The United States is a nation of paradoxes: it is certainly paradoxical to have both the highest per capita income among the large Western countries and the highest poverty rate. According to the OECD, in 2022 18.1% of the US population lived in conditions of relative poverty; Italy, which certainly does not stand out favorably in this ranking, stops at a more decent 12.2%.
For a European, it is very difficult to understand how such a rich nation could agree to leave such a large part of its population behind. In some ways, when we think of the United States we tend to think of the same country that our ancestors looked to with hope: a country full of resources, with great opportunities for anyone willing to roll up their sleeves.
There is no doubt that the United States was truly, between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the promised land for those who, from the overcrowded European continent, chose to chase their fortune across the Atlantic. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a worker in the American construction sector earned twice as much as his British equivalent, and about five times as much as an Italian worker. On the other hand, in the United States land and natural resources in general were abundant, while the workforce was scarce: the exact opposite of old Europe. Not only did workers, even the least skilled ones, command good wages, but in general American society was much less unequal than European society.
The United States in the period between the Civil War (1861-65) and the beginning of the twentieth century, therefore, enjoyed the optimal combination of high wages, high social mobility and low inequality. This is the scenario that still lingers in the imagination of Europeans, and that we think of almost automatically – forgetting that, as confirmed by the OECD, the United States of this first part of the twenty-first century is by far the most unequal of the great Western nations, has low social mobility (approximately Italian levels, so to speak) and forces almost a quarter of its workforce to accept starvation wages, or in any case very low wages.
If we want to understand the immediate causes of rampant poverty in the contemporary United States, we must certainly consider the progressive degradation of the social safety net, largely as a result of the very incomplete (from a European point of view) American welfare state. A very rich country, which could certainly afford to offer help to its weakest citizens, hesitates to do so. Not only that: it cyclically and stubbornly questions what has been achieved by the administrations most sensitive to social issues, as in the case of the Trump administration’s fight against the so-called “Obamacare”.
