The problem with entitlements

December 30, 2011 by
Filed under: Politics, Public policy 

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.

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8 Comments on The problem with entitlements

  1. Paul Bee on Fri, 30th Dec 2011 10:31 am

    2. “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”

    This is hopelessly woolly. We all hope for independence and self respect, but we any one of us at some time may have need for generous social entitlements to provide us with dignity. This is an artificial dichotomy.

    The arguments come from the gutter press and the privileged right who want to create a superficially coherent intellectual construct that justifies public spending cuts in order to protect their own financial interests without guilt.

    Dignity and self respect FOR ALL comes from interdependence and living in a society that provides FOR ALL, in good times and bad. As I said in an earlier post, you are only proposing your arguments because there is ‘no more money’. When there was money, this discussion wasn’t even in the air.

    Matthew, as a long time fellow I am increasingly concerned about the tone of your arguments and the direction that you may be leading the RSA.

  2. Robert Burns on Fri, 30th Dec 2011 10:54 am

    3. Hello Matthew,

    been away for while….but I’m back!

    I think that the semantic distinctions between the various usages of the term ‘social entitlements’ currently in use are problematic in themselves.

    The same words are in use, but the worlds of different meaning behind them render the public ‘debate’ into a sham.

    For a real debate to happen there has to be a common language rooted in a commonly agreed set of facts. That is just not happening now and never will.

    As our economy withers away the shared cake gets smaller (in real terms) every year.

    We live in a world of denial:

    1) Politicians won’t admit that they are powerless against the activities of transnational financial institutions;

    2) Those who talk of rising by ‘hard work’ and ‘merit’ are engaging in a dishonest conceit.

    The ‘hard work’ part may often be true but the ‘merit’ part frequently means they involuntarily possess a demographic profile that has got them past various protectionist barriers.

    I’ve known holders of PhD and Higher Degrees who could not get a job because they did not do A-Levels when they were 18.

    How can ‘social justice’ be meaningfully discussed, let alone created. by people who live by practicing social injustice?

  3. Indy Neogy on Fri, 30th Dec 2011 7:07 pm

    4. It should be questioned whether public service provision has performed notably worse than private *service* provision. Baumol’s cost disease isn’t just about public services. The private sector has managed some of the productivity increases by getting rid of service, sometimes pushing the responsibility onto the customer, sometimes with technology. We should be very careful with the stats in this area, as many agendas are served by misusing them.

    Re: activism – it seems a bit odd for you to be knocking local issues as a motivations for activism. A lot of volunteerism is inherently local – it’s rather natural that it be motivated by local issues. Not to mention how often you knock centralism…

    The problem with your incapacity benefit argument – and indeed your benefits argument in general is that throughout the 80s and 90s we never got near NAIRU, let alone full employment.

    As such, it’s a basic error to take the data as representing benefits as a cause of dependency. Rather we have unemployment, which causes dependency and we manage it in various imperfect ways – none of which remove the deadening of the spirit and health associated with unemployment – which are well documented in the academic literature.

    Until we are prepared to run an economy closer to full employment, then we will have dependency. As I understand it, the proposals of those who critique benefits boil down to:

    1) Let ‘em starve. – This is the reality for some currently being removed from incapacity benefit in particular. Not exactly civilised. We criticise other regimes through history for maltreating the disabled – are we now to ape them?

    2) Let’s have greater interchange of insecurity and part time work at the low end. This is potentially defensible, as spreading the benefits of work across more people could, theoretically outweigh the spreading of the misery of part-time, insecure employment across more people. However, the evidence isn’t looking good for this theory.

    Thus, I struggle to see why we’re concentrating on the ill-effects of benefits, rather than the ill-effects of an economy run for rentiers at the expense of the rest of society.

  4. Christopher Holvenstot on Sat, 31st Dec 2011 5:37 am

    5. Dear Matthew;

    I pipe in from across the pond where the same troubles arise but in a slightly different socio-political atmosphere.

    The Western World’s various visions of its future from perspectival loci stretching back to the industrial revolution all saw the rise of labor-saving devices as ultimately ubiquitous, but perhaps incorrectly characterized the freedom from labor as a universal benefit. It has as yet only truly benefitted (in terms of social and economic security) the few but fortunate titans of capitalism. The trick is how to spread the benefit of elaborate and efficient industrialization in a way that does not diminish the dignity and health of those who’s input into the economic system (due to the rise of mechanization/computerization of formerly human-based skills in tandem with rapid population growth), is reduced to nothing. And thus, ideologies (and their correlative economic manifestations) that continue to equate labor input to social and economic value would seem to be the source of the ills and conundrums you so articulately describe.

