CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- The issue of race has cast a long and often ugly shadow over American life. That's hardly news, especially in a state that was born out of a Civil War sparked by racially based slavery. But some serious economic research has found that the effects of race and racism extend farther that we might suspect.

Many observers have noticed that the capitalist economies of Western Europe tend to spend more public resources than the United States on social programs such as old age, disability and survivor's pensions; family and child benefits; and unemployment and labor market programs. These nations also have some form of universal health care, although they spend less of their gross domestic product (GDP) on this than we do.

Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth College investigated this issue. In 2001, they published a paper titled "Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?" (Note: the term "welfare state" as used here doesn't refer simply to programs that attempt to assist the poorest families but rather a range of programs and benefits across the population.)

They found that many things influenced these differences, such as different attitudes about inequality, different histories, economic and constitutional factors. But one of the biggest factors is the issue of race.

As they put it, "Racial discord plays a critical role in determining beliefs about the poor." Since members of racial minority groups are often seen as more likely to be poor, public policies that would reduce poverty are seen as primarily benefitting those groups - even though it doesn't really work out that way in practice.

They note that foes of such policies often use "race-based rhetoric" to oppose them. "Across countries, racial fragmentation is a powerful predictor of redistribution. Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America's troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state."

The authors found that states with higher percentages of African Americans tended to have lower social welfare benefits. In those states, white Americans are more likely to oppose social spending than in states that are less diverse. But this tendency isn't confined to the United States. In general, countries that are more ethnically homogenous spend more of their GDP on social programs than more diverse countries.

Although there's nothing natural about racism, human beings seem to have a powerful and possibly ingrained tendency to see the world in in-group/out-group terms, with a greater tendency towards altruism among the in-group. Although there are lots of ways to split people into rival groups - such as religion, political beliefs, or even loyalty to sports teams - race unfortunately works particularly "well" for that in America.

Many observers have noticed that the capitalist economies of Western Europe tend to spend more public resources than the United States on social programs such as old age, disability and survivor's pensions; family and child benefits; and unemployment and labor market programs. These nations also have some form of universal health care, although they spend less of their gross domestic product (GDP) on this than we do.

Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth College investigated this issue. In 2001, they published a paper titled "Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?" (Note: the term "welfare state" as used here doesn't refer simply to programs that attempt to assist the poorest families but rather a range of programs and benefits across the population.)

They found that many things influenced these differences, such as different attitudes about inequality, different histories, economic and constitutional factors. But one of the biggest factors is the issue of race.

As they put it, "Racial discord plays a critical role in determining beliefs about the poor." Since members of racial minority groups are often seen as more likely to be poor, public policies that would reduce poverty are seen as primarily benefitting those groups - even though it doesn't really work out that way in practice.

They note that foes of such policies often use "race-based rhetoric" to oppose them. "Across countries, racial fragmentation is a powerful predictor of redistribution. Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America's troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state."

The authors found that states with higher percentages of African Americans tended to have lower social welfare benefits. In those states, white Americans are more likely to oppose social spending than in states that are less diverse. But this tendency isn't confined to the United States. In general, countries that are more ethnically homogenous spend more of their GDP on social programs than more diverse countries.

Although there's nothing natural about racism, human beings seem to have a powerful and possibly ingrained tendency to see the world in in-group/out-group terms, with a greater tendency towards altruism among the in-group. Although there are lots of ways to split people into rival groups - such as religion, political beliefs, or even loyalty to sports teams - race unfortunately works particularly "well" for that in America.

While the in-group/out-group orientation may have served a purpose when small bands of humans struggled to survive, it doesn't serve us very well in advanced industrial democracies. And we've had to pay a high price for it.

Exploiting racial divisions has been a favorite ploy of opponents of popular movements and labor struggles - and has frequently been successful.  As Jill Quadagno noted in One Nation, Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance, when President Harry Truman proposed national health insurance in the late 1940s, powerful Southern politicians opposed the measure, in part out of fear that this would lead to desegregation.

Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote note: "A natural generalization of race-based theory is that Americans think of the poor as members of some different group than themselves, whereas Europeans think of the poor as members of their own group. Racial differences between the poor and the nonpoor in the United States will tend to create the perception of the poor as 'other.'..."

The irony is that while many people here think of poverty in racial terms, by far the largest number of poor people in the United States are white. While African Americans and Hispanics are more likely to be poor than white Americans, the Census Bureau reported in 2007 that over 25 million white Americans lived below the poverty line - or more than the number of African Americans (9 million), Hispanics (nearly 10 million) or Asian Americans (1.3 million) combined.

The same is true of health coverage. By far the largest group of the more than 45 million Americans without health insurance is white (more than 34 million). Again, this is more than the combined total of uninsured African Americans (7 million), Hispanics (nearly 15 million) and Asian Americans (2 million).

Viewing economic hardships through a racial lens makes even less sense in West Virginia, where the population is overwhelmingly white but despite recent gains still has high rates of poverty and lower median wages than the national average.

As the threat of recession looms and as more and more Americans are feeling the economic squeeze in the grocery stores, with home payments, or in unemployment lines, we would do well to stop thinking of the unfortunate as the Other and start looking out for each other.

Wilson is director of the American Friends Service Committee WV Economic Justice Project and publishes a daily public affairs blog,  www.goatrope.blogspot.com.