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Home/ Economic Challenges Research/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by Carolyne Wang

Contents contributed and discussions participated by Carolyne Wang

Carolyne Wang

To end poverty, guarantee everyone in Canada $20,000 a year. But are you willing to tru... - 2 views

  • The wage gap continues to grow, and one in 10 Canadians still struggles below the low-income line.
  • The idea of giving money to the poor without strings is not new. It melds altruism and libertarianism, saying both that the best way to fight poverty is to put cash in poor people's pockets and that people can make their own choices better than bureaucrats can. As a result, it can find support in theory from both left and right.
  • It has been tested with success in other countries, and now it has re-entered the Canadian political conversation.
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  • House of Commons committee on poverty released a report proposing a guaranteed basic income for Canadians with disabilities, on the model already available to seniors. The Senate released a similar report this spring calling for a study of how it would work for all low-income Canadians.
  • Within a year, working with counsellors who helped them with their plans and purchases, nine of the 15 participants were moving to some form of housing. The results were not perfect: A couple of people moved back out of housing again, and at least one was imprisoned. But most spent far less than the money available to them, mostly on clothing, food and rent. On the other hand, one person who chose to remain on the street asked for music lessons, and that was all right too.
  • Economists continue to bounce the idea around. Two years ago, Canadian researchers started their own chapter of the Basic Income Earth Network (a group founded in Belgium in 1986) to co-ordinate an ongoing discussion. Some say it might actually accomplish what political rhetoric has been promising for years: the eradication of poverty.
  • In Britain, an experiment was recently conducted with a small group of people who had been living on the streets for more than five years. They were given a budget that they could spend however they wished. The idea was to see whether the “personalized budgets” Britain gives to seniors and people with disabilities to pay for care (which include some conditions) would work for the very poor as well.
  • In Quebec, a government task force went further, recommending a minimum guaranteed income starting at $12,000 for everyone in the province.
  • The idea of a guaranteed annual income has been tested before in Canada – in the mid-1970s, in Dauphin, Man., a farming town with then about 10,000 residents. In the only experiment of its kind in North America, every household in Dauphin was given access to a guaranteed annual budget, subject to their income level. For a family of five, payments equalled about $18,000 a year in today's dollars. Politicians primarily wanted to see if people would stop working. While the project was pre-empted by a change in government, a second look by researchers has found that there was only a slight decline in work – mostly among mothers, who chose to stay home with their children, and teenaged boys, who stayed in school longer.
  • “Very often, services are about getting people off the streets, come what may,” says Joe Batty, who managed the program. “This is about normalizing people.” The program was considered so successful, he says, that the city of London is now providing financial support to expand it.
  • Evelyn Forget, a researcher in medicine at the University of Manitoba, reports that Dauphin also experienced a 10-per-cent drop in hospital admissions and fewer doctor visits, especially for mental-health issues.
  • But a guaranteed-annual-income program would be expensive. In developing nations, a small amount of money can bring about big changes. In a country like Canada, the basic income needed to pull everyone out of poverty would have to be larger, balanced against higher taxes.
  • cost analysis of the Quebec proposal estimated it could run the province as much as $2-billion, including the cost in lost taxes if minimum-wage workers did the math and left those jobs.
  • Other experts argue that poverty reduction needs to be tailored to individual circumstances, especially in cases involving mental health and addiction.
  • Conservative Senator Hugh Segal, one of the more vocal proponents of no-strings-attached aid for the poor, points out that the guaranteed-income program for seniors has greatly reduced poverty, especially among women. “There's a bias that when given the chance people will be lazy,” he says. “That's not my sense of reality.” Mr. Segal argues that giving money with no conditions removes the stigma and shame around poverty, allowing people to focus instead on how to improve their lot.
  • Requiring the poor to prove continually that they are deserving of assistance or threatening to pull help away without notice only discourages the risk-taking and confidence required to get out of poverty.
  • “If you think of the core premise of charity, it is not to treat people as lesser,” Mr. Segal says. “[It] is to give people a leg-up so they can have some measure of independence and can make some of their own choices.”
  • To do that effectively, he argues, we need to let them decide the steps they take to get there. Or – as Ms. Gray in Victoria puts it, saying she would go back to school for more training if she could count on covering rent and daycare – give some autonomy back to “people who are trying to be somebody in this world.”
Carolyne Wang

How paying people's way out of poverty can help us all - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

