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• More kids than ever are becoming educated, especially girls. In the 1980s, only half of girls in developing countries completed elementary school; now, 80 percent do.

one reason for our current complacency is a feeling that poverty is inevitable — and that’s unwarranted.

The world’s best-kept secret is that we live at a historic inflection point when extreme poverty is retreating. United Nations members have just adopted 17 new Global Goals, of which the centerpiece is the elimination of extreme poverty by 2030.

“We live at a time of the greatest development progress among the global poor in the history of the world,” notes Steven Radelet, a development economist and Georgetown University professor, in a terrific book coming in November, “The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World.”

Cynics argue that saving lives is pointless, because the result is overpopulation that leads more to starve. Not true. Part of this wave of progress is a stunning drop in birthrates.

Haitian women now average 3.1 children; in 1985, they had six. In Bangladesh, women now average 2.2 children. Indonesians, 2.3. When the poor know that their children will survive, when they educate their daughters, when they access family planning, they have fewer children.

The idea of a child benefit has gained support from both progressives and conservatives. Many on the political left see it as a way to reduce economic inequality and increase opportunity. On the political right, Jason explains:

younger conservatives are especially supportive of the idea. People under 50, he explains, are “the ones feeling the brunt of the brutal slowdown in real wage growth that started in the 1970s.”

“You can’t live on it,” Megan Curran, a research scientist at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy, told me.

According to the AFL-CIO, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio at Walmart (America’s largest private employer) is 1,076 to 1, at Walt Disney Company 1,424-to-1, at McDonald’s 2,124-to-1, and at Gap 3,566-to-1

At 49 S&P 500 firms, noted an Institute for Policy Studies report, half the work force―that is, 3.7 million employees―received wages below the official U.S. poverty line for a family of four.

“average Americans have spent this entire century on a treadmill getting nowhere fast.  The nation’s median―most typical―households pocketed 2.3 percent fewer real dollars in 2018 than they earned in 2000.”

in 2018, the nation’s income inequality reached the highest level since the U.S. Census Bureau began measuring it five decades before

Bernie Sanders reminded Americans that just three U.S. billionaires (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett) possessed as much wealth as half the people in the United States combined

In 1965, the ratio of CEO-to-worker’s pay stood at 20-to-1; by 2018 (when CEOs received another hefty pay raise and workers received a 0.2 percent pay cut), it had reached 278-to-1.  

the ten wealthiest Americans (with riches ranging from $53 billion to $107.5 billion each) had combined wealth of $697 billion―or an average of $69.7 billion each.  Assuming that, henceforth, they had no further income and had limitless longevity, they could each spend a million dollars a day for approximately 191 years.

 In 2018, 38.1 million Americans lived below the U.S. government’s official poverty threshold, including many people working at multiple jobs

another 93.6 million Americans lived close to poverty, bringing the total of impoverished and near-impoverished people to nearly 42 percent of the U.S. population.  

in 2019, for the first time in a century, life expectancy in the United States declined for three consecutive years

 Suicide rates, which closely correlate with poverty, increased by 33 percent since 1999

America’s ultra-wealthy, who, in addition to pouring money into the campaign coffers of politicians that safeguard and expand their fortunes, continue purchases like one multi-billionaire’s acquisition of a $238 million Manhattan penthouse―a supplement to his two floors at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Chicago ($30 million), Miami Beach penthouse ($60 million), Chicago penthouse ($59 million), and additional apartment in Manhattan ($40 million)

131-floor Central Park Tower building which, when completed, will become the tallest, most expensive residential dwelling in the United States.  It will feature179 luxury condos ranging in price from $6.9 million to $95 million and a seven-story Nordstrom flagship store with six restaurants, plus three floors of “amenity space” (dubbed the Central Park Club) spanning 50,000 square feet, with an outdoor terrace, pools, a wellness center, and a massive ballroom.

Meanwhile, partly by necessity, working-class families often take a more hands-off attitude to child-raising.

some of the most cost-effective antipoverty programs are aimed at the earliest years. For example, the Nurse-Family Partnership has a home-visitation program that encourages new parents of at-risk children to amp up the hugging, talking and reading. It ends at age 2, yet randomized trials show that those children are less likely to be arrested as teenagers and the families require much less government assistance.

Or take Head Start. Critics have noted that the advantage its preschoolers gain in test scores fades by third grade, but scholars also have found that Head Start has important impacts on graduates, including lessening the chance that they will be convicted of a crime years later.

James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, argues that the most crucial investments we as a country can make are in the first five years of life, and that they pay for themselves. Yet these kinds of initiatives are underfinanced and serve only a tiny fraction of children in need.

