The problem with entitlements
As regular readers may know, I have recently been exploring a concept I call ‘the paradox of entitlement’: in essence, state-backed social entitlements are a sign of progress but they are problematic and financially unsustainable if people treat them as mere entitlements.
A couple of days ago I offered a defence of entitlements from the critique of the right. Today I want to sketch out the second half of the paradox; the problems with entitlements.
To generalise and simplify, the left’s instincts about social entitlements (by which I mean public services, various forms of legal protection and welfare payments) tend to be as follows. The biggest problem with defending and expanding entitlements is a lack of political will. We live in a rich country and there is no reason why we shouldn’t enjoy levels of entitlement on a par with the best in the world (those in Scandinavia, for example). Quite apart from their material value to individuals, we should seek to expand social entitlements as a means to key progressive goals, principally greater social justice. Also, the ethic of social entitlement rooted in notions of solidarity is a vital bulwark against (or alternative to) the possessive individualism fostered by capitalism. It can also be argued that the planned and just distribution of social entitlements stands in contrast to the random, inequitable and wasteful distribution of goods through the market.
Just as there is validity to aspects of the right’s critique of entitlements so I have sympathy with aspects of the case for social rights. But, this case faces some tough reality checks.
In the context of austerity, rising needs and global economic competition the issue is less whether we will have to curtail some entitlements but when and how. Indeed, social care, particularly for the frail elderly, may already be the first major area of public service provision since the creation of the modern welfare state in which the core universal offer has substantially deteriorated, and this is well before the full impact of population ageing.
A more controversial critique of social entitlements is that they have singularly failed to embed a set of progressive values as alternatives to market individualism. Although some public services are very popular – particularly the NHS – the public’s general disposition towards social entitlements is as much characterised by passivity and resentment (towards inadequate services and ‘undeserving’ recipients) as a celebration of collective endeavour. Indeed, when there is activism around public services it is as likely to be associated with individual or local self-interest than solidaristic fellow feeling.
One reason for this ambivalence – which is generally no less marked among net beneficiaries of social entitlements – may lie in a deep seated sense that goods and services which are ‘earned’ individually through merit, effort or good fortune are of more value than those which are allocated collectively as social rights. Defenders of generous social entitlements reasonably argue that such entitlements are necessary to provide people with the means to live in dignity and with some control over their lives, but most of us tend to feel that dignity and freedom lie in self respect and independence, virtues not always associated with the bureaucratic benevolence of the state.
The efficacy of state provision is a subject in itself and even focussing on a specific programme the evidence is disputed. What can be said is that public service productivity has more of less flat-lined for several decades, that much of what the state provides is of dubious value (from teach-to-the-test education to the mass prescription of anti-depressants), and that working age welfare benefits – originally seen as ways of managing risk, tiding people over before a return to employment or tackling acute and exceptional cases of need – have for many people and many places become the primary source of income, with dependency sometimes stretching across a lifetime.
It is a lack of jobs rather than the existence of welfare benefits that is the primary cause of unemployment. However, there is no denying that welfare benefits are playing a different role in society than the architects of the welfare state – like Beveridge himself – envisaged. One particularly egregious example was the rise of Incapacity Benefit in the 80s and 90s, which not only encouraged people to abandon any aspiration to work, but was also associated in most cases with further deterioration in the health of those in receipt of the benefit.
This, then, is the paradox. For the reasons I outlined a couple of days ago the good society should seek to raise the threshold of universal citizenship entitlements, but for the reasons I have outlined today the past and current impact and future viability of entitlements is highly problematic.
My next post will suggest that it might be possible to solve the paradox but to do so will involve radically reframing and reforming our idea of social entitlements and the expectations which surround them.
‘….Like the corners of my mind’
I have always been proud of my present-receiving face. A few years ago three different people bought me Adrian Chiles’ book about West Brom fans (a book I had myself purchased on the day it was published). I was confident they all thought me delighted as I tore off the wrapping paper and exclaimed ‘ooh, I was just thinking of buying this’.