  • there’s an increasing awareness, among even the country’s most wealthy, that poverty reaches beyond the tables of the hungry and digs into their own pocketbooks
  • When people are poor, out of work or homeless, it hurts the bottom line of all Canadians. And as the country struggles to maintain a shaky recovery amid growing global economic uncertainty, that’s not a hit they can afford to take.
  • If Ottawa and the provinces fail to make this a priority, Tory Senator Hugh Segal predicts, “over time, we will begin to run out of the money that we need to deal with the demographic bulge because it will be consumed in the health care requirements of the poor, which will increase. It will be consumed in the costs of the illiteracy and unemployment which relate to poverty. ... And it'll be unsustainable.”
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  • It’s already on the radar of some provinces: One of Christy Clark’s first actions as B.C. Premier was to raise the province’s minimum wage for the first time in a decade and offer a tax cut for low-income families. Ontario has launched a sweeping review of social assistance programs that Community and Social Services Minister Madeleine Meilleur has admitted are failing the province’s neediest.
  • Despite Canada’s reputation for a strong social safety net, the country is becoming economically polarized. And the decades-old dominant economic dogma that growing wealth among society’s highest earners would trickle down to those less fortunate is being challenged by an alternative approach: Eliminate crushing poverty among the lowest earners, and wealth will trickle up.
  • The ranks of the working poor have swelled as minimum wages fail to keep pace with rising costs and social assistance levels drop.
  • The recession widened the chasm, and a subsequent recovery hasn’t closed it.
  • On paper, almost as many jobs have been added as were lost during the financial crisis. But they offer fewer hours and less pay – and some of the hardest-hit sectors aren’t coming back.
  • Food bank use hit a record high in 2010. Tellingly, more of the people using those food banks have jobs – they just don’t make enough to pay the bills or feed their families.
  • As the incomes of the country’s top earners have risen, the incomes of Canada’s lower- and middle-income earners have stagnated.
  • Mr. Masciotra is part of a growing group of skilled labourers on the brink. The métiers in which they’ve worked for years are no longer economically viable: Many well-paying blue-collar jobs are being replaced by minimum-wage, service-sector ones. And that’s causing significant shifts on both sides of the border, notes MIT economist David Autor.
  • “I have records of over 100 jobs I have applied for,” he said. “I have looked really hard. ... But I haven’t been able to get a job yet.
  • Tony Masciotra is diversifying himself. The Argentine-Canadian father of two went back to school immediately after being laid off from his tool and die job at Ford Motor Co. in Windsor three years ago.
  • It gets more complicated, and more economically detrimental, if the people who’ve lost jobs aren’t the ones being hired to new ones.
  • They enter what Robin Somerville of the Centre for Spatial Economics calls “structural unemployment.” And if they leave the workforce entirely, they fall off the radar of unemployment stats: The numbers look better precisely because they’re worse.
  • The drop is even more significant because more Canadians are putting off retirement. That should mean more people in the workforce. But it doesn’t: So many younger workers are dropping out entirely that they outweigh the older ones sticking around longer.
  • “If you’re losing opportunities in some areas, and you’re not replacing them with opportunities of equal or greater value, then the overall level of income in the economy is reduced. And the ability of people to go out and buy goods and services is reduced.”
  • Homelessness costs taxpayers money – in both foregone wealth and social service spending.
  • Some see a solution in a 40-year-old experiment: In the 1970s, Manitoba wanted to see what would happen if it guaranteed poor people in a few communities a set annual income.
  • The philosophy behind this is simple: People are more likely to stay in school, out of emergency rooms and out of jail; they contribute to the economy through their purchases; they’re more likely to move eventually above the poverty line and pay taxes.
  • The irony is that Canada already scores high compared to other OECD countries when it comes to helping the elderly. Where it falls short is where it matters: The working-age poor – the ones who should be contributing to the economy.
  • $134,000 Estimated amount for emergency shelter, emergency hospital care, law enforcement and other social services for one homeless person in Calgary, for one year
  • $34,000 Estimated cost to proide supportive housing for one person in Calgary, for one year
  • $12,555 Average cost of hospital stay for non-homeless patient at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto
  • $15,114 Average cost of hospital stay for homeless patient at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto
Carolyne Wang

The rich really are getting richer - The Globe and Mail - 2 views

  • The top 0.01 per cent of Canadian income earners, the 2,400 people who earn at least $1.85-million, aren’t just basking in investment income and business profits. Nearly 75 per cent of their income comes from wages, just like the average Canadian, according to a new study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The top 1 per cent, the 246,000 Canadians who earn more than $169,000, receive about 67 per cent of their income in wages.
    • Carolyne Wang
       