Sadly, and shockingly given where the U.S. used to stand in most rankings, few of the best practices foreign leaders want to emulate are any longer in the U.S.

Young Americans who see this country from different shores can't help but conclude that something is awry in a political culture that denies what they plainly see elsewhere: health care systems that provide better outcomes at lower cost and for everyone; better airports, faster trains, more extensive urban public transportation--and even, amazingly, better highways; more upward mobility (yes, the American dream is now more real in many other countries than it is here); more sustainable energy policies; elections that work more quickly and inexpensively, with more rational discourse and greater citizen participation. The list is long.

Consider some of the things that have fueled that American lantern of attraction for more than two centuries. Perhaps more than anything else, it has been the American Dream: the universal desire of all parents that their children will lead lives better than their own. This dream was given an American name, and not just in American dictionaries. But that dream is dying. And it can't be resuscitated if talented people sit on the political sidelines or don't attend the game at all. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, only 17 percent of Americans believe our national government possesses the consent of the governed. These numbers may not seem shocking, because they've been low for so long. But not always. In 1964, Pew found 77 percent of Americans expected their government to do "the right thing" most of the time.

One of the strongest indications of American democratic dysfunction is pervasive and expanding poverty. It is not just its existence in the richest country on earth that is shameful, but its utter absence from political discourse. Most of the poor don't vote; they have largely given up hope. And what national politician talks about poverty? Can you name any? America is moving toward the kind of bifurcated society we used to deride in banana republics--rich getting richer in gated communities, while the poor grow poorer, barely seen in segregated urban ghettos and hidden rural decay. Over 20 million Americans live in extreme poverty. One in 50 Americans' only income is food stamps. Add the poor and the near-poor--that is under $44K for a family of four--and you have more than 100 million people. The richest country in the world now has the highest rate of child poverty in the developed world. The U.S. has gone from being relatively egalitarian to one of the most unequal countries in the world.

hese are just a few signs that American government is broken. So why is it so broken? Let's consider the matter of money. When I left for Oxford in 1974, the total spent by all candidates for Congress, House and Senate, was $77 million. In 2010, it was $1.8 billion. Members of Congress spend up to 70 percent of their time raising money; that is their job; they become fundraisers far more than they are legislators. In that same year, 3 percent of retiring Congressmen became lobbyists. Now it's 50 percent of Senators, 42 percent of House members. Critics from the left and right and middle alike call our political finance system one of "legalized bribery."

why do presumably well-intentioned policy makers ignore, or deny, the correlations of family background and student achievement?

Since they can’t take on poverty itself, education policy makers should try to provide poor students with the social support and experiences that middle-class students enjoy as a matter of course.

Other countries already pursue such strategies. In Finland, with its famously high-performing schools, schools provide food and free health care for students. Developmental needs are addressed early. Counseling services are abundant.

But in the United States over the past decade, it became fashionable among supporters of the “no excuses” approach to school improvement to accuse anyone raising the poverty issue of letting schools off the hook — or what Mr. Bush famously called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Such accusations may afford the illusion of a moral high ground, but they stand in the way of serious efforts to improve education and, for that matter, go a long way toward explaining why No Child Left Behind has not worked.

their explanation begins by dismantling several others.

Was the source of the problem America’s all-too-ready supply of prescription opioids?

About a million Americans now use heroin daily or near-daily. Many others use illicitly obtained synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

As Case and Deaton note, most people who abuse or become addicted to opioids continue to lead functional lives and many eventually escape their dependence

The oversupply of opioids did not create the conditions for despair. Instead, it appears, the oversupply fed upon a white working class already adrift.

although opioid deaths plateaued, at least temporarily, in 2018, suicides and alcohol-related deaths continue upward.

Could deaths of despair be related to the rising incidence of obesity?

Case and Deaton report that we’re seeing the same troubling health trends “among the underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obese.”

Is the problem poverty?

Overdose deaths are most common in high-poverty Appalachia and along the low-poverty Eastern Seaboard, in places such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Connecticut. Meanwhile, some high-poverty states, such as Arkansas and Mississippi, have been less affected. Black and Hispanic populations are poorer but less affected, too.

How about income inequality? Case and Deaton have found that patterns of inequality, like patterns of poverty, simply don’t match the patterns of mortality by race or region.

A consistently strong economic correlate, by contrast, is the percentage of a local population that is employed

In the late nineteen-sixties, Case and Deaton note, all but five per cent of men of prime working age, from twenty-five to fifty-four, had jobs; by 2010, twenty per cent did not.

What Case and Deaton have found is that the places with a smaller fraction of the working-age population in jobs are places with higher rates of deaths of despair—and that this holds true even when you look at rates of suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease separately. They all go up where joblessness does.

