Arguments for Welfare: The Welfare State and Social Policy (Rowman & Littlefield International - Policy Impacts) - Hardcover

Spicker, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1786603012 ISBN 13: 9781786603012

Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

This book makes the case for the welfare state. Nearly every government in the developed world offers some form of social protection, and measures to improve the social and economic well-being of its citizens. However, the provision of welfare is under attack. The critics argue that welfare states are illegitimate, that things are best left to the market, and that welfare has bad effects on the people who receive it. If we need to be reminded why we ought to have welfare, it is because so many people have come think that we should not.

Arguments for Welfare is a short, accessible guide to the arguments. Looking at the common ideas and reoccurring traits of welfare policy across the world it discusses:

·The Meaning of the 'Welfare State'

·The Moral Basis of Social Policy

·Social Responsibility

·The Limits of Markets

·Public Service Provision

·The Role of Government

With examples from around the world, the book explains why social welfare services should be provided and explores how the principles are applied. Most importantly, it argues for the welfare state's continued value to society. Arguments for Welfare is an ideal primer for practitioners keen to get to grips with the fundamentals of social policy and students of social policy, social work, sociology and politics.

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Paul Spicker is Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at the Robert Gordon University.

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Arguments for Welfare

The Welfare State and Social Policy

By Paul Spicker

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2017 Paul Spicker
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78660-301-2

Contents

1 Understanding the Welfare State, 
2 The Moral Basis of Social Policy, 
3 Benefitting Other People, 
4 Individualism and Self-Interest, 
5 The Limits of the Market, 
6 Providing Public Services, 
7 The Role of Government, 
8 Welfare as a Way of Realising Other Values, 
9 Policy for Society, 
10 Does Welfare Have Bad Consequences?, 
11 Why Welfare?, 
Bibliography, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

Understanding the Welfare State

Some arguments are so obvious that no-one makes them. There is not much discussion about whether people should live in families, whether children should be educated, whether people should be able to buy food or whether there should be laws. There may be those who take a different view, but they are on the fringes. Their positions will be reviewed in passing, discussed in academic circles and occasionally someone experiments with alternatives, but the alternatives are not taken very seriously. The world we live in is taken for granted.

The provision of social welfare is different. On one hand, nearly every developed society is engaged to some degree with the issues of social protection. There are commonly occurring patterns of social need, and there is a constellation of benefits and services, typically covering old age, ill health and the interruption of earnings. Many independent groups and organisations have made arrangements for the provision of welfare, and in general there are complex, overlapping networks through which services are delivered. Beyond that, in every democratic society, government has also come to play a role in provision, sometimes providing services directly, but almost invariably recognising that it has some responsibility for the direction of welfare policy.

On the other hand, and despite the very generality of these arrangements, there is a chorus of dissent. The main focus of criticism has been about the idea that government should be involved at all. Many of the basic precepts of economic theory seem to argue against collective provision and distribution of goods. Arguments made against state welfare for hundreds of years – that people who receive welfare are a burden on others, that welfare encourages idleness, that it is wasteful – are frequently repeated, usually with the claim that even if welfare worked in the past, this time it's different. Often welfare systems are deeply resented. If we need to be reminded why we ought to have welfare, it is because so many people have come to think that we should not.

THE WELFARE STATE

There are some widespread misconceptions about welfare, but it will be difficult even to discuss the issue without at least a shared vocabulary. The first problem lies with the term 'welfare' itself. Economists use the term to refer generally to people's well-being, but that is not the main subject here. Part of the general argument for a welfare state is an argument for making things better. However, lots of things make people's lives better – music, comedy, open countryside, books, gardening, shopping, dancing or messing around in boats – and welfare states do not have much to do with any of them. There are publicly funded activities in many countries which help people do some of these things – public broadcasters, parks, sports grounds, libraries and community theatres – and they are almost certainly better places to live because of it, because then people have choices for a good life that they would not otherwise have. This is not, however, the stuff that welfare states are made of. The main use of the word 'welfare' refers instead to the provision of a conventional range of services – systems that have been developed to safeguard vulnerable people in a range of contingencies. The activities of welfare states are typically concerned with health, social security, housing, education, employment support and social care. The people who are being supported, typically pensioners, children, people with disabilities and those who are unemployed, are people who have been identified as having needs that ought to be met through collective social arrangements.

Even within that discourse, people understand the terms differently. The dominant use of the term 'welfare' in the United States is focused on a relatively narrow group of services, mainly concerned with people of working age on very low incomes. That sense was hardly used in Europe fifteen or twenty years ago, but it has become more and more prevalent, especially in Britain. The most obvious difference in definitions is that the broader sense of the term includes provision for medical care, pensions, education, housing support and social care. It is not difficult to defend welfare in the narrow sense as well as in a broader sense, but quite apart from the arbitrariness of the definition, the restriction of the argument has had some pernicious effects. One is the deliberate separation of arguments for welfare where the legitimacy of public provision is generally accepted from others where it is not: publicly funded schooling is usually approved of, support for low-income families with children often is not. A second example is the distinction drawn between arguments for pensions and arguments for support for younger people who are unable to work, often presented as a difference between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving'. There are few arguments for offering people a pension at sixty-five that cannot be made for supporting unemployed people aged fifty-eight. These distinctions create problems for practice too. Services which are confined to residual, stigmatised groups tend equally to be stigma-tised, complex and expensive, and treated as a 'public burden', and arguments against 'welfare' in these terms tend to be self-fulfilling.

The idea of the 'welfare state' is no clearer. Titmuss complained that it was an "indefinable abstraction". At times, the idea seems to be used to describe any arrangements that happen to be made. If all modern states are welfare states, Veit-Wilson complains, the word 'welfare' is not saying anything – "the term 'welfare' becomes redundant and mystifying noise."

The idea of the welfare state originated in Bismarck's Germany. The German system after Bismarck was a scheme of insurance for people who worked, and it hardly concerned itself with the poorest at all. The Beveridge report in the United Kingdom, although it was mainly concerned with the development of a national insurance scheme, was taken to represent an ideal system of government where people were provided for as a right of citizenship and covered 'from the cradle to the grave'. The French system, sometimes thought of as a fusion of principles from Bismarck and Beveridge, actually did something quite different: aiming to include as many people as possible in solidaristic and mutualist schemes, but tending to leave out those at the bottom, the 'excluded', until the system was reformed in the 1980s. The Swedish system, which for many has become paradigmatic of what a welfare state could achieve, used mutualist and occupational structures to pursue objectives of solidarity and social equality.

The academic literature on welfare states often describes them in terms of normative models. The best-known example, though there are lots of others, is the work of Gøsta...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1786603012
• ISBN 13: 9781786603012
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 124
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland