some might define socialist economies as merely being those that have high levels of redistribution, meaning high taxes and transfers. …It is certainly true that the Scandinavian countries have higher taxes and transfers than non-Scandinavian countries… Scandinavian countries all have low state ownership index values…and high values of the economic freedom index. The values for Scandinavia look much more like those for the United States than they do for pre-1985 China or post-2000 Venezuela. …Perhaps a more accurate description of Scandinavia is that the countries rely primarily on private ownership and markets but have chosen to have a large government transfer program, which implies not only high transfers but also high taxes.

I’ll simply add that the high transfers and high taxes have negative consequences for Scandinavian nations, but those countries at least have very pro-market policies in other areas to compensate for the damage caused by bad fiscal policy.

P.P.S. For my friends on the left who may suspect that Lazear cherry-picked his examples. I’ll simply challenge them to show a contrary example.

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Ludicrous Poverty Analysis from the United Nations

Back in 2017, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity released this video, which shows that free markets and small government are the best recipe for poor nations that want to become rich nations.

The CF&P video was motivated in part by a need to debunk international bureaucracies such as the OECD and IMF, which abandoned the “Washington Consensus” for economic liberalization and instead have been making the odd argument that prosperity can be achieved with higher taxes and a bigger burden of government spending.

Needless to say, neither of these international organizations has bothered to explain how such dirigiste policies produce more growth.

But the politicians who fund and control such bureaucracies doubtlessly appreciate the message.

You probably won’t be surprised that the United Nations also is on the wrong side of this issue.

A recent report from the New York City-based group regurgitates the anti-market viewpoint.

The argument that pro-market policies automatically benefit the poor is likewise at odds with the evidence. Traditional pro-growth polices, such as lower corporate tax rates, labor ‘reforms,’ deregulation, austerity-driven cuts to services, and privatization can have devastating effects on the well-being of poor people and the state’s capacity to reduce poverty. …There are various ways to reduce extreme inequality, but redistribution is an essential element. …Significant redistribution is indispensable. …Fair and equitable taxation can lay the foundations for a society that respects and promotes well-being for all. …Low tax revenue has hobbled the capacity of governments to undertake redistributive policies. …The time has come to take social protection seriously.

For those who don’t follow these issues closely, “social protection” is the buzz phrase to describe an ever-bigger welfare state.

As you might imagine, the report doesn’t provide any evidence to justify the assertion that higher taxes and bigger government will lead to less poverty and deprivation.

Which is an excuse to recycle my “never-answered question” since I’m still waiting for someone to show me a nation that became rich with the types of statist policy that the U.N. has embraced.

The most remarkable part of the report is buried toward the end. The United Nations actually argues that the poor will be better off if there is less economic growth.

A ‘pro-poor’ growth scenario necessitates a far smaller increase in global GDP and eradicates poverty much sooner. If every country reduced its Gini index by 1 percent per year, it would have a larger impact on global poverty than increasing each country’s annual growth one percentage point above current forecasts.

This is bad math, bad logic, and terrible economics.

And it assumes politicians can deftly re-slice a shrinking pie so that poor somehow get more than they have now (while ignoring Thomas Sowell’s sage warning that wealth can only be redistributed one time).

I’d like the United Nations (or any person or group) to show me a single example – at any point in world history – where less growth has improved conditions for poor people.

For what it’s worth, I can show lots of evidence that growth is the best recipe for helping the less fortunate, even though folks on the left may not be happy since rich people also benefit from economic growth.

I can’t resist pointing out one additional passage from the report. And this one was on the first page.

Poverty is a political choice.

In reality, poverty is the normal state of human existence (an observation that Tim Worstall also made in his CapX column criticizing the U.N. report).

What’s unusual – as explained in videos by Don Boudreaux and Deirdre McCloskey – is that parts of the world became rich beginning a couple of hundred years ago thanks to a new approach called capitalism.

(Though I suppose those five words from the U.N. report can be viewed as accurate. After all, governments perpetuate poverty by failing to copy the good policies of places such as Hong Kong and Singapore. But that’s not what the report means. Instead, we’re supposed to believe that politicians are allowing poverty by not choosing big government.)

