Should policy promote well-being?

The ONS has released a new publication in its series on measuring national well-being.  Cue the now predictable and trite criticisms.  Waste of money.  Voters care about other things.  Cameron's vanity project.

A more interesting criticism is whether or not the state should promote policies that explicitly and deliberately try to promote well-being.  Libertarians tend to argue that it is not the role of the state to decide what makes people happy.  Yet this is a deceitful argument.  At its root, libertarianism is the belief that individual freedom - mostly from the state -  will maximise people's well-being.  If it didn't, it would be a futile ideology.

So, should well-being be an official objective of policy?  If so, this would involve a major reorientation of social policy.  Since the creation of the modern welfare state, I think there have been three objectives to policy: reducing material want, spreading greater freedom and supporting economic growth.  Even more traditionally social goals - reducing inequality for example - have often been justified by these three objectives, rather than for their impact on well-being.

Spreading greater well-being seems like an obvious goal of policy, but there are a number of problems here.  In particular, the increasing use of social science evidence to show the determinants of well-being raises some interesting debates.  For example, we know from social surveys that married people and religious people tend to be happier than those who are single and atheist.  Does this mean that government show use policy to promote marriage and religion?

My own doctoral research crosses such debates.  In short, I'm interested in whether unemployed people who are on welfare-to-work programmes have higher levels of well-being than unemployed people who aren't (the 'openly unemployed'). My preliminary findings suggest that welfare-to-work participants are happier.  But is this a strong argument that the government should put more of the unemployed on welfare-to-work schemes?  Campaign groups against welfare-to-work - such as Boycott Workfare - invoke other arguments: the denial of basic rights, the wrongful subsidy of multinationals and so on.  This shows that well-being is not the only goal of policy, and needs to balanced against other concerns.

Ultimately, emphasising that policy should promote well-being is an important and good development.  It makes us look beyond the usual indicators - GDP, inflation, household incomes - and consider how people actual feel about their lives.  Yet as we increasingly discover the determinants of well-being, we are left with awkward questions.  What if what makes us happy, many of those don't like the idea of the state promoting?

'One Nation Labour': all things to all people?

I really enjoyed Ed Miliband's speech to the Labour conference on Tuesday.  As someone who's keen on the ideas of 'Blue Labour', I felt the speech was a culmination of two years of ideas around the need for Ed Miliband to move beyond both 'New Labour' and more traditional social democratic concerns, and towards a more communitarian strand of social democracy.

But then, looking at the response to the speech, everyone seemed happy.  New Labour types starting comparing Ed to the 1994 Tony Blair.  The Labour Left celebrated his attack on the banks and promotion of the NHS.  And the more traditional, centre-left social democrats cheered on the attack on inequality and social divisions.

The broad appeal of the speech led me to think: does 'One Nation' mean all things to all people?  How is it possible, in other words, to philosophically appeal to such a broad spectrum within the Labour Party?  Was it just that people saw whatever they liked in the speech and claimed it for themselves?

These worries were confirmed when I saw this story on what 'One Nation Labour' would mean for the welfare state.  Intuitively, I thought it would involve a celebration and defence of universality and contribution and an attack on means-testing.  Means-testing is socially divisive and pits tax-paying non-beneficiaries against non-tax-paying beneficiaries.  Given that 'One Nation' is supposed to be all about reducing social divisions and uniting people, how does means-testing fit in with this concept and vision of social life?

Yet apparently, means-testing universal benefits for pensioners - such as winter fuel payments - is 'One Nation Labour'. To my mind however, rewarding pensioners for decades of work with something like a bus pass or a fuel payment is an important way for society to show an appreciation and honouring of a person's life contribution.  It says that the welfare state is for all - for 'one nation' - not just for the poor - for 'two nations'.

Ed Miliband's speech was striking in the positivity of its vision.  And successful too in baring for all the nasty divisiveness that typifies Cameron's conservatism.  Yet New Labour worked because its political philosophy matched a set of policies: investments in health and education; an 'active' welfare state; early-years support; marketization of public services.  Now, we need a clearer demonstration from Labour of how 'One Nation' relates to policy, and why.

