How can the richest nation on Earth have so much poverty? It isn’t a new question. “The enormous increase in productive power which has marked the present century,” the social reformer Henry George complained in his 1879 bestseller, “Progress and Poverty,” “has no tendency to extirpate poverty.”

George’s riddle resurfaces in two new books by eminent American sociologists: “The Poverty Paradox” by Washington University’s Mark Robert Rank and “Poverty, by America” by Princeton’s Matthew Desmond. Like George, both authors start from the premise that industrial capitalism generates more than enough profit to eliminate poverty. So why doesn’t it? Because, Rank argues, we don’t understand poverty’s causes. Desmond takes a darker view: because we’re complicit in poverty’s creation.

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. Our poverty rate was (according to this measure) about 15 percent, about the same as that of Estonia — even though Estonia’s economy is roughly one-thousandth the size of ours. Shame on us.

For many decades the prevailing framework for examining...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiU2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0...