Conservatives tend to offer cultural explanations

People are taking the lazy way out of responsibilities, the argument goes, and so they choose alcohol, drugs, and welfare and disability checks over a commitment to hard work, family, and community. And now they are paying the price for their hedonism and decadence—with addiction, emptiness, and suicide.

Yet, if the main problem were that a large group of people were withdrawing from the workforce by choice, wages should have risen in parallel.

Case and Deaton argue that the problem arises from the cumulative effect of a long economic stagnation and the way we as a nation have dealt with it

For the first few decades after the Second World War, per-capita U.S. economic growth averaged between two and three per cent a year. In the nineties, however, it dipped below two per cent. In the early two-thousands, it was less than one per cent. This past decade, it remained below 1.5 per cent.

Different populations have experienced this slowdown very differently

Anti-discrimination measures improved earnings and job prospects for black and Hispanic Americans. Though their earnings still lag behind those of the white working class, life for this generation of people of color is better than it was for the last.

Not so for whites without a college education. Among the men, median wages have not only flattened; they have declined since 1979. The work that the less educated can find isn’t as stable: hours are more uncertain, and job duration is shorter

Among advanced economies, this deterioration in pay and job stability is unique to the United States.

In the past four decades, Americans without bachelor’s degrees—the majority of the working-age population—have seen themselves become ever less valued in our economy. Their effort and experience provide smaller rewards than before, and they encounter longer periods between employment.

The problem isn’t that people are not the way they used to be. It’s that the economy and the structure of work are not the way they used to be

Today, about seventy-five per cent of college graduates are married by age forty-five, but only sixty per cent of non-college graduates are

Nonmarital childbearing has reached forty per cent among less educated white women.

Religious institutions previously played a vital role in connecting people to a community. But the number of Americans who attend religious services has declined markedly over the past half century, falling to just one-third of the general population today.

Case and Deaton see a picture of steady economic and social breakdown, amid over-all prosperity.

climate—the amount of social and economic instability not only in your life but also in your family and community—matters, too. Émile Durkheim pointed out more than a century ago that despair and then suicide result when people’s material and social circumstances fall below their expectations.

why has the steep rise in deaths of despair been so uniquely American

The United States has provided unusually casual access to means of death.

The availability of opioids has indeed played a role, and the same goes for firearms

The U.S. has also embraced automation and globalization with greater alacrity and fewer restrictions than other countries have. Displaced workers here get relatively little in the way of protection and support.

And we’ve enabled capital to take a larger share of the economic gains. “Economists long thought that the ratio of wages to profits was an immutable constant, about two to one,” Case and Deaton point out. But since 1970, they find, it has declined significantly.

A more unexpected culprit identified by Case and Deaton is our complicated and costly health-care system.

The focus of Case and Deaton’s indictment is on the fact that America’s health-care system is peculiarly reliant on employer-provided insurance.

As they show, the premiums that employers pay amount to a perverse tax on hiring lower-skilled workers.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2019 the average family policy cost twenty-one thousand dollars, of which employers typically paid seventy per cent.

“For a well-paid employee earning a salary of $150,000, the average family policy adds less than 10 percent to the cost of employing the worker,” Case and Deaton write. “For a low-wage worker on half the median wage, it is 60 percent.”

between 1970 and 2016, the earnings that laborers received fell twenty-one per cent. But their total compensation, taken to include the cost of their benefits (in particular, health care), rose sixty-eight per cent. Increases in health-care costs have devoured take-home pay for those below the median income.

this makes American health care itself a prime cause of our rising death rates.

we must change the way we pay for health care. Instead of preserving a system that discourages employers from hiring, retaining, and developing workers without bachelor’s degrees, we need to make health-care payments proportional to wages—as with tax-based systems like Medicare.

So far, the American approach to the rise in white working-class mortality has been to pour resources into addiction-treatment centers and suicide-prevention programs. Yet the rates of suicide and addiction remain sky-high. It’s as if we’re using pressure dressings on a bullet wound to the chest instead of getting at the source of the bleeding.

Case and Deaton want us to recognize that the more widespread response is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. And here culture does play a role.

When it comes to people whose lives aren’t going well, American culture is a harsh judge: if you can’t find enough work, if your wages are too low, if you can’t be counted on to support a family, if you don’t have a promising future, then there must be something wrong with you

We Americans are reluctant to acknowledge that our economy serves the educated classes and penalizes the rest. But that’s exactly the situation, and “Deaths of Despair” shows how the immiseration of the less educated has resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, even as the economy has thrived and the stock market has soared.

capitalism, having failed America’s less educated workers for decades, must change, as it has in the past. “There have been previous periods when capitalism failed most people, as the Industrial Revolution got under way at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and again after the Great Depression,” they write. “But the beast was tamed, not slain.”