Ed Miliband and predistribution: what does it mean and could it work?

Mark Ferguson at Labour List writes about Ed Miliband's new 'big idea': predistribution.  This is the idea that the market, rather than the state, should be the primary mechanism for delivering a fairer distribution of wealth.  In other words, people's wages should be more equal in the first place - so that the state has less need to intervene through the tax and benefit system.

The advantages of predistribution over redistribution are numerous.  First and most obviously, higher equality and lower poverty could be achieved whilst the state spends less money.  In a time when the electorate highly associates Labour with 'profligate spending', predistribution thus becomes highly attractive.

A second advantage of predistribution is that it's more attuned to many people's notions of fairness and redistributive justice.  To redistribute income through the state you need high levels of solidarity, trust and feelings of reciprocity.  For many complex reasons, we lack these in the UK.  This makes high redistribution - akin to the Scandinavian model - politically untenable.

Predistribution is not a completely new idea.  For those familiar with The Spirit Level, the example of Japan will be remembered.  Japan is one the most equal countries in the OECD world, yet it achieves this with levels of public spending more like the US than Sweden.  How?  Predistribution.  Wages are already more equal in Japan, so the state has less of a need to intervene.  Alternatively, the market distribution of wages in Scandinavia is much more like the market distribution in the US and the UK.  The Scandinavian approach then relies upon the state - in the form of high taxes, generous social transfers and quality services - to achieve a fairer society.

It sounds like a panacea - both for the economic problems the country faces and the political and philosophical impasse that Labour finds itself in.  But it's potentially not.  As Mark Ferguson writes, in a predistribution state that ensures high equality and low poverty through the market, there is the question of what happens to those excluded from the market: such as the disabled and the unemployed.

The second problem is even more profound.  This is that the UK economy is not built for predistribution.  Over the past three decades, successive governments have built a labour market that is high in flexibility but low - at the bottom end - in wages, skills and in productivity.  The problem is that predistribution only works in a high skill, high productivity labour market.

This is why the classic predistribution policy - the minimum wage - has an economic limit in a labour market like the UK's.  Increase it too much, and either unemployment will increase or prices go up - or both.  If Ed Miliband is to make predistribution a real policy goal, he'll need to flesh out how he would fundamentally restructure the British labour market.  And this will be the real challenge.

Are religious people more or less likely to support redistribution in the welfare state?

We are all familiar with many of the characteristics that distinguish people who support the welfare state and those who don't.  We might expect, for example, left-wing voters, women with children, ethnic minorities and the poor to be amongst the most consistent supporters of welfare.  But what is the role of religion?  Are religious more or less likely to support welfare measures - such as income redistribution - than their non-religious counterparts?

This is the question posed in this interesting new study in the European Sociological Review.  Before reading the paper, my intuition was that religious people would be more likely to support redistribution. This might be because religion, or more its purported values - charity, altruism, cooperation, community - seem more aligned with the kind of values associated with support for the welfare state.

However, the authors propose a different hypothesis: that religious people are less likely to support redistribution.  They suggest that this antagonism may be due to the historic transition between the church and state in the responsibility for social welfare, with the former and its devotees unhappy at the diluting of religion's responsibility for welfare.

In short, it transpires that this second hypothesis is true: religious people are significantly less likely to support redistribution than secular individuals, even after a whole host of other variables are controlled for.  The influence of religion on anti-redistributionist attitudes is equivalent to having a higher income or being more highly educated, with these latter two determinants also linked to weak support for redistribution.

I found these results surprising, but my (mistaken) intuition might say more about perceptions of religion in the UK.  Cities with strong Catholic communities - such as Liverpool and Glasgow - tend to be overwhelmingly associated with the Left.  And, as the old saying goes, Labour owed more to Methodism than to Marx.  This interesting study suggests the contrary.  The Conservatives might owe more to the Church than to Churchill.

Is it possible to make social security popular again?