Often at Christmas a particular present becomes ubiquitous. This year I gave three copies of Rebecca Ferguson’s lovely CD and received two in return. I also gave and received Julian Barnes’ Booker Prize winning novel ‘The sense of an ending’ .
It is a wonderful book. The story follows the narrator’s school and student years and then switches as in retirement he gradually and disturbingly comes to see actions of his earlier life in a very different light. It is one of those books that works both as an engrossing piece of fiction but also a treasure trove of ideas, in this case about the perversity of memory.
Indeed the book led to an insight that, although now I repeat it may seem obvious, felt profound when it came to me.
My intuitive idea of memories is of each time I remember an event revisiting the original moment stored somewhere in my brain. It is as if the recollection is a locked room I can choose to visit from time to time. It may get a bit dusty and various features decay, but each memory takes me back to that original scene.
The unfolding narrative of ‘The sense of an ending’ tears apart this illusion. The truth, of course, is that the place we visit each time we look back does not contain the event but actually the last recollection of that event. Each memory is a memory of the last memory. Thus – unless we check our recollections against those of other people – remembering is our own private game of Chinese whispers. Emotional associations may seem to strengthen the memory but they also create more background noise, increasing the chances of distortion.
As with other cognitive biases, recollection also tends to be self-serving. So for example our tendency to view our own mistakes as trivial or unfortunate and the mistakes of others as the consequences of their failings helps rearrange our memories into a more comforting form. The pivot of Barnes’ novel is when the narrator is shocked to realise how unpleasantly he had behaved much earlier in his life.
I was trying to explain this to some friends at Christmas when one of them impatiently burst out:
‘Well, at least this novel seems to have been a successful present. Much better than when we gave you that Adrian Chiles book a few years ago‘.
‘Oh yes’, the other friend chipped in, ‘your face when you opened it; like we’d given you a dead rat’.
Defending rights from the right
Since first writing about it a few weeks ago I have found myself thinking more and more about what I called ‘the paradox of entitlement’. I have even allowed for the possibility this could be a strong enough topic for a book. But as anyone knows who reads this blog at all regularly, when is comes to sustained intellectual projects my reach far exceeds my grasp. As under-promising and over-delivering is as sound a strategy for life as it is for politics, I will for the time being restrict my ambition to a few more posts examining various facets of the paradox.
To recap, the paradox of entitlement states that social rights are a good thing but their social benefits are much reduced, and their economic viability increasingly questionable, if people treat them as mere entitlements. This post and my next will argue that this contention has the virtue of challenging orthodoxies of both the left and right.
Forgive the generalisation but the right is uncomfortable with the idea of entitlement. The most obvious concern, especially in times like this, is financial viability. But while this makes a pragmatic argument for the limits to what can be guaranteed by the state (one which thoughtful people on the left would accept but to a different extent) there are deeper more doctrinal concerns.
Through the generation of moral hazard, entitlements – especially in the domain of welfare benefits – are seen as socially corrosive. To use a phrase favoured by columnists in the Daily Mail and Spectator (but also by Labour centrists) welfare rights create a ‘something for nothing society’ and trap the poor in ‘a culture of dependency’.
It is obviously more palatable to attack social rights on the grounds that they are bad for the poor but the right also believes they are bad for everyone else. On the one hand, financing social rights (whether protections, services or welfare payments) through taxation requires restricting the freedom of those who have become wealthy through their own choices and efforts; thus the rights of the unsuccessful and feckless are put above those of the successful and industrious. On the other hand, the provision of expanding universal social rights provides a pretext for the growth of the state and the wider imposition of a bureaucratic conformity; to use Hayek’s mordant phrase it sets society on ‘the road to serfdom’.
Many of these concerns are reasonable and can be seen to reflect genuine problems for policy makers. But the idea of social rights can nevertheless be defended. For a start, I want to argue that many of the problems the right links to social entitlements are contingent rather than inherent. The degree of moral hazard and the extent of central state interference can be altered by the design of benefits and social programmes and by the normative context of expectations and obligations in which those rights are exercised.