Today, the battles are over an employer-based system for financing health care, corporate governance that puts shareholders’ interests ahead of workers’, tax plans that benefit capital holders over wage earners.

We are better at addressing fast-moving crises than slow-building ones. It wouldn’t be surprising, then, if we simply absorbed current conditions as the new normal.

Black southerners understood that unemployment and poverty were not caused solely by changes in the market or the laws of supply and demand.

Before the 1960s, their chief concern was how to get black people to work for them. Now, the problem was what to do with workers whose labor was no longer needed—and who could now vote. In the majority-black plantation counties, landowners feared the election of social justice advocates who would increase taxes on the wealthy to pay for job training programs, improved education, infrastructure spending, and other investments that could help unemployed workers adjust to the new economy.

Plantation owners’ preferred solution to this dilemma was for African Americans to leave the region, and they tried to discourage unemployed people from remaining in their communities by cutting public assistance programs, blocking economic development efforts, and opposing antipoverty projects initiated by the federal government’s War on Poverty.

With support from new federal agencies created to address economic inequities, southern social justice activists experimented with innovative methods for alleviating unemployment in the late 1960s and early 1970s

All of these projects were open to poor white people as well as black Americans, but many white southerners were reluctant to participate. Supporters of antipoverty programs faced violent attacks and economic reprisals by the same white supremacist groups that resisted the civil rights movement, and opponents portrayed the War on Poverty as a ploy to transfer wealth from hardworking white Americans to undeserving black Americans in an effort to discredit it. As one federal official observed, white southerners were “led to believe that Poverty Programs are for Negroes only. . . . The poor white man is not encouraged to take advantage of his Government’s efforts to lift him out of the pits of poverty.”

Over the next several decades, the idea that government assistance was for lazy black people and that self-respecting “real” Americans could succeed through individualism and hard work seeped into the national political discourse. Segregationist presidential contender George Wallace laid the groundwork for this shift in his campaigns of 1964 and 1968 by equating efforts to ensure racial equality with federal tyranny

observers at the time thought that the problem was that wealth was concentrated in so few hands that consumers did not have purchasing power to buy the goods that lay rotting in the fields. Increasing consumer purchasing power became the paradigm that drove economic policy during the New Deal and for decades after. A central element of this was increasing homeownership by encouraging citizens to take on large debts for the purchase of home

This history also explains the current resistance in Europe, especially Germany, toward Keynesian stimulus.

Understanding this fundamental divergence between the United States and Europe sheds new light on several episodes of recent history

It suggests that in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan tried to deregulate industry, he was actually pushing the United States in the direction of Europe.

Where Europeans focused on restraining consumption, Americans saw consumption as the machine that drives growth — and we still do.

a consumption bias has distributional consequences that we are only beginning to understand. Some studies suggest that it undermines support for the welfare state, because as consumers come to depend on private assets — especially their homes — for their well-being, they appear to become less interested in providing for the welfare of others.

A consumption bias also focuses the efforts of the left on increasing private consumption.

But credit access does nothing for the truly poor, those who are not deemed creditworthy

Pointing out all the ways in which the American government has actually been more interventionist than European governments seems to alarm partisans on both the left and the right. Activists on the right can

o longer pretend that American history is about small government. Those on the left are equally alarmed, because pointing out the ways in which the government has been hostile to business can undermine their calls to be even more hostile to business.

poverty reduction is not about hostility to business. It’s about strategies like promoting saving over borrowing. We don’t need regulations as loose as postwar Europe’s, but if reducing poverty and inequality is the goal, we do need to rethink our love affair with consumption.

As Governor Cuomo excoriated New Yorkers about mask-wearing, he took no responsibility for not shutting down indoor dining for weeks, well into the new spike.

The inconsistent aid had a cascading effect. Governors like Mr. Cuomo, who don’t have the budgetary ability of the federal government to extend substantial business relief, ended up in a lose-lose situation as the virus surged in late summer and fall. New York had to keep high-risk businesses open, it was argued, so that they could earn whatever meager revenue they could. But what is “the economy” worth if it comes at the cost of our physical well-being, our very lives?

Dr. Jha said that early in his time on the task force there was a lot of interest in building a robust testing system. “But it was killed by the political leadership in the White House,” he said

“The primary thing we really should have had is ubiquitous testing, and the government has just not chosen to do that,”

I agree with her on one point: It is the American way to champion individualism over collective obligation.

We could lift every family out of poverty by sending out regular checks; other countries use taxes to fund benefits that significantly reduce their poverty rates. Poverty, then, is a policy choice.

