142 • INCLUSION MATTERS
of middle-class and poor people alike in countries as diverse as Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Hungary, Nigeria, and several others. Essentially, the relations between the state and society are undergoing a change, with rising numbers of the middle class demanding a different kind of accountability but also wanting to preserve their benefits in the face of a rising lower-middle class. Empirical evidence on what this means is relatively thin, but the trends appear to be clear. The middle class and the elite are also an important agent for change, as chapter 6 shows. Recent evidence from the United States suggests that policies favored by affluent Americans (the top income decile) have a one in two chance of being adopted; in contrast, the support of the poor has virtually no impact on the prospects of a policy being adopted (Gilens 2012). This is not to say that elites necessarily opt for antipoor or exclusionary policies—most affluent Americans would support broadening access to higher education, for example (Gilens 2012). Moreover, when elites have a stake in public systems, the systems tend to perform better. In Sweden, for example, everyone was required to attend state schools until the early 1990s. In 1992, the country introduced an innovative school voucher system, offering students the freedom to choose any school they wanted. The municipality would pay the school an amount equivalent to the average cost incurred by the child in a state school. Private schools could participate as long as they did not charge an additional fee. In this manner, private schooling became affordable to everyone, and schooling outcomes improved (Baker 2004; The Economist 2007; Böhlmark and Lindahl 2012). It helped that affluent Swedes did not mind paying higher taxes under Sweden’s progressive tax policy. Economic Crises and Food Insecurity In contrast to the dramatic growth that characterized the last years of the previous millennium, growth rates in most countries have slowed, as a result of crises in recent years. With the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, the global economy shrank for the first time since World War II, with social and economic impacts reverberating around the globe. The crisis overlapped with an earlier food and energy crisis, which in 2006–08 pushed the prices of staple items beyond the reach of millions of people. Economic and other crises tend to affect already disadvantaged groups more than they do others. The effects of a global crisis can be transmitted through various channels (such as trade, public budgets, credit, investment, aid, and remittances). The nature and magnitude of each of these impacts