      See the link for visuals of income distribution in Canada.
  • That’s a change from the 1940s, when the rich took 45 per cent of their income from wages, 25 per cent from business profits and the rest from investments, dividends and interest.
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  • Looking back over the past 90 years, income is now concentrated in a way that hasn’t been seen since the 1920s, she said. In the past decade, almost a third of income growth has gone to the richest 1 per cent, she added.
  • The big picture shows that after the Second World War, Canadian society distributed income in an increasingly level fashion. From 1946 to 1977, she writes, the income share of the richest 1 per cent fell from 14 per cent to 7.7 per cent. That trend was reversed over the past 30 years, as the top 1 per cent regained its 14-per-cent share of Canadian income. Over that time, the richest 0.1 per cent almost tripled their income share and the richest 0.01 per cent increased their share fivefold.
  • Median incomes, meanwhile, have been stagnant
  • “You’ve always had these people who’ve got their fingers on something the rest of us don’t. But why are they suddenly worth many multiples of what they were back then?” Ms. Yalnizyan said.
  • The answer, she said, is not economics. It’s in our culture.
  • Economist Michael Veall, who teaches at McMaster University, said a few theories try to explain the income shift by focusing on changes in the labour market at the high end, particularly for managers. One view is that corporate governors have allowed CEO salaries to jump because they were climbing elsewhere. Another is that CEOs, known for being superb communicators, are more effective, and thus more valuable, in the digital age because e-mail and the mass media facilitate contact with employees and the public, Prof. Veall said.
Carolyne Wang

Is income inequality just business as usual? - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

    • Carolyne Wang
       
      The visuals in this link show the distribution of wealth among the highest income earners in Canada.
  • Professor Richard Wilkinson just finished a tour of Canada, discussing his research findings from the past 30 years or so. A social epidemiologist, he has gathered international data showing the very tight correlation between life expectancy and income inequality, between literacy and income inequality, between rates of incarceration and income inequality, etc. etc. Over and over again he shows a range of issues that have a strong social gradient which reveal that almost everybody is better off in a society with greater income equality, including the rich. You can see his presentation in Vancouver at this link. http://i.sfu.ca/TmyYCh
  • For most of the 20th century inequality in Canada - and in virtually all developed nations, actually - had been declining. By the 1980s that long term trend reversed. First because of recessions (where the bottom end of the spectrum lost ground) then because of rowth (when the top part of the income spectrum zoomed ahead). So for the past generation inequality has grown in Canada, in good times and bad.
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  • There are two reasons for hope. One is, oddly, the result of an aging population and the consequent shrinking pool of workers, which may push up wages for workers producing basic goods and services, not just those at the top of the skill spectrum. The other is a culture shift, where a growing number of boomers understand what is at play and start working with others to come up with ways to ensure there will be a resilient middle class for the next generation.
  • When the cost of something goes up, we tend to consume less of it. So, since living wages are higher than minimum wages, employers are likely to hire fewer workers. A living wage campaign is part of the effort to raise the visibility of a sorry development in Canada. The saying that "the best social policy is a job" is in many ways true; but a new reality has developed over the past decade or so - that you can't necessarily escape poverty by working. Working full-time full-year at a minimum wage job, as many adults do, condems you to poverty.
  • international statistics show that poverty rates are lowest where income inequality is lowest too. That can be because of culture -- the wage spectrum is compressed, as in Japan, where it is unseemly to get too far ahead of others in pay -- or through active redistribution programs, where taxes and the services they buy redistribute incomes and opportunities to try to level the playing field a bit more.
  • The Mincome experiment in Manitoba in the mid 1970s, the MacDonald Commission i n the mid 1980s, and the House Report from Newfoundland and Labrador in the early 1990s all had proposals for providing a basic income. Only Manitoba tried it, as a pilot project, for a few years. The problem with the guaranteed income idea is at what rate you set it, and at what rate you tax it back. It could remove the stigma of income support programs, but it could just as easily be a costly experiment that, essentially, guarantees poverty. Also, as Dr. Wilkinson has suggested, at some point on the GDP per capita curve, income inequality is no longer about material deprivation, but rather one of psycho-social responses. We are, after all, pack animals.
  • We can redress some of the vagaries of the market through public policies, but the root cause of growing inequality is how different peoples' work is valued. IN a slow growth environment, which seems to be the foreseeable future for Canada, it will become harder and harder for those at the top of corporate structures to take the types of increases they have been commanding in the marketplace and expect unionized workers to be happy about losing their pension, benefits and wage increases, and expect low-end workers to essentially stay put or lose more ground. Two things can happen - those at the top start moderating their increases; or those in the middle and the bottom start seeing solid increases, particularly as the wave of retirements starts accelerating. The problem with rising incomes, generally, is that usually goes along with rising prices; and we're about to host the largest cohort of retirees we've ever had in history, a group that lives on fixed and low incomes, to whom rising prices are toxic. So how will the highest priced workers get away witih demanding more in that context I wonder?
  • Historically, increasing economic growth first deliver rising inequality, then lowering inequality (Simon Kuznets' famous work back in the 1950s). That's still true of developing nations - economic growth is first badly distributed, then leads to demands for greater equality.
  • We can raise our kids more equitably - but it will take more taxes. We can have less of a winner take all society - but it will require some people at the top to trim their expectations. We can beat this in small ways, but we also need leaders to express the way forward. In the US they have Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and politicians leading the way. We're waiting for more people like Ed Clarke, the CEO of TD Bank, to weigh in on how to make Canada fairer (his suggestion is higher taxes on the rich).
Carolyne Wang