I recently came across Ben Baumberg's paper - 'Three ways to defend social security in Britain' - in the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice.  It is an interesting read and, in short, assesses the success that three recent contributions to the social security debate have had in meeting what Ben argues are the necessary conditions required to improve the quality of social security.  These are that policies:

• Lead to reductions in poverty and inequality.
• Fit existing public attitudes on the deservingness of claimants.
• Aim to, in the long run, change such attitudes on deservingness.

Without going into great detail, Ben's central contention is that the challenge facing those who desire to make social security better is as follows.  First, there is a need to engage with existing public perceptions of 'who deserves what'.  Second, however, there is a need to ensure that engagement does not become accommodation; and that, in the long run, wider public notions of deservingness are changed.  Such a strategy will clearly involve a high degree of skilful political and policy manoeuvring. 

Can it be done?

The message then is that the kind of welfare state many on the Left would like - generous, supportive, personalised, popular - will not come over night.  And to achieve it, there must be a genuine engagement with the public: many of whom do not appear to like social security very much at all.

The key to this dilemma seems to lie somewhere in dealing with the realm of contribution and reciprocity.  The lack of engagement with these concerns is what Ben Baumberg criticises about the first two contributions he reviews: Decent Childhoods and National Salary Insurance.  The third - The Solidarity Society - attempts to deal with this dilemma (of engaging with, acquiring and changing public attitudes) much more centrally.

The problem that remains is how to rethink the relationship between social security and contribution/reciprocity without merely falling back to old ideas about social insurance or capitulating to seemingly popular notions of 'tough conditionality'.  Ben's argument is that such change will only happen in stages and that this will require engaging with the public whilst also leaving the scope open for future progress.

My own thought is that this could be partly achieved with a rethinking of conditionality (at least for claimants of JSA).  This could involve, for example, higher benefit payments to claimants who enrol on training, education, work experience or community placements.  To my mind this would a) reduce poverty, b) engage with existing public concerns of deservingness and c) change attitudes in the long-term.  

The latter is the hardest task that the Left faces with regards to social security.  Yet I would argue that a shift in rewarding claimants' contributions with higher payments would emphasise to the public what claimants do whilst they are unemployed, rather than what they don't do.  The obvious fact is that many present claimants are contributing in a wide variety of ways, yet because this is not rewarded, it goes unnoticed: and the public emphasis remains unchanged.  

As Ben argues rightly, focusing on conditionality carries certain dangers: such as that future governments will simply revert back to the type of conditionality on offer now.   Yet we have to see a better welfare state as a long-term goal.  As Margaret Thatcher found out, her goal of a worse welfare state did not come about immediately.  It took years of subtle changes to public and political debate.  Little rewards could offer big hopes.

Why does unemployment make people want to die?

This is an article about suicide.  If you're experiencing suicidal thoughts there are places you can go for support. Find out more on the Mind website or call the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90.

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Today saw the release of a new study in the British Medical Journal that shows how the rate of suicide has increased during the recession in the UK (link to paper here).  Importantly, a key finding in the study is that for every 10 per cent rise in unemployment, there is an associated 1.4 per cent increase in suicide.

This finding confirms the results of many previous studies: that unemployment is psychologically damaging and tends to increase the risk of suicide.  Indeed, it has been nothing but bad news for the unemployed during the past few weeks.  In July, the ONS released their major findings on subjective well-being; showing that the unemployed are one of the most unhappiest groups of all.

Why is unemployment such a miserable experience?

The question of why unemployment increases risk of suicide (and other harmful health behaviours) has been a key question in the social sciences for some time.  This is not necessarily an obvious question to ask.  Economists have tended to assume that leisure is good and work is a burden.  Since the unemployed have copious amounts of leisure, shouldn't they have decent levels of happiness?

The answer shown in studies like the BMJ one is definitely not.  And so explanations and theories have been proposed.  The most obvious explanation is income: i.e.: unemployment has a tendency to intensify experiences of low income and poverty.  This is especially true of the UK, which has a social security system with very low income replacement rates.

The second most obvious explanation is that it has nothing to do with unemployment at all.  This is the idea that people with physical and mental health problems are more likely to end up unemployed anyway.  Unemployment just happens to be a common experience and has nothing to do with the problems it's strongly correlated with.

