What would reduce the poverty rate?

[Republican Left]

How would you reduce the poverty rate, specifically in the U.S but answers for other countries are welcome? How do you think poverty in other countries is different to that America?

[God-Empress Stacey I of House Abrams]

We all know what reduces poverty. Only one thing has ever successfully done so anywhere in the history of the world. It's called redistribution.

[Del Tachi]

In the developing world:  better inputs for smallholding farmers that will crowd-in additional improved cultivation practices.

[Kingpoleon]

Someone wanting to badly enough.

[Egotistic Egoist / Materialistic Materialist]

Cheaper housing and fewer zoning regulations. Scrapping rent control laws. Bolstering the community college system and encouraging people to get degrees from there.

[Averroës Nix]

Measure it differently.

This response is only half-joking. The official poverty measure used by federal agencies in the US is a poor representation of material insecurity and deprivation.

[mileslunn]

I actually think GAI is best way to reduce it as it gives the poor money so you can cut a lot of the bureaucracy and duplication for social assistance.  Also any money you give the poor, they will spend it in the economy which helps grow the economy overall creating a multiplier effect thus more jobs and more tax revenue.

[Balsanator03]

Expand public housing with incentives.

If more public housing is built nationwide with the incentive to bring homeless off the streets or the impoverished by setting the monthly income to $250 per month, and a requirement being to get a job, people can have a better life and poverty and homelessness decrease tenfold.

[Rover]

Through education, both academic and vocational training. College fees need to be subsidized and dealt with.
Reform the housing sector, and perhaps adopt the Singaporean housing model in cities that are struggling, i.e. San Francisco, Boston, Chicago. Markets have clearly failed and rents are ridiculously high in many cities throughout the nation.
Reform healthcare and make sure everyone is insured. We can learn something from our neighbors in Canada.
Healthcare, college loans, and rents are eating much of the average millennium salary.

[Blairite]

Negative income tax, zoning reform, education reform, baby bonds, making higher education more affordable (but actually), single-payer healthcare, criminal justice reform, targeted infrastructure investment, etc.

[parochial boy]

We all know what reduces poverty. Only one thing has ever successfully done so anywhere in the history of the world. It's called redistribution.

Yep, but people will do anything they can to avoid admitting that fact. Including arguing that the failures of neoliberalism are in fact the failures of an insufficient level of neoliberalism. Intellectually, it's the equivalent of refusing to recognise that the USSR's Communism was failing in the 1980s.

[pbrower2a]

1. Stronger trade unions. Unionized workers get better pay and working conditions, but also get better opportunities for their children. For kids whose parents are in the same occupations, the union workers' kids fare better in school, getting better grades and being less likely to drop out... and to go further with their formal schooling.

2. More subsidies for formal education. If education is about as expensive as a hobby (which is about what it was in the 1970's at land-grant universities), then people are less likely to quit for reasons of cost... or compromising their education to work in menial jobs. It's  hard to see what college students learn from working in fast-food places, dollar stores or convenience stores... the people who need such work most as a long-term career are typically poor people with little education and few skills.

3. Drug rehab. That should be obvious.

4. Promote the establishment of high-tech industry in what are now cities in economic decline. Just think of Detroit, which when the automobile industry was so important attracted talented and hard-working people much as Silicon Valley does today. The auto industry isn't as big a share of the economy anymore, and it has dispersed heavily from southeastern Michigan. I could give plenty of other examples.

It is a terrible idea to have economic activity concentrated in a few high-cost areas. Need I tell you about Ohio?     

[khuzifenq]

2. More subsidies for formal education. If education is about as expensive as a hobby (which is about what it was in the 1970's at land-grant universities), then people are less likely to quit for reasons of cost... or compromising their education to work in menial jobs. It's  hard to see what college students learn from working in fast-food places, dollar stores or convenience stores... the people who need such work most as a long-term career are typically poor people with little education and few skills.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/who-cares-about-the-ivy-league?

We need to question the importance of matching in our society. Tyler Cowen makes a good case in his book The Complacent Class that America has over-indexed on sorting and stratification in our society. There’s probably diminishing returns to putting all the top people in one room or on one team. It means ideas spread around less, and the top people have less of a chance to educate others. It’s like a gifted-and-talented program for all of society, but instead of one hour a day it’s forever, and instead of just extracting the nerds it extracts the rich kids too.

And there’s a strong possibility that our obsession with matching has negative side effects — when all the talented and rich people befriend and marry all the other talented and rich people, the rest of society is left to sort of fend for itself. What’s more, even the commentariat doesn’t seem to realize what a problem this is, possibly because so many of us went to those top schools too.