    This raises philosophical questions related to 21st century enlightenment that you are uniquely equipped to address and disseminate. How now to characterize the source of human dignity? How now to redirect that source in a way that delicately and judiciously separates a person’s marketable talents and skills from a person’s value, dignity, and rights to a portion of humanity’s economic pie? Tough questions indeed!

    There may be many ways to approach this dilemma but obviously we must reconsider the ideological sources behind our outdated notions of human value.

    Best,
    Christopher Holvenstot

  5. junius on Sat, 31st Dec 2011 11:37 am

    6. The ‘entitlement paradox’ referred to boils down to the fact that there is not a non-zero sum redistribution of wealth between the very rich and the “poor”- the 50 per cent tax rate is not very redistributive and is considerably bypassed through elaborate tax avoidance and evasion schemes and non-domicile tax exempt status for the foreign super wealthy who increasingly buy up property in the capital etc. Thus, the wealth of the top 1 per cent substantially increased as a percentage of national income during the Blair/ Brown years.

    The tax burden for such redistribution as has occurred has fallen disproportionately upon middle and low earners who have lost out from the policy driven ‘entitlement’ policies of the Blair-Brown years. They will no doubt lose out much more from the austerity policies of the Conservative led Coalition which will hardly target the super wealthy for higher tax contributions.

    Of course, different benefits are more or less generous. Job Seeker’s Allowance, a contract based benefit requiring job search to qualify, is considerably less generous than income support which has no such requirements. For households with children, JSA claimants can also claim generous child tax credits.

    Income support can be a wholly unsustainable and inequitable benefit as anyone who knows about its complex system of premiums will know. It is possible for claimants of this benefit with four or five children, with all premiums and possible DLA, council tax benefit and housing benefit- to receive an income topping £700-£800 per week without paying tax. If you doubt me, investigate it. Child premiums amount to £62 per child- with four childrn this is £248 in premiums alone without including family premium, client premium and disability premium. I am sure there are cases of claimants planning the size of their household in order to maximize this complex system of benefits/ premiums.

    DLA can now be awarded for ADHD. I know of one claimant who received it for tennis elbow (which he always referred to in its impressive latin format).

    For many working people, not favoured with this ‘entitlement’, and struggling under austerity, the whole arrangement can only be seen as inequitable and iniquitous.

  6. Steve Brunt on Sun, 1st Jan 2012 2:14 am

    7. Sorry, Matthew, but neither of these posts has made the case it sets out to. It’s an interesting subject badly handled. Lazy language, wooly and/or sophist assertions, half-made points.

    I’d like to make a more constructive contribution, but i don’t see anything to build upon. I’d recommend starting again.

  7. matthew taylor on Tue, 3rd Jan 2012 2:37 pm

    8. Thanks for these comments. There is a lot here that is useful. Christopher makes very important points about how to explore notions of human value which are deeper and more inclusive than labour market value. This is particularly important if – picking up on one of Indy’s points – we are not conceivably going to return to anything approximating full employment. On another point, Indy, I don’t mean to disparage localism merely to point out that activism tends to be about preserving local entitlements rather than the broader principles of social rights (and as FRSA Tessy Britton has pointed out it is very hard to move from oppositional to creative activist mode).
    Paul, I can at least defend myself from the charge that this agenda is simply a response to a lack of money. I have long been interested in these topics and I made my first speech – about what I called the social aspiration gap – as RSA CEO in the boom year of 2007 Julius, as you say it is very hard to read the underlying basis in need or fairness in such a complex system.
    Steve, what can I say? This is one of a series of posts which are about working through ideas. I am not for a moment claiming that these are finished thoughts. Sorry that you find them so unsatisfactory.

  8. Steve Brunt on Wed, 11th Jan 2012 12:09 am

    9. Hi Matthew,

    I did at least make (i hope) a more useful contribution elsewhere in the series. I was unduly harsh, so please accept my apologies. I’m not usually so grumpy, even on New Year’s Eve. BTW, do you know the great quotation from
    Elizabeth Warren?

    “There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea – God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

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