P.S. If there was a contest for worst analysis from an international bureaucracy, I still think the IMF deserves to win since it has explicitly embraced the crazy notion that it’s okay to hurt the poor so long as the rich are hurt even more.

P.P.S. Indeed, the report I’m writing about today isn’t even the U.N.’s worst publication. That “honor” belongs to the 2018 report that blatantly lied about the prevalence of poverty in the United States.

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The Welfare State Penalizes the Poor with High Marginal Tax Rates

Back in 2016, I shared an image that showed how the welfare state punishes both the poor and rich.

Rich people are hurt for the obvious reason. They get hit with the highest statutory tax rates, and also bear the brunt of the double taxation (the extra layers of tax on saving and investment resulting from capital gains taxes, double taxes on dividends, death taxes, etc).

But I also pointed out that the poor are penalized because they get trapped in dependency.

In large part, this is because they face bad incentives when they work and try to become self sufficient. Not only do they get hit by federal and state taxes, but they also can lose access to various redistribution programs. And the combination of those two factors can produce very high implicit marginal tax rates.

I cited an astounding example of this phenomenon in 2012, showing that a single mother in Pennsylvania would be better off earning $29,000 rather than $57,000. In other words, her implicit marginal tax rate on an extra $28,000 would be 100 percent (thus fulfilling FDR’s odious dream, albeit against a different set of victims).

How pervasive is this problem?

A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research gives us the answer. Authored by David Altig, Alan J. Auerbach, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Elias Ilin, and Victor Ye, it estimates implicit marginal tax rates for various segments of the population.

A plethora of federal and state tax and benefit policies jointly determine Americans’ incentives to work. …complex and often arcane provisions that condition tax payments and benefit receipts on labor income, asset income, total income, and the level of assets. …The myriad features of our fiscal system raise this paper’s central questions: What are the typical levels of marginal net tax rates facing Americans of different ages and resource levels, taking the entire federal and state fiscal system into account? …How much does one’s choice of the state in which to live impact one’s incentive to work? …We address these questions by running 2016 Survey-of-Consumer-Finances (SCF) data through The Fiscal Analyzer (TFA).

The five economists discovered that lower-income people are often hit by very high marginal tax rates on work (τL).

Our main findings, which focus on the fiscal consequences of SCF household heads earning $1,000 more in our base year – 2018, are striking. One in four low-wage workers face lifetime marginal net tax rates above 70 percent, effectively locking them into poverty. Over half face remaining lifetime marginal net tax rates above 45 percent. …marginal net lifetime tax rates are generally higher for those in the lowest quintile than for those in the middle three quintiles… The potential poverty trap arising under our fiscal system is highlighted by the 75th τL-percentile values for the bottom quintiles. Moving from the youngest to the oldest cohorts, these values are 67.4 percent, 75.9 percent, 69.3 percent, 76.5 percent, 74.4 percent, and 73.9 percent. Hence, one in four of our poorest households, regardless of age, make between two and three times as much for the government than they make for themselves in earning an extra $1,000.

This graph from the study shows how poor people can even face marginal tax rates of more than 100 percent (which I’ve highlighted in red). The vertical axis is the tax rate and the horizontal axis is household prosperity.

Subjecting poor people to very high implicit tax rates is horrible economic policy, just like it’s horrible policy to hit any other group of people with high marginal tax rates.

Simply stated, when people are punished for engaging in productive economic behavior, they respond by reducing their work, their saving, their investment, and their entrepreneurship.

Interestingly, some states are better (or less worse) than others.

One’s choice of state in which to live can dramatically affect marginal net tax rates. Across all cohorts, the typical bottom-quintile household can lower its remaining lifetime marginal net tax rate by 99.7 percentage points by switching states! …The typical household can raise its total remaining lifetime spending by 8.1 percent by moving from a high-tax to a low-tax state, holding its human wealth, housing expenses, and other characteristics fixed. …To illustrate how τL varies from state to state, we calculate the median τL for households in the 30-39 age cohort in the lowest resource quintile in each state. …Figure 11 shows the cross-state variation in median lifetime marginal tax rates. …median rates varies between a low of 38.8 percent in South Carolina and a high of 55.0 percent in Connecticut. Clearly, where people live can matter a lot for their incentives to work.

