Monday, May 13, 2013

Chris Dillow — Changing Attitudes

Peter Taylor-Gooby points out that, as inequality has risen, attitudes towards the poor and benefit recipients have hardened.He suggests several longer-term reasons for this, among them the decline of class alignment and rise of individualism. I'd add three other factors:
- A mistaken factual base. The public under-estimate bosses' pay and over-estimate welfare benefits.
- Recessions usually make people more mean-spirited.
- Capitalism generates cognitive biases (ideologies) that result in hostility to welfare recipients.
As Taylor-Goody says, it doesn't need to be this way: "Alternative approaches that emphasise reciprocity, solidarity and inclusion are possible."
This poses the question: how do we get to such approaches from where we are?
Stumbling and Mumbling
Changing Attitudes
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle (UK)


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This poses the question: how do we get to such approaches from where we are?

This will require more than some policy innovations. We are talking about a fundamental collapse in the bonds of solidarity that hold societies together.

However, some gradual steps in the right direction can be made by adopting Minsky's vision of a universal employment system to replace the current welfare-state or charity-state system. The modern welfare state was the most effective tool capitalists every created for dividing the lower orders of society into antagonistic classes.

Tom Hickey said...

The modern welfare state was the most effective tool capitalists every created for dividing the lower orders of society into antagonistic classes.

The groundwork was already being laid during the FDR administration by the opposition, and it started in earnest with Reagan and Thatcher's political ascension, but both Reagan and Thatcher recognized that there were limited and that neither the US nor the UK were Chile.

After the collapse of the USSR, it was considered no longer necessary to co-opt the masses to head off a socialist revolt, and so it could be eliminated as an unnecessary expense. Now the thinking is that Pinochet's Chile is doable in the US and UK.