By portraying contingent problems of welfare regimes as inherent the right avoids confronting the core question; is it a good thing that as wealth, freedom and opportunity expand we should seek to increases the entitlement of all citizens to those basic aspects of life that research consistently shows to be the most important to people’s well-being, resilience and life chances? Or to put it another way, how defensible is the idea that in a rich society many citizens might through misfortune, mistake or even eccentricity be denied the basic building blocks of a decent life over which they can exercise some control? As John Rawls famously argued, if we were designing a society knowing we had to live in it but not knowing whether we would be privileged or talented, we would surely be inclined to design one which protected the interests of its less fortunate citizens.
A concern for the opportunities of everyone not just the successful also provides a defence of social rights from the argument that their financing through taxation infringes freedom. For if freedom is considered aggregately across society, then the freedoms at the margin lost to the well off by paying taxes are likely to be more than offset by the freedoms gained by the poor as a consequence of having various social entitlements and therefore being more able to exercise autonomy in their lives.
Interestingly, an emphasis on freedom also poses problems for the right’s general support for greater conditionality in welfare provision (a support shared strongly by the general public). It may be an unfashionable idea, but for a society to agree that all reasonably law abiding, reasonably sane, citizens should receive social entitlements is an important statement about the freedom of citizens to choose lives they consider valuable even if most of us don’t agree with their choices. The wider conditionality extends the less such freedom exists.
These are the bare bones of the first half of the case for the entitlement paradox; social rights are a good thing. I would, of course, be pleased to hear from my friends on the right why I’ve got this wrong, but bear in mind that my next post will focus on the second half; that for people to treat entitlements as entitlements may be both socially corrosive and financially unviable.
A results driven business?
More perhaps than at other times, during austerity the competing claims of principle and pragmatism often hang discomfortingly in the balance. In such circumstances there are no easy answers but we should try to be honest about dilemmas and invite thoughtful debate.
Over recent years the RSA has aimed to increase its impact by engaging in direct service provision. 2011 has seen substantial progress. Most of our research projects have some element of on-the-ground experimentation. We now have two excellent RSA Academies with hopefully two others on their way. Our Opening Minds charity is seeking to strengthen practice in, and collaboration between, the many schools teaching our capabilities-based curriculum.
Then, a few weeks ago, we heard that we had been successful in our bid to be a provider of drug and alcohol rehabilitation services in West Kent based on our innovative ‘whole person recovery’ model. The work has been allocated under a payment by results (PBR) contract and it has been the experience of negotiating PBR which has thrown up a dilemma.
The contract is for two years research and service delivery that will cost the RSA around £250,000 to undertake. Most of that cost is met by the commissioner channelled through the prime provider. Part of the contract is funded through PBR and in theory it should be possible to make ‘a profit’. However, this would require performance at an unprecedented level. Even if our work is much more successful than existing practice (and, of course, we hope it will be) it is a question not of whether but of how much we are likely to lose.
When we explained to the RSA Trustees the financial implications of winning a contract they were understandable surprised. In the end they backed the bid because seeing it as a relatively cheap way for us to undertake a major pilot study of a methodology the RDA has been developing for several years. In essence this means that we as a charity stand ready to subsidise public provision.
Because our work is experimental, innovative and is the practical expression of core contemporary RSA values I have no difficulty justifying the bid and risk of some losses. But similar dilemmas about PBR are being faced across the sector and in some cases the argument may be much more finely balanced.
It seems that in many areas where PBR is becoming the dominant form of contract (for example, rehabilitation and employment) third sector service providers face a dilemma. Because the results targets for PBR are set so punishingly high these organisations are having to bid for contract in which there is a high degree of risk that the services they provide will cost more than the fee the charity receives. In order to continue to provide a service, perhaps even to survive as an organisation, the charity has no choice but to use its charitable funds to subsidise projected losses on the contract. To an extent this can be disguised by charities crossing their fingers and hoping to perform exceptionally well, but while this might work for the lucky few many other providers know they are set to lose.
