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Mind the gap: facing up to inequalities

Christian Century, June 14, 2003 by Harlan Beckley

Inequality and Christian Ethics.

By Douglas Hicks. Cambridge University Press, 287 pp., $60.00; paperback, $22.00.

The Common Good and Christian Ethics.

By David Hollenbach, S.J. Cambridge University Press, 269 pp., $65.00; paperback, $23.00.

What Government Can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Inequality.

By Benjamin I. Page and James R. Simmons. University of Chicago Press, 409 pp., $29.00; paperback, $20.00.

The New World of Welfare.

Edited by Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins. Brookings Institution Press, 514 pp., $49.95; paperback, $19.95.

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PINEAPPLE, AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD growing up in the Mott Haven district of the South Bronx, wanted to become a pediatrician, she told Jonathan Kozol. She was among the Hispanic and African-American children Kozol came to know through the after-school program at St. Ann's Episcopal Church when he was preparing to write Ordinary Resurrections in the late '90s. Pineapple's aspirations and potential far exceeded her opportunities to fulfill them. Unemployment in the South Bronx was at 45 percent; of the 1,900 to 2,000 children enrolled at Morris High School, only about 65 graduated each year; and, many of the children were afflicted with asthma, something Kozol associated with the neighborhood's incinerators for discarded medical supplies. These circumstances prompted indignant protest from Mother Martha, the priest at St. Ann's. Mother Martha, Kozol reported, "doesn't simply say ... that rich people 'have advantages.' She says, 'They take advantages.'"

Kozol's account of the human toll of poverty and inequality reflects an all-too-common reality in the U.S. and in the developing world. More than one in every ten Americans (11.7 percent) and an even higher number of children (16.3 percent) lived in poverty in 2001. The poverty line that year was $18,104 for a household of four. Many people estimate that the actual threshold for poverty is far higher than this income line used by the Census Bureau, and poverty is on the rise in the present recessionary economy. Poverty measurements that include illiteracy and premature death in addition to income make the prospect for Americans like Pineapple even grimmer. According to the poverty index of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the U.S. ranks last (17th) among all the developed nations for which measurements are available. Canada ranks 12th.

People just above the poverty line fare little better and are becoming increasingly worse off. Two of the books considered here cite data showing that the quintile of U.S. citizens with the highest income receives nearly 50 percent of all income, while the lowest quintile receives less than 4 percent. Income inequality has significantly increased since the early 1970s, and the changes are even more dramatic over the past three decades among the very highest income levels.

Paul Krugman, Princeton University economist and a columnist for the New York Times, says that the 13,000 U.S. taxpayers with the highest reported income received 3 percent of all income in 1998, 300 times that of average families. In 1970 a similar segment of taxpayers received 0.7 percent of all income, "only" 70 times the average family income. (According to Krugman, changing social norms, not economic productivity, explain these obscenely large incomes.)

Provisions for health care are just as unequal. In a nation that devotes nearly 14 percent of its GNP to health care, more than 40 million citizens (one-sixth of the population, most of whom are not officially impoverished) lack private or public health care insurance. No other industrial nation contributes more than 9 percent of its GNP to national health care, yet all have a universal and far more equal system of health care delivery.

The data on global poverty and inequality chill hope that economic growth alone will diminish poverty and benefit everyone. In its millennial report on poverty, the World Bank reveals that 24 percent of the population in developing nations live--or struggle to live--in absolute poverty, on less than one dollar a day. From one perspective, this is good news. The percentage of the world's population in absolute poverty has diminished significantly during the past half century. Nevertheless, hopes that democracy, free markets and economic growth would substantially reduce poverty, as measured by income, have been frustrated by uneven progress. Nor do measurements of cognitive development and physical and mental health give reason for satisfaction. The UNDP calculates that 113 million of 680 million primary-school-age children were not enrolled in school in 1998. In 2000 1.1 billion people lacked access to safe water and 2.4 billion to sanitation services.

The data on global inequality are even bleaker. The 2002 report of the UNDP indicates that the 5 percent of the world's population with the highest income receives 114 times the amount received by the 5 percent with the lowest. The inequality of income between countries for which we have data has increased since 1950. The adult literacy rate in Niger is 16 percent compared to over 90 percent in many Latin American nations.

Mind the gap: facing up to inequalities

Christian Century, June 14, 2003 by Harlan Beckley

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