Americans may have overthrown the monarchy and built the land of opportunity, but economic mobility is higher in Great Britain than in the United States. In Britain, the social safety net allows people who fall into poverty to pull themselves out. Americans who become poor are more likely to stay that way.
Research in the 1980s and 1990s showing that poverty was often short-term and not limited to an “underclass” helped motivate social policy shifts away from income redistribution. But it gradually became clear that this view of poverty as transient was partly a result of measurement error, says Peggy McDonough of the University of Toronto. “People over- or underestimate their income,” McDonough says. “Any time you ask people questions about income, the data you obtain are problematic.”
Using more recent statistical methods that take measurement error into account, McDonough and colleagues revealed a more stagnant picture. They looked at transitions into and out of poverty between 1993 and 2003 in the United States and Britain, which are similarly liberal welfare states. “Poverty persistence exists in both societies, but it is clearly more prevalent in the U.S.,” says McDonough. And the risk of staying poor is not equally distributed. Lack of education increases the risk of persistent poverty by 14 times in the United States, but by only 4.5 times in Britain. Not being white quadruples the risk of persistent poverty in the United States, and only doubles it in Britain.
The researchers credit British policy with the nation’s relative social mobility. “British social programs are associated with a 40 percent decline in the proportion of people who are persistently poor, compared to the United States, which has only a 3 percent drop,” says McDonough. “Britain’s stronger safety net, as well as their explicit commitment to reduce poverty, seems to have made a difference.
“I think it all comes down to how you as a society respond to those most vulnerable within it,” McDonough says. “Do you cut them loose and say: ‘You’re on your own—we did it, now you go do it, too’? Or do you say … we as a society are going to try to mitigate inequalities? It’s a choice of the society, and America has always been more individualistically based than other social democratic countries.”
The distinction may now be fading. Since the 2010 election, Britain “is making deep cuts to social program spending with the David Cameron government,” says McDonough. “It will be interesting to see whether persistent poverty increases in the coming years.”
Diana Worts, Amanda Sacker, and Peggy McDonough, “Falling Short of the Promise: Poverty Vulnerability in the United States and Britain, 1993-2003,” American Journal of Sociology, 116, 2010.
Read more stories by Jessica Ruvinsky.