Poverty Returns with Misguided Policy

by Franz Segbers, Nick Caya (Editor), Marc Batko (Translator)

Overview

Poverty is returning. That must be our first discovery when we speak about poverty in Germany. Once it was fought and became a marginal problem. Why is it returning? For a long while, there was the firm belief that life goes forward and we live in an elevator society. Our children will be better off. That was the motto when I was growing up. This picture of the elevator society where everyone would be prosperous is not reality any more. Everyone is not on an upward course any more. The picture has turned upside down. While some are going upward, others are going downward. A Lord's Prayer society has replaced the elevator society. The formerly secure middle class at its outskirts has long been eroding. Children with good education can not find good jobs and work their way from one traineeship to the next and one temporary job to the next.

In the 1980s, unemployment was the main reason for poverty. In the 1990s, child poverty moved into the center of attention. Since the turn of the millennium, work is the main reason for poverty. Now poverty gnaws in the situations of many families who are counted in the middle class. Why is that? Why is poverty returning and why is the number of the poor increasing – and also the number of the rich? Why is the middle class shriveling?

The poor are the first ones who suffer from a false or misguided economic and political policy. Economic and financial crisis on one hand the crises of the social state are two sides of one and the same coin of a flawed economic and social policy. A policy according to the motto "Less state and more market" has failed.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940156199181
Publisher:	Marc Batko
Publication date:	12/03/2018
Sold by:	PUBLISHDRIVE KFT
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	148 KB

About the Author

Freelance translator of German articles on alternative economics, rethinking state, market and neoliberal myths. Profit-making is different than profit-maximizing. The neoliberal model promotes profits, not investments. All personal and corporate achievement depended on state investment in roads, schools, health care, food safety, water quality and airwaves. The future could be full of free internet books, community centers, reduced working hours, shared work, exchanging roles, cloud workers, play, exuberance and mystery! The future that is open and dynamic not closed and static must be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the present. (cf. Jurgen Moltmann)