Quote Originally Posted by OngBonga View Post
wut?

Slums happen BECAUSE there is no welfare. We don't have slums in the UK, and as best I know they don't exist in USA, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal... the list of countries with slums will be very similar to the list of countries that have no basic welfare, places like Mexico, Brazil, Kenya, Bangladesh, India... do you suppose this is a coincidence?

The only way to make a slum no longer a slum is to demolish it, and you can only do that when there's no people living there.
I don't know if that correlation would be meaningful in a regression (it probably wouldn't be), but I do know that economic theory describes why welfare is very unlikely to cause increasing prosperity.