Lane Kenworthy writes:
The book is full of graphs that support the above claims. One thing I like about Kenworthy’s approach is that he performs a separate analysis to examine each of his hypotheses. A lot of social scientists seem to think that the ideal analysis will conclude with a big regression where each coefficient tells a story and you can address all your hypotheses by looking at which predictors and interactions have statistically significant coefficients. Really, though, I think you need a separate analysis for each causal question (see chapters 9 and 10 of my book with Jennifer, follow this link).
Kenworthy’s overall recommendation is to increase transfer payments to low-income families and to increase overall government spending on social services, and to fund this through general tax increases.
What will it take for this to happen? After a review of the evidence from economic trends and opinion polls, Kenworthy writes, “Americans are potentially receptive to a more generous set of social programs, but their demand for it is far from overwhelming.”
P.S. See Kenworthy’s blog for related material and here for our paper on income inequality and partisan voting.
