I wonder to what extent the social mobility in the Nordic countries is the result of the relative homogeneity of the population. Other than the Saami (Lappish) people of the far north (and much more recently the immigrant tide), these countries were always very mono-ethnic and mono-cultural. Racism was never a factor. Whereas in the US both racism and also cultural factors among the poor must be considered.

I also notice that the paper on the spending of Nordic countries doesen't have much to do with welfare reform. The Democrats who supported welfare reform like Clinton aren't against increased social spending. Welfare reform itself wasn't about cutting spending, it was about letting individual states experiment with their own welfare systems through block grants rather than top down centralized federal control & taking measures so that those who fall back on welfare, aren't trapped there & that they can find work that will pay. It may have succeeded, it may have not, I'm of the opinion based on what I've read from independent academic studies (rather than idealogical think thanks like Heritage & CB&PP) that it's been quit e effective. But this has little to do with the merits of increased public spending.

What poor people lack is money. Policies which give them money get them out of poverty. There are many mechanisms which can be used from negative taxation to outright grants, but they all have one thing in common, they give the poor more income.

This country has a long history of belief in rugged individualism and thus there is an underlying resentment of "unearned" aid.

I recently suggested a plan as to how to eliminate poverty in the US. We can easily afford it, but overcoming the resentment is a more difficult task. My plan mostly even pays for itself as the non poor cost society less in terms of health and imprisonment public expenses.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

I should also note that while I do not wish to repeat a conservative meme (as I personally support increased social spending), sometimes poverty is indeed a person's own fault; you can't throw money at someone and simply expect them to pull themselves up out of poverty by the bootstraps. I think one aspect of welfare reform that was particularly appealing, even to progressives, was the idea of incorporating more responsibility into the social welfare system; in other words, welfare would be more of a quid pro quo kind of deal.

Theoretically, I don't think that decreased social spending is necessarily bad if the decreases result from increased efficiency in the distribution and usage of funds. That being said, while some of the decreases in social spending were surely due to increased efficiency in allocating funds (getting more chronically welfare-dependent people without children out of the system), I will agree that most of the spending decreases were due to the Republicans' single-minded pursuit of tax cuts and income re-redistribution.

To what extent are we comparing apples to oranges here? Are we counting all the middle class entitlements (universal healthcare, etc.) in Scandinavia as “welfare” while not counting similar programs (Social Security, Medicare etc.) in the US? It’s not apparent what the counts as “welfare” here at all. Of course we all know that the Scandinavians have large social spending budgets and I am not seriously suggesting that US spends anywhere like that amount (adjusted for population), but are these Scandinavian “welfare” programs earmarked specifically for the “poor” or are they across-the-board entitlements? If the latter then that argues for a very different set of programs here in the US if you are looking to help our underclass.

I seem to recall that Scandinavia is home to a relatively high proportion of immigrants. Sweden, e.g. is 12% foreign born, 7% non-European born.

Norway is 8% foreign-born, and Pakistanis are the single largest group.

The corresponding figure for the US is what?

Patria est ubicumque est bene. Their 'homeland' is wherever they can turn a buck. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations

The point about racism is valid. Studies have shown that people are more inclined to provide welfare to people who have a similar racial and cultural background.

The point about immigration is not as valid. If you were to run the social mobility numbers for the US excluding recent immigrants I bet you'd still find low mobility. In fact, recent immigrants are some of the most motivated, and thus socially mobile, people in the country.

http://madskvalsvik.blogspot.com/

As a Scandinavian, it is my view that the Nordic approach isn't so much focused on lifting people out of poverty. I don't know that they can cite great examples of having done that.

Rather, what they have is a system of redistribution and social safety nets that prevent the creation of sustained poverty in the first place.

http://madskvalsvik.blogspot.com/

Which may be a valuable lesson for the US too: rather focusing exclusively on the poor, what we need is a solid middle class safety net to prevent people from ending up in poverty in the first place. Plus, those types of programs tend to be politically impervious. ADC was widely disliked and its constituency was small. But look how, despite a vast scare campaign and complete control of the government, the GOP got exactly no where in their attempt to gut Social Security.

Given the direct relationship between property-tax revolt in the US and education spending in the past few decades, I think that lack of education in the lower socioeconomic strata might have more to do with the persistence of poverty than welfare spending.

Nathan,

Not that I disagree in any way with your argument in this post, but isn't it surprising that poverty hasn't risen a whole lot more over the last decade, or even just since 2000? Certainly, if you had asked me in 1996 what consequences would follow for the US poverty rate from welfare reform, I would have expected poverty to be much more common for any given level of unemployment + minimum wage -- and yet right now we have a labor force participation rate below where it was in 1996 (EPI's underemployment rate for 2004 was 0.1% lower than in 1996), a minimum wage lower in inflation adjusted terms than it was in 1996, and yet poverty appears to be less common: the poverty rate for 2004 (lastest I can find) was 12.7% vs. 13.7% for 1996. EPI reports that in 2003, 24.3% of workers earned poverty level wages, vs. 30.3% in 1996. There are plenty of reasons to move the US toward Scandanavian style social democarcy (greater social mobility, improved political democracy, fairer distrubtion of the burdens of globablization). But its hard to argue that social policy has moved in the wrong direction over the last decade when the incidence of poverty has moved in the right direction (if only a little) even though the logical predictors of poverty (minimum wage and un/underemployment) would lead us to expect an increase in poverty.

