Refuting Kenworthy (1999)

Lane Kenworthy authored a paper claiming that welfare does not increase poverty in the long run. He averaged government transfers reported in OECD data over the period 1960-91 and regressed this upon an absolute poverty threshold in 1991. He considered several collinearity issues and found them unimportant; thus, the issue is simply whether welfare spending correlates with poverty.

His preferred measure of welfare , the decommodification index, is simply a measure of how white a country is:

Poverty correlates with climate (weather from climatetemps.com for capital city, Fahrenheit):

For a given climate, welfare has no correlation with poverty:

Spreadsheet.