The psychosocial environment of unemployment

While these two explanations are important, many studies have found that unemployment does have a causal relationship with the psychological problems associated with it.  Further, this important study by Winkelmann and Winkelmann found that unemployment had a harmful effect irrespective of income and that its psychosocial effects - rather than its economic ones - were of prime importance.

So what is so psychologically damaging about unemployment, for most people who experience it?  Marie Jahoda's theory of latent deprivation, developed in the 1980s, is still probably the most well-known psychological explanation.  Jahoda argued that employment fulfilled a range of psychological requirements she called 'latent functions': time structure, social activity, collective endeavour, regular activity, status and identity.

The problem with unemployment then is that it deprives people of 'latent functions' that are so valuable for mental well-being.  Jahoda's theory has come under some criticism since.  Most notably from David Fryer, who argued that unemployment is damaging because it restricts a person's sense of agency and autonomy.  And, to my mind, there is certainly something to be said about the way in which unemployment is socially constructed and, consequently, stigmatized.  Yet Jahoda's theory remains a good example of the kind of non-pecuniary benefits people acquire from work.  And the potential dangers of losing these benefits through a spell of unemployment.

What can we do about it?

If unemployment does have these effects, what can we do about it?  All in all, I would suggest three policy responses:

• Increase the value of unemployment benefits.  We still know that low income is a major problem for unemployed people, especially in the UK with the very low rate of JSA.
• Do much more to keep people in work. We also know that for many people, work is psychologically beneficial.  Doing more to keep people in jobs should similarly be a policy objective.
• Invest more in better active labour market policies.  The potential of active labour market policies (or welfare-to-work ) to improve the experience of unemployment is still relatively unknown.  There is some evidence to suggest these policies do have beneficial social outcomes - and this is something my own PhD research is focusing on.  This would involve providing more services to unemployment people, such as work experience schemes, training and education.

Finally though, beneath the public policy and statistics these are ultimately tragic human stories.  What they remind us of - and what governments seem to have ignored - is that unemployment is never a price worth paying.

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Young researchers beware: potential scams, paying for articles and David Publishing

Soon after the recent Social Policy Association (SPA) conference at York, I received an e-mail from an American publishing company called David Publishing.  The e-mail said that one of David Publishing's journals - the Journal of US-China Public Administration - was interested in potentially publishing my SPA conference paper (link here).

My initial reaction was to be quite excited by the letter.  This was a paper I worked on for my MSc last year, had put lots of work in to and had since been rejected by a couple of social science journals.  After the SPA conference I was convinced about finally putting the paper to bed, which - after a lot of hard work - was a tough decision to make.

So the e-mail from David Publishing looked (initially at least) very promising.  However, when I actually read through the e-mail for a second time, the alarm bells began to ring.  The letter seemed to be worded rather strangely.  For example, as you can see from below, the letter stated that the Journal 'hoped to become friends' with me.  This certainly wasn't what I've been used to with previous journal experience.

So (like all good academics would) I did a bit more research: on the journal and the publishing company.  The website for David Publishing seemed a bit odd with, again, lots of poor English.  Another blog I found by a researcher who had been contacted by the same publishing house said that they were actually based in China and could potentially be a front for Chinese researchers to get published in 'American' journals.

I also read rumours of David Publishing charging authors to publish their paper - and this is what really riled me.  Young researchers - most on low bursaries - are often desperate to get those first couple of journal articles under their belt to establish their careers.  Deliberately approaching young researchers and offering to publish their work - and then subsequently charging them for it - seemed to be deeply cynical and exploitative.

So I contacted David and asked them do they charge.  Their e-mail response is posted below.  David Publishing charge $50 per page for a journal article.  If you consider most journal articles are between 10 to 20 pages long, this means that a researcher could end up paying between $500 to $1000 dollars to publish their paper.

Although some reputable publishing houses do charge for publication, deliberately targeting PhD students with the objective of taking up to $1000 from them for an article seems wrong to me.  By approaching young researchers, David Publishing are engaging in an exploitative practice, purposefully targeting eager, ambitious yet in all likelihood naive researchers; most of whom are not yet versed in how some quarters of the publishing world are happy to take advantage of them.