> Congrats to Doug on the section on transfer payments and
>poverty drawing on the LIS studies. Well done!
Si, si. Excellent, amazing article.
The piece made me curious about France. Of the three economic models presented--social democratic, corporatist, liberal--I would have assumed, based admittedly on scant knowledge, that France is of the second. Is this true, or am I mistaken? (I am aware that these are not hard-and-fast categories.) The thing that struck me was that France has a poverty rate that tops even liberal countries like the UK and Australia (though, of course, it doesn't approach the US's). If France is of the liberal model their poverty rate makes perfect statistical sense. If it is of the corporatist model, however, it skews the typologies a bit. If this is so, what makes France such an anomoly?
I guess maybe the bigger question is: Why does a country with a population as activist and take-it-to-the-streets as France's have such high poverty? Should this be disheartening? or is France just going through a rough period?
Eric Beck