Here’s a map showing the marginal tax rate on people in the bottom 20 percent. The obvious takeaway is that you don’t want to be a poor person in Connecticut, Minnesota, or Illinois.

For what it’s worth, tax rates are still too high in the best states (South Carolina, Texas, Indiana, and South Dakota).

The bottom line is that the welfare state is bad news for both taxpayers and recipients. All of which may help to explain why the poverty rate stopped falling once the government declared a “War on Poverty.”

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More Economic Illiteracy from Pope Francis

Back in 2013, I talked to the BBC about Pope Francis and his bizarre hostility to free enterprise.

Sadly, it doesn’t appear that the Pope took my advice (though I think it’s amusing that at least someone in the Vatican is paying attention).

There’s a wealth of evidence that markets are the best way of helping the poor. But the Pope wants more government.

Moreover, there’s also plenty of data showing that higher tax rates and more spending hurt the poor. Yet the Pope wants more government.

And there’s lots of research on capitalism and upward mobility for the less fortunate. Nonetheless, the Pope wants more government.

For instance, he’s once again advertising his ignorance about economics, development, and fiscal policy.

Pope Francis blasted the practice of tax cuts for the rich as part of a “structure of sin” and lamented the fact that “billions of dollars” end up in “tax haven accounts” instead of funding “healthcare and education.” Speaking at the seminar set up by the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences  the Pope criticized “the richest people” for receiving “repeated tax cuts” in the name of “investment and development.” These “tax haven accounts” impede “the possibility of the dignified and sustained development of all social agents,” claims the Pope.  He added that “the poor increase around us” as poverty is rising around the world. This poverty can be ended if the wealthiest gave more.

Wow. Sounds more like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rather than a religious leader.

Libertarian Jesus must be very disappointed.

In an attempt to add some rigorous analysis to the discussion, Professors Antony Davies and James Harrigan wrote a column for the Foundation for Economic Education on capitalism and its role in global poverty reduction.

Galileo ran afoul of the Inquisition in 1633 when he was found “vehemently suspect of heresy.” …One might think that being this profoundly wrong about something well outside the realm of theology would cause the magisterium, and the pope specifically, to tread very carefully even 386 years later. But one would be wrong. Because here comes Pope Francis yet again, offering economic opinions from the bulliest of pulpits about something he understands no better than a garden-variety college freshman. …According to the pontiff, “the logic of the market” keeps people hungry. But “the market” has no logic. The market isn’t a thing, let alone a sentient thing. “The market” is the sum total of individual interactions among billions of people. …Whenever a trade occurs, both sides are better off for having made it. We know this because if they weren’t, the trade wouldn’t occur. …Not surprisingly to anyone but perhaps Pope Francis, some of the first financial speculation in which humans ever engaged involved food. Financial speculation and its more evolved cousins, options and futures contracts, evolved precisely as a means to fight hunger. …speculators took some of the risk of price fluctuations off the backs of farmers, and this made it possible for farmers to plant more food.

Davies and Harrigan inject some hard data into the debate.

If these arguments are too esoteric for Francis, there is also overwhelming evidence. Economic freedom measures the degree to which a country’s government permits and supports the very sorts of markets against which Francis rails. …If we list societies according to their economic freedom, the same pattern emerges again and again and again. Whether comparing countries, states, or cities, societies that are more economically free exhibit better social and economic outcomes than those that are less economically free. …even Francis should be able to see it quite clearly from his Vatican perch. …Extreme poverty rates for the half of countries that are less economically free are around seven times the extreme poverty rates for the half of countries that are more economically free.

Here’s one of the charts from their column.

As you can see, the state-controlled economies on the left have much higher levels of poverty than the market-driven economies on the right.

They also share some economic history.

…if the world around Francis doesn’t provide enough compelling evidence, the world prior to Francis certainly does. At the turn of the 18th century, around 95 percent of humans lived in extreme poverty. That was at the advent of the Industrial Revolution and of capitalism. …the extreme poverty rate fell from 95 percent to below ten percent. With the flourishing of capitalism, the extreme poverty rate fell tenfold at the same time that the number of humans grew tenfold.

Amen. Videos by Deirdre McCloskey and by Don Boudreaux confirm how the world went from near-universal poverty to mass prosperity (at least in the nations that embraced free markets and the rule of law).