“We’ve basically had a complete abdication of the federal response,” Gregg Gonsalves, an assistant professor in epidemiology of microbial diseases at Yale, told me when asked about the interplay between public health and economic struggles

If we want people to take individual actions to help curb the spread of the virus, we also need to invest in their ability to do so. The government could send every household masks — a plan the Trump administration nixed early on. It could pay Americans to stay home if they feel sick, test positive or work for a business that should close for public health reasons, to avoid choosing between their health and their bills.“If you want people to do the right thing you have to make it easy, and we’ve made it hard,”

The last 10 months have given us a very clear message: We are inextricably connected to each other. We can’t stay healthy unless our neighbors can do so, too.

The one-year credit appears likely to garner enough support to be included in the stimulus package, but it will also have to clear a series of tough parliamentary hurdles because of the procedural maneuvers Democrats are using to muscle the stimulus package through, potentially without Republican support.

With House Democratic leadership aiming to have the stimulus legislation approved on the chamber floor by the end of the month, Congress moved last week to fast-track Mr. Biden’s stimulus plan even as details of the legislation are still being worked out.

But the child tax credit could provide an opportunity for some bipartisan support, since Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, introduced a similar measure that would send payments of up to $1,250 per month to families with children.

Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, warned on Sunday that the United States labor market was stalling and in a “deep hole” that could take years to emerge from if lawmakers did not quickly pass the stimulus package.

Ms. Yellen said that passing the stimulus package could allow the economy to reach full employment by next year. Failing to do so, she said, could leave the jobless rate elevated for years to come.

Researchers at Columbia University found that Mr. Biden’s overall stimulus proposal could cut child poverty in half in 2021 because of the expansion of the child credit, as well as other changes to tax credits and expansions of unemployment and food assistance benefits.

In the absence of elections, Communist Party officials in China rise up the ranks based on how well they deliver on the party’s priorities, at least in theory. For years, the top priority was economic growth

Local officials plowed money into the highways, ports and power plants that manufacturers needed, turning China into the world’s factory.

Under Mr. Xi, government priorities have shifted toward self-sufficiency and the use of industrial robots, something that Chinese leaders believe is critical to escaping the middle-income trap, in which a country can no longer compete in low-wage manufacturing because of rising wages but has not yet made the leap to the value-added products of high-income countries.

some Chinese companies purchased robots that don’t work well and exaggerated their success to get government subsidies and curry favor with politicians. Directives from party officials with little expertise in robotics fetishize machines beyond their actual usefulness.

Those unskilled laborers — who will increasingly be replaced by robots, according to China’s grand strategy — present an economic challenge and a threat to political stability

What many Chinese businesses wanted most, she said, was “invisible infrastructure”: a predictable judicial system, fair access to bank credit and land, and regulations that are applied without regard to political connections

Her findings, reported in detail in “The Gilded Cage: Techno-State Capitalism in China,” which will be published next fall, suggest that Beijing’s pronouncements about amazing technological advancement should be viewed with a touch of skepticism.

Mr. Xi had a privileged childhood as the son of a top Communist Party official. But the Cultural Revolution shattered that sheltered life; he was sent to a remote village for seven years, where he did hard labor and slept in a hillside cave home. As a result, he can claim a familiarity with rural people and rural problems that few world leaders can even imagine.

One of Mr. Xi’s most celebrated campaigns has been a vow to stamp out extreme poverty, a tacit acknowledgment that China’s economic miracle has left hundreds of millions of rural farmers behind

Some corporate managers complained that government subsidies often flowed to politically connected firms and were wasted, while others grumbled that government directives were unpredictable and ill informed.

Only 30 percent of working Chinese adults have high school diplomas, although 80 percent of young people are getting them now, according to Scott Rozelle, a co-author of “Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise.”

more than 600 million Chinese people scrape by on the equivalent of $140 per month.

Last year, Mr. Xi declared “complete victory” in eradicating extreme poverty in China, but skepticism about his success abounds. Some experts on China report that local officials gave out cash to rural families — one-time payments that got them temporarily over the poverty line — instead of initiating badly needed structural reforms.

“Rural Chinese in many ways are like the lowest class in a policy-driven caste system,” Mr. Rozelle told me. Nevertheless, even a flawed program to address rural poverty is better than no program at all.

He set out to save his rudderless Communist Party by cracking down on graft and bringing wayward nouveaux riches back into the fold by recruiting them as party members. He ordered chief executives to contribute more toward “common prosperity” and showed what could happen to those who didn’t toe the party line.

Mr. Xi’s crackdown went too far. Increasingly, foreign investors and Chinese entrepreneurs are fleeing. Coupled with a draconian zero-Covid strategy, Mr. Xi’s policies have sent the economy into a tailspin.

