GOVERNMENT CAN FIGHT INEQUALITY.

• Position: Poverty research - Brief Article

"Despite recent headlines heralding the latest Census Bureau figures on poverty, the gulf between the rich and the poor has widened significantly since 1973." notes Benjamin Page, the Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making in political science at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., co-author of What Government Can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Equality with James R. Simmons of the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. The Census Bureau report figures suggest that the economic boom has pushed poverty to its lowest rate since 1979. "It is true that the nation's robust growth finally began to trickle down to low-income workers in the late 1990s." Page indicates "But U.S. inequality and poverty are still at the highest levels in the advanced. industrialized world."

Since 1973, the gap in earnings between well-educated and not-so-well-educated workers has steadily increased, and the real standard of living of a large proportion of the workforce may have declined. This pattern can be traced to a number of powerful economic and political forces, including increasingly free international trade, capital mobility and immigration, the loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., increased use of computers and information technology, and weakened trade unions.

Page and Simmons advocate many sweeping changes, while emphasizing that the policies they favor do not and will not have negative impacts on economic efficiency or individuals' freedom and liberty:

* Arguments for abandoning egalitarian programs because of the competitive pressures of economic globalization are greatly exaggerated. though some government initiatives are more vulnerable than others. A comparative look shows that welfare states in the social democracies of northern Europe and other advanced countries have undergone marginal retrenchment, but remain largely intact with no signs of unraveling.

* A number of programs involving investment in the human capital of disadvantaged individuals--particularly in the areas of infant and child health and nutrition, preschooling, and elementary and secondary education--can reduce poverty and inequality while helping, rather than hurting, the economy as a whole.

* Several programs designed to provide abundant jobs at good wages, which are crucial to any serious effort to reduce poverty and inequality, produce net economic benefits...