By contrast, there’s not a single example of a nation that became rich and reduced poverty with big government.

P.S. Mauritius is a good test case of why Pope Francis is wrong. Very wrong.

P.P.S. To learn more about why Pope Francis is off base, I also recommend the wise words of Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.

P.P.P.S. To be fair, there was plenty of bad economics in the Vatican before Francis became Pope. And also some sound thinking.

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The Best-Ever Tweet about Inequality

I periodically see tweets that deserve attention because they reveal something very important, usually in a clever and succinct fashion.

• Best tweet about capitalism vs socialism.
• The most depressing tweet.
• Trump’s worst-ever tweet.
• The best-ever counter-tweet.

Today, let’s add to this collection.

I’ve argued, over and over again, that the best way to help the poor is to focus on policies designed to boost growth rather than policies designed to reduce inequality.

Simply stated, the former approach is a recipe for making everyone more prosperous, while the latter approach means everyone fights for bigger slices of a shrinking pie.

When making this argument, I sometimes ask people whether they would rather be a poor person in Hong Kong or France? There’s no welfare state in the former, but lots of opportunity, whereas France has plenty of handouts but not much hope for upward mobility.

But no matter how often I’ve tried to analyze and explain why we shouldn’t fixate on inequality, I’ve never come close to cramming this much insight into such a concise observation.

Compassionate people care about poverty.

Envious people care about inequality.

— Jon Stewart Mill 🏛 (@Jon_StewartMill) February 2, 2020

Kudos to @Jon_StewartMill. In just ten words, he captures the key insight that I’ve tried to get across in several dozen columns.

I’ll close with some speculation about why some people fixate on inequality. What makes them focus on trying to drag down the rich instead of finding ways to build up the poor?

I’m not sure, though there is polling data to suggest that some people really are motivated by envy and resentment of success.

But I suspect that politicians who play the class-warfare card simply think it’s a way of maximizing votes.

Even worse than the politicians are the “poverty hucksters” who deliberately lie about poverty in hopes of advancing a redistributionist agenda.

P.S. The most powerful numbers on why growth matters more than inequality come from China.

P.P.S. The most reprehensible effort to reduce inequality (by making everyone poorer) came from the IMF.

P.P.P.S. The most accurate political analysis of inequality came from Margaret Thatcher.

P.P.P.P.S. The best satire on the issue of inequality can be found in this “modest proposal.”

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The New York Times vs. Chilean Prosperity

By every possible measure, Chile is the most successful country in Latin America.

Income has soared and poverty has plummeted thanks to market-based reforms.

It’s not perfect, of course. The nation’s economic freedom score – 7.89 on a 0-10 scale – is good enough for a #13 ranking, but there’s still room for improvement.

But there’s also plenty of room for economic decline, and that might be the unfortunate outcome if politicians respond in a misguided way to recent protests.

Especially if they take advice from the wrong sources. For instance, the New York Times opined yesterday about the supposed shortcomings of the Chilean model.

Chile is often praised as a capitalist oasis, a prospering and stable nation on a continent where both prosperity and stability have been in short supply. But that prosperity has accumulated mostly in the hands of a lucky few. As a result, Chile has one of the highest levels of economic inequality in the developed world. …Chileans live in a society of extraordinary economic disparities. …What makes Chile an outlier among those 36 nations is that the government does less than nearly any other developed nation to reduce economic inequality through taxes and transfers. As a result, Chile has the highest level of post-tax income inequality among O.E.C.D. members. …Even after increases in recent years, the Chilean government still spends a smaller share of total economic output than every other nation in the O.E.C.D. The obvious path for Chile is for the government to spend more money.

As is sometimes the case with the New York Times, parts of the editorial are downright false. Income in Chile has jumped significantly for all quintiles, not just a “lucky few.”

And even the parts that are technically accurate are very misleading.

Notice, for instance, what the NYT is doing with inequality numbers. It is comparing Chile with rich nations, mostly from Europe.

But what happens if Chile is compared to other countries from Latin America.

That tells an entirely different story, as you can see from this poverty map (dark red is bad, light yellow is good) produced by the Center for Distributive, Labor, and Social Studies in Argentina.

All of a sudden, Chile looks very good.