A creeping, toxic elitism

I don’t want to veer too far into cultural hand-waving here, but it seems like obsession with the Ivy League is a symptom of a creeping, toxic elitism that has permeated American society over the last four decades. We’re obsessed with high-status winner-take-all jobs. Our economy is dominated by superstar companies. The cult of Hollywood celebrities may have given way to the cult of Instagram influencers and YouTube stars, but it’s still all about the glittering few. Even the people who spend all day yelling about Elon Musk on Twitter are still spending all day…thinking about Elon Musk. It’s as if the inequality of income and wealth is mirrored in a general inequality of status, where only a few people and institutions matter and everyone else is left to watch the glitterati from the cheap seats.

I don’t know how we reverse this trend. I don’t know how the everyperson becomes central to our culture and our policy and our visions of our own lives again. Maybe redistribution will do the trick. But I think one small piece of it is for the commentariat (and that includes me) to focus less on the Harvards and Stanfords of the world, and more on the Cal State Long Beaches and the SUNY Stony Brooks. Already I like what the Biden administration is doing, focusing more resources on HBCUs and community colleges. Perhaps the old man is onto something.

[Egotistic Egoist / Materialistic Materialist]

We all know what reduces poverty. Only one thing has ever successfully done so anywhere in the history of the world. It's called redistribution.

Yep, but people will do anything they can to avoid admitting that fact. Including arguing that the failures of neoliberalism are in fact the failures of an insufficient level of neoliberalism. Intellectually, it's the equivalent of refusing to recognise that the USSR's Communism was failing in the 1980s.

The word "neoliberal" has, in the past 40 years, been applied to everyone from Milton Friedman to Kamala Harris. Its meaning has effectively been lost to time.

[parochial boy]

We all know what reduces poverty. Only one thing has ever successfully done so anywhere in the history of the world. It's called redistribution.

Yep, but people will do anything they can to avoid admitting that fact. Including arguing that the failures of neoliberalism are in fact the failures of an insufficient level of neoliberalism. Intellectually, it's the equivalent of refusing to recognise that the USSR's Communism was failing in the 1980s.

The word "neoliberal" has, in the past 40 years, been applied to everyone from Milton Friedman to Kamala Harris. Its meaning has effectively been lost to time.

That's only partially true. Word's have meaning because people have a shared understanding of what they mean. The fact that it is thrown out at every possibility may mean that it has a rather imprecise meaning, but that applies to basically every political concept. The fundamental principle of the ideology - namely the perspective that the rules of free market competition should be introduced as widely as possible, still holds true and is still the basic understanding that people have of it. And more importantly, any honest discussion about politics has to accept that this is a guiding ideology that many people follow.

In that respect, it's no different to any other ideological label - but I don't go around arguing that the words "socialism" or "fascism" don't mean anything just because some people are inclined to use them as a catch all to refer to things that they don't like.

[215 till I die]

1. Stronger trade unions. Unionized workers get better pay and working conditions, but also get better opportunities for their children. For kids whose parents are in the same occupations, the union workers' kids fare better in school, getting better grades and being less likely to drop out... and to go further with their formal schooling.

2. More subsidies for formal education. If education is about as expensive as a hobby (which is about what it was in the 1970's at land-grant universities), then people are less likely to quit for reasons of cost... or compromising their education to work in menial jobs. It's  hard to see what college students learn from working in fast-food places, dollar stores or convenience stores... the people who need such work most as a long-term career are typically poor people with little education and few skills.

3. Drug rehab. That should be obvious.

4. Promote the establishment of high-tech industry in what are now cities in economic decline. Just think of Detroit, which when the automobile industry was so important attracted talented and hard-working people much as Silicon Valley does today. The auto industry isn't as big a share of the economy anymore, and it has dispersed heavily from southeastern Michigan. I could give plenty of other examples.

It is a terrible idea to have economic activity concentrated in a few high-cost areas. Need I tell you about Ohio?     

In addition, stronger unions even help laborers in non-union businesses. Labor strength offers an incentive for non-union employers to pre-emptively offer benefits+a fair wage to placate workers from organizing themselves.

[georgelee]

How would you reduce the poverty rate, specifically in the U.S but answers for other countries are welcome? How do you think poverty in other countries is different to that America?

Welfare trusts play great role under this regard. We should be the one solid part of these trusts. 

[Red Velvet]

We all know what reduces poverty. Only one thing has ever successfully done so anywhere in the history of the world. It's called redistribution.

Yup. But not just that.

So I would add investment in public infrastructure as well. Assuring the poorer have access to universal healthcare, free public education of quality, that kind of basic stuff.

[America Needs Kali]

More broadly shared economic growth.