We've been talking about comparable welfare states and the value choices that are built into them, and we've looked at size and structure. And so in this video lecture, we're going to focus on outcomes, and the charts are going to be quite big, so you're not going to see very much of me. But to begin with, we're talking about outcomes, and we're going to think about outcomes in terms of measures of poverty and inequality, life outcomes for people in the country, and education and employment as outcomes. Now, what outcomes you pick are, of course, a value issue. And so if you picked an issue that had to do with starting of new businesses or development of new technologies, which could be an outcome of the welfare state, you would end up with a somewhat different analysis. These are the classic reasons that we engage in welfare state activity, to reduce poverty and inequality, to improve the outcomes for people, and education and employment. So this chart brings us to a conversation about poverty, and we'll look at this quite a lot more in a later lecture. But you can see that the US, with our very large social welfare expenditures, in a comparable sense, has 18% of our population poor, whereas Canada, the next highest that I'm pointing out here, is just about 14 and a half. In between Canada and the US, there's Italy, Greece, Spain, Chile, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, and Turkey, and Israel. And Turkey and Mexico, which are countries that we generally think of as quite a bit poorer than the US, actually have lower poverty rates than the US. And then when we look at the United Kingdom and Poland here, you'll see that their poverty rates are about at 13.5%, and the French poverty rate is just above 10%. So social welfare in the United States leaves more people poor than it does in comparable nations. So this is before and after taxes. So before taxes, actually, Germany has more people poor than do the United States, and so does Great Britain have more people poor, and so does Poland, and France has more people poor. So what's changing here is the decisions that are made in the social welfare system. So although France has more people poor before government taxes and transfer, they have substantially less afterwards than the United States does over here. And that's true of Poland, it's true of Great Britain, it's true of Germany, it's true of Canada, it's true along the line here. So our welfare state leaves more people in poverty. So income inequality, the US here has an income inequality measure that is higher. This is a Gini measure. It goes from zero to one. It's a standard measure of inequality, and you'll see that the next most unequal nation here that we're talking about is the United Kingdom. Turkey, Chile, and Mexico have more inequality than the United States. Canada has less than Britain and the United States, but more than Poland and France. Ans so if one of the outcomes we're looking for here is more equality, the US social welfare system does worse than the German one, the Canadian one, the United Kingdom one, and then the French one right here. So now, another way of thinking about outcomes is what happens to people's lives. And so this is life expectancy at birth, and you'll see that at birth, in Poland, it's assumed that people will live just above 78 years. In the United States, it's about 78.5, in Germany, it's 81 and a half, in the United Kingdom, it's 81 and a half, and in Canada, it's 82. Now, the argument here is that as we provide better social welfare, people do better, and the most vulnerable people live longer, and that leads to longer life expectancy. Infant mortality is another measure that's often used to measure this. This has to do with the nutrition of the mother, it has to do with the healthcare available to the mother, it has to do with the general social development of the mother. Infant mortality has a great deal to do with that. It often has to do with early birth and neonatal activity, and these are the result, often, of nutrition, and mothers' preparation for what they're doing. And you'll see here that the US' infant mortality rate is highest, except for Chile, Turkey, and Mexico. And significantly higher than Canada, higher than the United Kingdom, higher than Germany, higher than Poland, higher than France. So this is another measure of the outcome of the social welfare system. And finally, this is a measure of suicide, which has to do with despair, and a sense of wellbeing, a sense of having the resources to move on with one's life. You'll see here that, again, the United States has a higher suicide rate than almost all of the nations we would consider ourselves comparable to. Some of the former communist nations have higher suicide rates. Korea has a quite amazingly high suicide rate. But in the set of nations that we've thought of as comparable to us, the US' suicide rate is highest. So the potential lost years of life here are higher for the US as well. And so overall, what the point of this is, is that we make choices in our welfare state, in the United States, we decide how much to spend, and we spend quite a lot. We decide in what what form to spend, and we spend a great deal of what we spend in platform benefits that come from employers, and that we spend much less on income benefits for lower income people. And we spend much on healthcare, but much of that healthcare spending is platform-related healthcare spending. And so the results that we looked at were that we have more poverty, more inequality, and generally, in the measures of life outcomes, we're not doing as well. And so this brings us to critical questions about the choices that are being made in the design and execution of the US welfare state that we will continue to talk about through the rest of this sequence.
