Though Lane Kenworthy and I have very different politics, I really admire his work. His post taking apart The Spirit Level is a classic, and he’s quick to acknowledge when data on the sources of social stratification leaves room for interpretation. I’ve been thinking a lot about his December post titled “Has rising inequality been bad for poor?”:

In some countries with little or no rise in income inequality, such as Sweden, government transfers increased and so did the incomes of poor households. In others, such as Germany, transfers and the incomes of low-end households did not increase.
Among nations with sharp increases in top-heavy inequality, we observe a similar disjunction. Here the U.S. and the U.K. offer an especially revealing contrast. The top 1%’s income share soared in both countries, and through the mid-1990s poor households made little progress, as the following chart shows. But over the next decade low-end American households advanced only slightly, whereas their British counterparts experienced sizable gains. The New Labour governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown increased benefits and/or reduced taxes for low earners, single parents, and pensioners. As Jane Waldfogel documents in her book Britain’s War on Poverty, these were big policy shifts, even if not always high-profile ones. They produced a significant rise in the real disposable incomes of poor households. [Emphasis added.]

My impression is that Kenworthy and Waldfogel see Britain as a potential model for the United States, but I’m more skeptical. Consider Anthony Daniels’ recent post on contemporary Britain at The Corner:

Britain has the highest crime rate in Western Europe, despite having a third of all the closed-circuit television cameras in the world to oversee the population, and despite having more or less abandoned a suspect’s right to silence. There are whole areas of the country in which the weight of the state in the economy is not far short of that of the state in Soviet Russia. Thanks to state-sponsored social pathology, more than a third of the population is entirely dependent on the state for its livelihood, and would starve without it. The last government created a new criminal offense every working day for ten years, such that no citizen can possibly know what is legal and what is not. Arbitrary and constantly changing regulation makes life a nightmare for anyone running a business or a service. While expenditure on education doubled between 2000 and 2007, the proportion of British children learning a foreign language declined by 75 percent. In short, the British state is a swamp of corruption, all the worse for being more intellectual and moral than straightforwardly financial. [Emphasis added.]

I have to assume that Kenworthy and Waldfogel would object to Daniels’ characterization, and the third he has in mind could encompass public sector workers as well as individuals and households dependent on transfers. I can’t say for sure. But I do wonder if increases in absolute incomes at the bottom are the surest way to address a broader tangle of social pathologies. It seems at least possible that increasing labor force participation might be a better goal than increasing absolute incomes through direct transfers, as it might help alleviate a wider range of social pathologies.

I’d also argue that the economic gains from combating violent crime are considerable, and it is possible that investments in crime prevention and control could yield a higher marginal return than more generous transfers, though I’d want to see more evidence.