More worrisome still is the return of an atmosphere of fear and sycophancy not seen since Chairman Mao’s time. A businessman who was critical of Mr. Xi was sent to prison for 18 years. The era of relative openness to intellectual debate and foreign ideas appears to have come to an end.

id another despot like Mao, have gone out the window so Mr. Xi can have more time in power. Mr. Xi has been called a modern-day emperor, the chairman of everything and the most powerful man in the world

Yuhua Wang, a political scientist at Harvard who is author of the book “The Rise and Fall of Imperial China,” released this month. Mr. Wang studied 2,000 years of Chinese history and discovered, somewhat counterintuitively, that China’s central government has always been the weakest under its longest-serving rulers.

Emperors, he explains, have always stayed in power by weakening the elites who might have overthrown them — the very people who are capable of building a strong and competent government.

“One can argue that he has good intentions,” Mr. Wang told me of Mr. Xi. But the tactics he has used to maintain power — crushing critics, micromanaging businesses, whipping up nationalist fervor and walling China off from the world — may end up weakening China in the end.

The views of the rich on other policies that might reduce inequality followed a similar pattern. A mere 19 percent of the wealthy, versus two-thirds of the general public, said the government should “see to it” that anyone who wants a job can find one

Forty percent of the wealthy, versus 78 percent of the public, said the government should make the minimum wage “high enough so that no family with a full-time worker falls below the official poverty line.”

Ms. Chin’s findings, which she is scheduled to present at a conference in April, are even more stark. As she puts it, the rich tend to see inequality “as a story about individual hard work, effort and character.”They recognize that growing up poor puts workers at a disadvantage but argue that a middle-class background presents no barrier to economic success and that growing up wealthy can even be a liability because it robs people of their incentive to work hard.

In general, Ms. Chin has found, the rich regard those who do not succeed in life as “people who didn’t take advantage of the education system,” not victims of circumstances beyond their control.

one of the most intriguing conclusions of the recent avenue of research: Wealth seems to shape people’s views regardless of their age, gender, education, marital status — or even ideology and political party. “There is a sense in which wealth seems to trump partisanship,”

given the attention candidates of all stripes must lavish on wealthy donors, that might explain why even relatively moderate presidential aspirants are reluctant to propose a prominent role for government in reducing inequality

Jeb Bush, arguably the most outspoken potential Republican candidate on the subject, has struck much the same posture as his more conservative rivals. “We believe the income gap is real, but that only conservative principles can solve it by removing the barriers to upward mobility,” Mr. Bush wrote

Mr. Rubio is the Republican who has come closest to suggesting an affirmative role for government, proposing that Washington redirect money from programs like food stamps to subsidies for low-wage workers, though he would not increase the total funds available for alleviating poverty. A spokesman said by email that Mr. Rubio “doesn’t think the federal government is very good” at reducing poverty and would like to see those programs reformed. He has indicated that he would cut taxes for the rich rather than raise them.

Mrs. Clinton was vague when it came to solutions. She promoted the public-private partnerships that the Clinton Foundation was brokering to expand worker training and noted that her husband’s administration had ushered in “broad-based growth and shared prosperity” through increasing the minimum wage and doubling the earned-income tax credit.

Before the well-heeled crowd at Aspen, she said, “We have to have a concerted effort to meet a consensus about how to deal with this.”

If those effects were repeated in Medicaid, it could prove disastrous for the health of the program’s beneficiaries. Especially in states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, work requirements could create a new underclass of people ineligible for any health insurance. That includes a large contingent of people with disabilities who don’t qualify for Supplemental Security Income and vulnerable populations like young men with felonies. Caught in a vicious cycle, those people would then be less healthy and less financially secure, and thus less likely to be able to work and make it out of poverty

Such a program would have its most drastic effects on wages, productivity, and reducing racial and class-based wealth inequality if it were implemented as a universal program. But it could probably achieve CMS’s goals of long-term health benefits and poverty reduction if it were instituted solely for current Medicaid beneficiaries. If the 4.4 million non-elderly adults who aren’t working; aren’t caregivers, retired, or students; and don’t qualify for disability insurance are used as a floor, providing jobs for them would cost a little more than Lowrey’s total of $158 billion, around 30 percent of Medicaid’s annual budget of over $550 billion. If people who self-report as ill or disabled are excluded from that number, Medicaid would need to pay for a maximum of 880,000 jobs, or $35 billion a year, 6 percent of the annual Medicaid budget.

