A short one today:

A brief summary of

Moller, Stephanie, et al. “Determinants of Relative Poverty in Advanced Capitalist Democracies.” American Sociological Review, vol. 68, no. 1, 2003, pp. 22–51. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3088901. Accessed 10 May 2020.

This article reviews the development of a data set to measure the impact of multiple different variables on poverty and proverty reduction efforts. It does this by devising a means to measure poverty with and without “tax and transfer” (ie government intervention via wealth redistribution). It tests 17 different variables which had been hypothesized to be indicative of poverty rates across 14 different countries with different rates of poverty to determine which factors had the greatest impact of causing poverty and which factors had the greatest impact on reducing poverty. (more…)

Single Parent Families with Children under 18 have a markedly higher rate of poverty. 26.6% of single parent families (41.4 % in the US (, 2nd only to Ireland’s 45.8%) are below the relative poverty line. This is 3.5X the rate of dual parent or childless homes (which are similar, 7.6% and 8.9% below the poverty line). The number one cause of single parent families is still Separation or Divorce, followed by unwed pregnancy. (56% of childless homes from divorce per pew research for the US, and more dramatic in other nations like Japan, with 96%+ from divorce). While there are some indications that unwed single parents are financially worse off (30% of median 2 parent income vs 49% for divorced), there isn’t a good source I have yet found which breaks out single parents in poverty by these two cohorts and by the definition of relative poverty in the prior post, both would be below the relative poverty line. (more…)