Even if you use U.N. numbers that rely on the left’s misleading definition of poverty (i.e., based on relative income), Chile is a success story compared to other nations in the region.

It’s especially important to understand that Chile is getting good results for the right reason.

Poverty is falling because of the private economy rather than coercive redistribution. Here are some excerpts from a recent U.N. release.

In an analysis of the countries with the greatest reductions in poverty in the 2012-2017 period, in Chile, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, the increase in income from wages in lower-income households was the source that contributed the most to that reduction, while in Costa Rica, Panama and Uruguay, the main factor was pensions and transfers received by lower-income households.

Sadly, some people in Chile don’t have the fortitude to build on the market reforms that have boosted national prosperity.

Indeed, it appears there will be backsliding according to the aforementioned New York Times editorial

Sebastián Piñera, the billionaire elected president in 2017, …proposed a slate of reforms, including an increase in the top income tax rate, an increase in retirement benefits, and a guaranteed minimum monthly income. …Andrónico Luksic Craig, chairman of Quiñenco, a financial and industrial conglomerate, wrote on Saturday on Twitter that he was ready to pay higher taxes.

I’m disappointed but never surprised when politicians unravel progress.

But it’s always discouraging when guilt-ridden rich people embrace statist policies (sounds familiar, huh?).

For the sake of the Chilean people, let’s hope this is empty rhetoric.

P.S. Since we’re on the topic of Chile, here are some excerpts from the abstract of a study in the Journal of Development Economics that estimated the heavy economic cost of the nation’s detour to socialism in the 1970s.

…we look at share prices in the Santiago exchange during the tumultuous political events that characterized Chile in the early 1970s. …deploying previously unused daily data and exploiting two largely unexpected shocks which involved substantial variation in policies and institutions, providing a rare natural experiment. Allende’s election and subsequent socialist experiment decreased share values, while the military coup and dictatorship that replaced him boosted them, in both cases by magnitudes unprecedented in the literature. The most parsimonious interpretation of these share price changes is that they reflected, respectively, the perceived threat to private ownership of the means of production under a socialist government, and its subsequent reversal.

By the way, this in no way should be interpreted as support for the Pinochet dictatorship.

But what it does say is that dictatorships that allow economic freedom produce much better results than dictatorships impose totalitarian economic policies in addition to totalitarian political policies.

Which is basically the point Milton Friedman made when asked about his connection to Chile.

For what it’s worth, Pinochet eventually allowed a transition to democracy, which somewhat atones for his sins.

P.S. To be fair, the NYT editorial was merely misguided, which is better than the wild inaccuracy that has characterized some analyses.

P.P.S. If you want to learn about Chile’s reforms, here are columns about the private social security system and the national school choice system. And this World Bank comparison of Chile and Venezuela is very instructive as well.

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Why Is The Economist Misleading Readers About Poverty?

I’ve created a new page to showcase various “Poverty Hucksters.”

These are people and institutions that use data about income distribution to mislead and lie about the prevalence of poverty in the United States.

This rogue’s gallery includes:

• The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
• The United Nations
• The New York Times
• The Equal Welfare Association
• Germany’s Institute of Labor Economics
• The Obama Administration
• The European Commission
• Professor Noah Smith

What is their dodgy tactic? Here’s how I described the methodology in 2018.

…the bureaucrats…have put together a measure of income distribution and decided that “relative poverty” exists for anyone who has less than 50 percent of the median level of disposable income.

More recently, I explained why this approach is senseless, at least if one wants to measure actual poverty

…an artificial and misleading definition of poverty. One that depends on the distribution of income rather than any specific measure of poverty. Which is insanely dishonest. It means that everyone’s income could double and the supposed rate of poverty would stay the same. Or a country could execute all the rich people and the alleged rate of poverty would decline.

Now we have a new member of this ill-begotten group of hucksters.

Here’s an excerpt from an article in the latest issue of the Economist.

…international comparisons…make…America a true outlier. When assessed on poverty relative to other countries (the share of families making less than 50% of the national median income after taxes and transfers), America is among the worst-performing in the OECD club of mostly rich countries (see chart). Despite its higher level of income, that is not because it starts with a very large share of poor people before supports kick in—it is just that the safety net does not do as much work as elsewhere. On this relative-poverty scale, more than a fifth of American children remain poor after government benefits, compared with 3.6% of Finnish children.

