CAUSES OF POVERTY; FRASER INSTITUTE

   In a follow-up policy paper, the Brookings Institution assembled a panel of experts representing various perspectives to outline the principal causes of and solutions to poverty. It lays out a plan of action that is broadly similar to the Sawhill-Haskins proposals and clearly implies that behavioural factors (i.e., choices) are the primary cause of poverty and that with the right policies and incentives as well as the expectation of personal responsibility, behaviours can change. Specifically, the experts suggest policies that promote cultural norms relating to parenthood and marriage, promote delayed, responsible childbearing, increase access to effective parenting education, improve skills and make work pay for the less educated, and increase public investments in early childhood education.
   The Canadian evidence is similar to that presented for the United States. When social norms like finishing high school, getting a full-time job, and having children only after getting married are followed, poverty rates are extremely low (less than 1%) using 2015 data. Single-parent families, especially in those cases where the parent was never married, have among the highest incidence of poverty in Canada, as is the case in the US. Yet, single parent families where the parent is employed full-time reduce their risk of poverty more than four-fold.
    Unless poverty is “enabled,” most people, regardless of their disadvantage, manage to escape poverty. So, bad choices and bad luck are not destiny. Enablement effectively reduces the cost of bad choices and makes them more likely. Bad choices can be enabled by ineffective and counterproductive policy. For example, the existing welfare system, undoubtedly developed with good intentions to help the poor, turns out to be the key enabler of poverty. In practice, a system that has no employment strategy for clients, has no requirements of them, and expects nothing from them, is simply unhelpful. It slowly traps some people, especially those with low self-esteem and little confidence, into a child-like state of dependency and permanent low income.