The difficult issues raised are not new to any service providing charity but they are exacerbated by the swingeing terms of PBR. First, should charities be reduced to running like hamsters in a treadmill trying to meet targets set by government; targets which the charity may believe are not only unrealistic but too narrow. Second, is it acceptable to use charitable funds to subsidise state contracts? Would all those who have donated to the charity be happy to see their money being spent to help ministers and public servants deliver Government policies? Also while larger charities may have the funds to cross-subsidise PBR contracts, smaller organisations are being outbid and facing closure.
None of which is to say that charities should boycott PBR. The RSA is going ahead because it is worth the risk of manageable losses to test out ideas, which we hope might ultimately influence practice across the sector. Other charities can make similar calculations; perhaps they too think their form of delivery adds something distinctive over and above meeting the targets. And, of course, charities will want to win contracts so they don’t have to shrink or lose staff. Furthermore, when resources are shrinking and needs growing is there anything wrong with charities subsidising state services even on government’s terms? Perhaps it’s just a different way of thinking about the Big Society?
Managers and Trustees of many large charities will recognsie and be wrestling with these issues. Perhaps as cuts bite deeper and more services are subject to PBR the debate needs to be opened up to the wider public.
Looking for a dull woman
Although I like to think of my blog as being reasonably eclectic I have never ventured in to literary criticism. For one thing I don’t read that many novels. But, hey, Christmas is a time to be playful, and a pattern in my recent reading has prompted some questions.
Here are four books I have read in the last year or so:
The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce by Paul Torday
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe
I know this is a slightly random list and a reasonable question is why these particular books have fallen into my hands. Two were presents, one was a recommendation and I bought the McEwan because I’ve enjoyed his other work. The list probably says something about the kinds of stuff that interests me, or that people assume will interest me – namely, middle age men facing existential calamity.
It’s hardly a surprise that each novel focuses on someone having a crisis, whether of faith, career and money, addiction or sexuality. After all, if the life of a book’s protagonist were happy and ordinary, there wouldn’t be much to write about. My question is why all these books feature such unattractive heroes?
It’s a while since I read the McEwan and Julian Treslove does have some funny lines in the Jacobson, but generally speaking all the books feature characters you would not want to find yourself sitting next to at a dinner party. It’s not just that they are all miserable. None of them are very interesting or wise; their complete self-absorption is only matched by their almost total lack of insight into their true damaged and unappealing character.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed getting to know the central characters in these books (although I thought Solar was well below McEwan’s usual high standard). As a grumpy middle aged man with my own life crises and intellectual insecurities it was great to be able to feel superior. Did the authors get the same pleasure from making the characters up I wondered.
As I say, I am not a literary critic and it may be that I am simply being too superficial in my reading, but together the books leave me with three questions.
First (and if the answer to this is ‘yes’ I guess it invalidates a lot of the post) is it just coincidence that I have read four books by men featuring such unappealing male heroes? Or is this a more common phenomenon?
Second, why is it necessary for the protagonists to be so inadequate as well as so troubled? Don’t intelligent, generous people – even middle aged men – have dramatic life crises? One explanation is that two of the books are explicitly comic and McEwan has created a caricature. But can’t clever people be funny too?
Third, and here my ignorance is even more exposed, are there female equivalents of these works? Before anyone answers ‘chick lit’, isn’t this generally about a younger age group and also a less literary genre?
I asked my PA Barbara this question and she suggested Anita Brookner, but when I pushed her she had to admit that, although Brookner’s protagonists were often sad and lonely, they weren’t generally stupid, self-obsessed or inept.
I have now passed the point of feeling reassured that I am less of a loser than characters like Maxwell Sim or Michael Beard and started to move into despair about men of my age. So just to add some balance and give me a change of literary scenery at Christmas I am looking for a recommendation: a book by a highly rated woman author featuring a middle aged, middle class woman who is not only beset by crisis but is also boorish, inadequate and thick.
Or would such a work simply lack any credibility?
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