And here’s the accompanying chart.

Needless to say, any chart that purports to show less poverty in Mexico than the United States is laughably inaccurate.

But that’s the kind of perverse outcome that is generated when using a ridiculously dishonest approach.

I suppose the Economist deserves a bit of credit. In both the article and in the chart, they acknowledge (at least for careful readers) that they’re measuring the share of the population with less than 50 percent of a society’s median income, not the share of people living in poverty.

So why, then, do they refer to the “poverty rate”?

I have no idea if the reporter is dishonest or incompetent, but I can say with certainty that the Economist has done a disservice to readers.

P.S. The Economist relied on dodgy data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And if you read the columns about the other Poverty Hucksters, you’ll find that most of them also relied on numbers from that left-leaning, Paris-based bureaucracy. Yet another example of why the OECD is the worst international bureaucracy, at least on a per-dollar-spent basis.

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Pope Francis Rejects Prosperity for Developing Nations

I first opined about Pope Francis in 2013, when I told a BBC audience why the Pope was wrong on economic policy.

The following year, I expanded on that point, explaining that statist policies are bad for the poor. And I revisited the issue again last year.

I’m not the only one making these arguments. In a column for Reason, Stephanie Slade explained why Pope Francis is deeply misguided.

I’ve had some harsh words to describe Pope Francis. …the pontiff’s ignorance of basic economics has led him to a bad conclusion about which public policies are best able to reduce the crushing yoke of poverty in the world. …as a matter of empirical fact, markets are the single greatest engine for growth and enrichment that humanity has yet stumbled upon. …He seems to be arguing that an outlook that places the individual above “the common good” is morally suspect. …his statements betray a shallowness in his understanding of the philosophy he’s impugning. If he took the time to really engage with our ideas, he might be surprised by what he learned. …what Pope Francis calls an “antisocial” paradigm…is better known by another name: the liberty movement, a cooperative and sometimes even rather social endeavor among people who cherish peaceful, voluntary human interactions.

Sadly, there’s zero evidence that Pope Francis has learned any economics since taking up residence in the Vatican.

For instance, he just visited Mauritius, a small island nation to the east of Madagascar.

His economic advice, as reported by Yahoo, was extremely primitive.

Pope Francis on Monday urged Mauritius, a prosperous magnet for tourists and a global tax haven, to shun an “idolatrous economic model” that excludes the youth and the poor… While the island is a beacon of stability and relative prosperity, Pope Francis honed in on the struggles of the youth… “It is a hard thing to say, but, despite the economic growth your country has known in recent decades, it is the young who are suffering the most. They suffer from unemployment, which not only creates uncertainty about the future, but also prevents them from believing that they play a significant part in your shared history,” said the pope. …Since independence in 1968, Mauritius has developed from a poor, agriculture-based economy, to one of Africa’s wealthiest nations and financial services hub. …General unemployment is low compared to the rest of the continent at 6.9 percent in 2018 according to the World Bank…

I’m glad the article acknowledges that Mauritius has been economically successful.

Though I’m frustrated by the failure to explain why.

So I’ll redress that error of omission by showing that Mauritius dramatically expanded economic liberty in the 1980s and 1990s. The nation’s absolute score jumped from 5.11 in 1980 to 8.07 in the most-recent estimates from Economic Freedom of the World.

It’s done such a good job that Mauritius is now ranked as the world’s 9th-freest economy.

So what has greater economic liberty produced?

More national prosperity.

A lot more. Based on the Maddison data, you can see that living standards (as measured by per-capita GDP) have tripled over the past three-plus decades.

I confess that I’ve never been to Mauritius.

So maybe it’s possible that the country is filled with “idolotrous” folks who think of nothing but money.

But I’m guessing that people in Mauritius are just like the rest of us. But with one key difference in that they’ve been following the recipe for growth and prosperity.

Too bad Pope Francis instead believes in the Peronist model that has wreaked so much havoc in Argentina.

P.S. The Pope should read Stephanie Slade’s column. Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell also should be on his list.

P.P.S. Methinks Pope Francis should have a conversation with Libertarian Jesus. He could start here, here, and here.

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