Inequality Rising Across the Developed World - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • A new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development finds that most of its member countries have seen their richest citizens get much, much richer in the last few decades, leading to a widening income gap.
    • Carolyne Wang
       
      This graph shows that the Gini coefficients of most countries have increased, indicating increasing income inequality in the world as the value of the Gini coefficient approaches 1, which represents perfect income inequality.
  • As lower-paid workers have seen their incomes stagnate or even fall, the highest-paid workers have gotten steep raises.
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  • Changes in capital income — which primarily affects wealthier people — have contributed to rising inequality, although the impact has been relatively modest when compared to changes in labor income
    • Carolyne Wang
       
      In this graph, you can see that there is a greater reduction in the number of hours worked by low income earners compared to the hours worked by high income earners. Fewer work hours combined with low wages leads to lower incomes for the poor and widens the divide between the rich and the poor.
  • Today, across developed countries, the average income of the richest 10 percent of the population is about nine times that of the poorest 10 percent, with much bigger multiples in Israel, Turkey, the United States, Chile and Mexico. In these last two countries, the income ratio is 27 to 1.
  • Besides outright layoffs, there have also been cuts in work hours (sometimes voluntary, sometimes not), disproportionately affecting lower-paid employees:
  • Globalization has had an impact, as rich countries have been sending more of their commodifiable, generally less-skilled jobs offshore, which has displaced many lower-paid workers in rich countries.
  • Technological improvements have also disproportionately benefited the pay of high-skilled workers. Regulatory changes, like loosening protections for temporary (and less-skilled) workers and lower unemployment benefits, may have also had an effect.
  • Over the years people have become more and more likely to marry mates who have similar incomes. “Today, 40 percent of couples in which both partners work belong to the same or neighboring earnings deciles, compared with 33 percent some 20 years ago,” the report says.
  • Surely to some extent this has to do with more women having earnings, period, and therefore having more women’s earning matching what their husbands make. But in any case if poor marry poor and rich marry rich, that magnifies the income gap effect. After all, if poor married rich, the result would be more evenly distributed wealth.
Carolyne Wang

Economist's View: Why Does Inequality Matter? - 0 views

  • We know that a society with perfect equality does not grow at the fastest possible rate. When everyone gets an equal share of income, people lose the incentive to try and get ahead of others.
  • We also know that a society where one person has almost everything while everyone else struggles to survive—the most unequal distribution of income imaginable—will not grow at the fastest possible rate either. Thus, the growth-maximising level of inequality must lie somewhere between these two extremes
  • As Lane Kenworthy notes, when we look at how inequality has changed in various rich nations over the last several decades, "it turns out that there is no relationship between changes in income inequality and changes in the absolute incomes of low-end households. The reason is that income growth for poor households has come almost entirely via increases in net government transfers." Thus, nations where lower income households have fared better are also the nations where income transfers have been the highest.
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  • One hope for turning this around in the future is education
  • Unfortunately, we won't know the answer until we actually improve education, then wait to see how our better educated young fare when they graduate, a process that will take decades. It will do little to alleviate existing levels of inequality.
  • redistribution of income is the only answer to our inequality problem
  • But won't such policies lower economic growth? No. Given the present, elevated level of inequality, a reduction is unlikely to have much of an impact on incentives that are important for economic growth.
  • If we want to preserve a growing and socially healthy economy, and avoid moving to points on the inequality curve curve associated with lower growth, then we will need to do much more redistribution of income than we have done over the last several decades. That means the wealthy will no longer get it all, or at least almost all; they will be asked to share economic growth with the workers who helped to bring it about, workers who ought to be rewarded for their growing productivity.
  • sharing economic gains among all those who had a hand in creating them is the right thing to do
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