Someone recently wrote a book about the idea of eliminating completely welfare and all forms of government social service and instead issuing a check for $10,000 to every U.S. citizen every year(regardless of whether they need it or not) to use for tuition, job training, health care or whatever. I haven't read the book or looked at the issue much beyond the surface, but on its face, it makes sense. I know that in between that dollar in the govt. coffers and the recipient is maze of bureacracy that eats up the majority of that dollar. I also like the idea that people who have been kept out of the potentially profitable free market, would now have the capital to enter into that market which heretofore was reserved for the monied classes.
Thoughts?

Also, in regard to the norther european countries and poverty: Capitalism is a zero sum game, in this country there is no cap as to how rich one can become, consequently, there is no cap as to how far one can fall. Is there some kind of soceital "cap" in Scandanavia? I'm pretty sure that concentration of wealth in the hands of the few is a contributing factor to poverty in the developed world.

“it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

— upton sinclair

, in this country there is no cap as to how rich one can become, consequently, there is no cap as to how far one can fall

Why consequently ?

I guess that it's a question as to whether how far is related to the depth of the drop or to the lowest point that could be reached. Mathematically  no fall in Norway can be as extended as Ken Lay's . Conversely no one in Norway will ever fall to the depth to which we condemn our homeless but that is not a necessary consequence of our economic system (we are no more capitalistic than the Norweigians) but a political choice: that the poor should.suffer......................................Our  cleaning lady in Belgium announced that her daughter was being taken  for a month at the sea shore because the the Nurse on her regular visit thought that Beatrice looked a little pale and needed to get sea air.  That's another political choice-that children of the poor  should be healthy .

Several things not considered in this article. Scandanavian populations are generaly demographicaly older populations. With a higher percentage of the populace in the work force it's a considerable amount easier for people to rise above the poverty line. Also the study was focused on males transcending poverty levels. This is rather deceptive as Sweden has the highest percentage of out of wedlock births in the world. This means that so many of those boys born into poverty can arrive at adulthood, father children, yet never be financialy bound to these children. So in theory Sweden could forever have massive populations of men coming out of an impoverished childhood because the whole society is designed to create impoverished children and then free, at least the men, from direct financial ties to the generation they father. Not to mention the ambiguities in social status made possible by the socialist state AND with Norway you have the fact that they can draw on the oil wealth that's given them the title "Kuwait of the North" to continue their socialist state with greater vigour than many other nations could. And there's the fact that the Scandanavian nation's populations are rather sparse in contrast with many other nations in the world. All of which make them rather poor standards to hold the rest of the world to.

You're right. But I was merely pointing out that we take in more immigrants than Nordic countries do, and that might affect the numbers; I didn't say anything about social mobility. However, I think that you are right that immigrants would likely skew the numbers in favor of social mobility.

Those “out of wedlock” births aren’t at all what they appear to be. They are births to cohabiting couples who have never bothered to get married formally since marriage is seen by many in Scandinavia as an outdated religious ritual only. There are relatively few truly single mothers in Scandinavia and few men who father children without any parental responsibility for them.

Do you have any means to confirm this beyond mere assertion?

The important point is that our level of unemployment and hence of poverty is a choice. If unemployment fell for long below the number the Fed considered inflationery it would raise interest rates until more people were out of work. No amountof education or moral exhortation would lower the resulting number . 

Excellent point, flavius. I've always wondered about that. Expecting people to pull themselves out of poverty on the one hand, while at the same time having an economic policy in which the goal is that 5% of the population (I think that's the number) should be unemployed in order to keep wages contained for the benefit of US employers and prices low for the rest of us, seems to be quite a glaring contradiction in our policies. If our government consciously chooses to sacrifice that 5% of the population for the greater good, then the argument about "accountability" is more or less demolished and we ought to make certain those people are taken care of by welfare.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them. --Paul Valery

I think there’s a problem here with the defining of terms. To social conservatives “single parenthood” means “unwed parenthood” pure and simple. The article you link to reinforces uses that definition too or at least discusses “births to unwed mothers”. Left out of consideration is whether these unwed mothers have been abandoned by their children’s fathers to rear them alone, on public assistance. I think my point still holds, that, No, this is not common in Scandinavia. In fact, as the article, mentions often enough the parents are living together and even marry eventually.

While this has traditionally been true for the Nordic NATO-countries, the non-NATO-countries Sweden and Finland spent much more during most of the Cold War.

This is relevant since the here discussed poverty-mitigating policies have changed little since the height of the Cold War, and are similar if you compare Sweden now with Finland now, despite Sweden today spending considerably less on defence.

/Tuomas