If the Middle Class Can’t Make It — What’s the Point of a Rich Country?

Or, Why Eliminating Poverty Might Just Be the Key to Escaping Decline

Image Credit: Spencer Platt

Here’s a tiny question — which might strike you as a little strange, controversial, or foolish: why should rich countries have poor people in them, anyways?

When we take a hard look at the world, a curious fact pops out: rich societies with the least numbers of people living in abject poverty do better. Today, such countries are in Northern Europe, the core of Europe, and Canada. What’s interesting about them? Well, having less poverty seems to have spectacular benefits. They are more stable, resilient, and prosperous. They are more robust democratically. They are happier and kinder. They are saner, wiser, and healthier. They are better off in every single way imaginable compared to rich societies with more poverty.

What are those societies like? Well, rich societies with more people living in poverty do not just worse, but spectacularly, enduringly worse, in nearly every way imaginable. They end up like America or Russia. They do not really stay democracies, but become authoritarian oligarchies. Lives are shorter and harder and meaner and unhappier. Norms and institutions reward anger, greed, cruelty, spite, and rage, so they end up emptied of of reason, truth, courage, insight, and wisdom. Their economies end up dominated by misinformation, manipulation, bailouts, and predation. The result is that they are much, much more fragile, unstable, precarious, and just plain toxic to be than rich countries with less poverty — everyone is worse off, in the end.

All of which leads me to my second question. Is reducing poverty the single simple secret to building a successful society — the key to escaping decline? Let me put that in perspective. “A successful society needs to be a techno-utopia! Supersonic trains and robo-teachers!”, says one side. “No!”, cries, another, “it’s about deficits!!” How do we build societies that don’t end in catastrophic decline, like America, anyways? Can we? It’s not sci-fi, because, Canada, Sweden, and Germany did so.

Reality says: maybe, just maybe, it’s a lot simpler — and yet more difficult — to escape decline we think it is. If societies with less poor people in them are better off in nearly every imaginable way — then isn’t the elimination of poverty probably the very first thing a society should try and do? The one thing with the greatest effect, that it should focus on getting done before anything else, whether cutting taxes or building Facebooks or sending billionaires to Mars?

So. Let me ask again. Why should rich countries have poor people, anyways? Maybe they shouldn’t.

Now. I don’t want to spend this essay on the “how”. That’s easy enough: whether basic income, basic assets (aka trust funds at birth), employment and income guarantees, giving people homes, and so on. Here is the curious thing. Poverty is a solvable problem — we are well on the way to eliminating extreme poverty globally. Why then don’t rich countries do so? That is the more interesting question — because if the means are known, then what must be standing in the way is ideology, which is to say economics.