A Medicaid jobs guarantee could serve to amplify both of those roles. It could essentially set a wage floor for Medicaid enrollees, who often work near the bottom of the wage scale and often barely crack the poverty line even while working full-time hours (or more). Integrating Medicaid into bespoke job structures for people with disabilities could provide transportation and rehabilitation, and further increase the accessibility of those positions, thus creating more synergy between health and employment.

Similar to how employer-sponsored insurance has become a backbone to the economic growth of the middle class, a jobs guarantee for Medicaid would take the largest health-insurance program in America and transform it into a nexus of anti-poverty policy and health equity. Put more simply: The easiest way to make sure people receive the health benefits of employment could be to employ them.

Acemoglu and Robinson outline a theory of how economic and political institutions shape the fate of human societies. They reinterpret the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history, showing how differences in institutions interact with changing circumstances to produce development or stagnation.

It also has implications for the contemporary United States, where increasing inequality and the growing influence of money in politics threaten to reshape our political institutions.

In more fortunate countries, pluralistic political institutions prevent any one group from monopolizing resources for itself, while free markets empower a large class of people with an interest in defending the current system against absolutism. This virtuous circle, which first took form in seventeenth-century England, is the secret to economic growth.

Economic institutions are themselves the products of political processes, which depend on political institutions. These can also be extractive, if they enable an elite to maintain its dominance over society, or inclusive, if many groups have access to the political process. Poverty is not an accident: "[P]oor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty." Therefore, Acemoglu and Robinson argue, it is ultimately politics that matters.

The logic of extractive and inclusive institutions explains why growth is not foreordained. Where a cohesive elite can use its political dominance to get rich at the expense of ordinary people, it has no need for markets and free enterprise, which can create political competitors. In addition, because control of the state can be highly lucrative, infighting among contenders for power produces instability and violence. This vicious circle keeps societies poor

Countries differ in their economic success because of their different institutions, the rules influencing how the economy works, and the incentives that motivate people," write Acemoglu and Robinson. Extractive institutions, whether feudalism in medieval Europe or the use of schoolchildren to harvest cotton in contemporary Uzbekistan, transfer wealth from the masses to elites. In contrast, inclusive institutions -- based on property rights, the rule of law, equal provision of public services, and free economic choices -- create incentives for citizens to gain skills, make capital investments, and pursue technological innovation, all of which increase productivity and generate wealth.

Acemoglu and Robinson differentiate their account from alternatives that they label the "culture," "geography," and "ignorance" hypotheses.

An example of the first is Max Weber's famous argument that Calvinism lay at the roots of capitalist development

the best-known recent example of the second is Jared Diamond's explanation of the Spanish Conquest as the inevitable outcome of geographic differences between Eurasia and the Americas.

Most economists, Acemoglu and Robinson assert, subscribe to the ignorance hypothesis, according to which "poor countries are poor because they have a lot of market failures and because economists and policymakers do not know how to get rid of them." According to this view, development can be engineered through technocratic policies administered by enlightened experts.

this focus on policy obscures the fundamental importance of politics.

Their perspective is informed by New Institutional Economics, an approach developed in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and associated with prominent economists such as Douglass North and Oliver Williamson, that focuses on how economic forces are mediated by institutions such as political systems and legal codes

A state based on extractive institutions, whether the Kuba Kingdom of seventeenth-century Central Africa or more recently the Soviet Union, can generate growth, especially when starting from low levels of development. But in most of these cases, the ruling elite is unwilling to allow inclusive economic institutions because they would threaten its political supremacy; the inevitable result is economic stagnation.

This leaves open the question of why some societies end up with inclusive rather than extractive institutions -- why some are rich and some are poor. The answer, according to Acemoglu and Robinson, is that institutions evolve -- and that history is messy.

Institutions change in subtle ways over time, allowing societies to drift apart. When major shocks occur, small differences in institutions can send societies down vastly different historical paths.

Early modern England, France, and Spain were all feudal societies with power-hungry monarchs. But the English Parliament had slightly more power than its continental relatives; as a result, the crown was unable to monopolize trade with the Americas, which made many merchants rich instead; in turn, this new commercial class became an important part of the coalition that overthrew James II in 1688, successfully fighting off absolutism. In Spain, by contrast, the monarchy controlled overseas trade, quashed internal challenges to its authority, and maintained extractive economic institutions -- and the country went into long-term decline. Crucially, Acemoglu and Robinson remind us that these outcomes were not preordained. James II might have suppressed the Glorious Revolution, or the Spanish Armada might have succeeded a century earlier. History is like that.

In this light, the material prosperity of the modern world, unevenly distributed though it is, is a fortunate historical accident.

But inclusive institutions can also break down. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a small group of families transformed Venice's semi-democratic institutions into a hereditary aristocracy and then monopolized long-distance trade, spelling the end of the city-state's economic expansion

Acemoglu and Robinson, by contrast, examine why nations fail. Societies, in their telling, are like Tolstoy's families: The success stories are similar -- pluralist democracies with regulated capitalist economies -- but failure comes in different forms. There are many ways in which elites can impose extractive institutions that cripple economic development.

The United States is one of the happy families of Why Nations Fail. Although our institutions have often been deeply flawed, Acemoglu and Robinson show how crucial moments in history, from Jamestown to the Progressive Era to the civil-rights movement, have led to the expansion of political democracy and economic opportunity.

Rather than as a series of inevitable triumphs, however, this history can also be seen as a warning -- that our institutions are fragile, always at risk of being subverted by elites seeking to exploit political power for their narrow economic ends. That risk has reappeared today.

The power of the financial sector is only one example of the broader threat to our inclusive political institutions: namely, the ability of the economic elite to translate their enormous fortunes directly into political power. In the wake of the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United, super PACs can mobilize unlimited amounts of money--and can accept contributions from 501(c)4 organizations, which do not have to identify their donors.

This may seem like a level playing field. But money is not distributed evenly. American Crossroads, for example, has consistently raised more than 90 percent of its funds from billionaires (with a "b"). The recent, breathtaking rise in inequality has put unprecedented resources at the disposal of the super-rich. With the ability to secretly invest unlimited sums in political activities, they now have the opportunity to swamp all other participants in American politics.

Rising inequality and deregulation of political spending have made possible a new kind of class warfare. The 1 percent can blanket the airwaves, install their chosen representatives, and sway public policy in their favor.

The most direct way to translate political power into cold, hard cash is to advocate for lower taxes. Republican presidential candidates spent the past year competing to offer the most bountiful tax cuts to the super-rich

Showering goodies on the rich would require draconian cuts to Social Security and Medicare -- programs that are popular among the Tea Party rank and file. Republicans' current anti-tax orthodoxy reflects the interests of their wealthy funders rather than their middle-income base.

As Warren Buffett observed, "there's been class warfare going on for the last twenty years, and my class has won." This should be little surprise: "My side has had the nuclear bomb. We've got K Street, we've got lobbyists, we've got money on our side."

Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents were instrumental in unleashing unlimited corporate political spending in Citizens United, accelerating the concentration of political power in the hands of the super-rich.

The most potent bulwark of inclusive institutions is probably the rich variety of influential interest groups that all have the ability to participate in politics. Still, the accumulation of huge fortunes and their deployment for political ends has changed the nature of our political institutions. Funding by the economic elite is a major reason why Republicans advocate transfers from ordinary people to the rich in the form of tax cuts and reductions in government services -- and why Democrats have been dragged to the right along with the GOP

Acemoglu recently said, "We need noisy grassroots movements to deliver a shock to the political system," citing both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as potentially helpful developments. As he recognized, however, the one with more staying power -- the Tea Party -- has been co-opted by well-funded, elite-dominated groups (including Americans for Prosperity). If a popular movement can be bankrolled as easily as an attack ad, it is hard to see what money can't buy in politics. The next test for America will be whether our political system can fend off the power of money and remain something resembling a real democracy -- or whether it will become a playground where a privileged elite works out its internal squabbles.

There's more bad news: IFS found that growth in average incomes will be close to zero -- once inflation is taken into account -- over the next two years,

Britain voted in June to leave the EU, setting off a period of tremendous economic and political uncertainty. While the pound immediately plummeted, the most dire economic scenarios envisioned by analysts prior to the referendum have failed to materialize. But growth over the next five years is expected to be 2.4% lower than it would have been had Britain remained a member of the EU.

Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to start formal Brexit negotiations with the EU in the coming weeks. The most likely scenario is that Britain will end up leaving Europe's unified trading market and be forced to negotiate new terms of trade with its biggest partners.

That's the message Democrats need to hammer home as they take well-earned credit for what they've achieved here.

Taking credit isn't just so Democrats can pat themselves on the back; it's so the public understands how and why this happened.

Democrats are spending their time passing legislation that could reduce poverty by a third, cut the number of kids living in poverty by half, put food on tables and keep roofs over heads.

Raising the shamefully low federal minimum wage remains on the table. The Biden administration is also turning its attention to America's crumbling infrastructure. Most importantly, many Democrats are pushing their own party to make early moves to ensure that power is fairly distributed, and that every American gets an equal vote and a voice in our elections.

We can't bring back all of the people whose lives were lost thanks to Trump's recklessness. But with Democratic majorities in Congress and a Democratic president in the White House, we have more competent political leadership that could propel us toward a brighter future.