The Ruminator

Generous welfare benefit levels make people who are not in employment more likely to want to work rather than less, new research suggests. “Many scholars and commentators fear that generous social benefits threaten the sustainability of the welfare state due to work norm erosion, disincentives to work and dependency cultures,” the researchers say. “This article concludes that there are few signs that groups with traditionally weaker bonds to the labor market are less motivated to work if they live in generous and activating welfare states.”

So that’s out of the way, now we turn to the study.

It was a survey conducted of 19,000 people in 18 different European countries. It focused on responses to the statement

‘I would enjoy having a paid job even if I did not need the money’

What they found is quite remarkable. The more a country paid to the unemployed or sick, and invested in employment schemes, the more people were likely to agree with the statement, whether employed or not.

To quote liberally from it:

“They found that almost 80% of people in Norway, which pays the highest benefits of the 18 countries, agreed with the statement. By contrast in Estonia, one of least generous, only around 40% did.

The UK was average for the generosity of benefits, and for the percentage agreeing with the statement — almost 60%.

The researchers also found that government programmes that intervene in the labour market to help the unemployed find work made people in general more likely to agree that they wanted work even if they didn’t need the money. In the more active countries around 80% agreed with the statement and in the least around 45%. The UK’s response, though one of the least interventionist, was around 60%.”

They attempted to rationalise it – maybe those who are paid generous benefits feel more dutybound to go out and get work to give back to the State that so generously looked after them. I don’t know if that’s quite right, I wonder if  those who live in countries where the benefits for the unemployed are shit-house feel dispirited by the whole exercise and have their souls crushed by the right-wing machine (which I realise is just the cynics perspective of exactly what they’re positing).

But the point is this doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what the rationale is, the point is that we have data that shows, among European countries anyway, that the warmer the blanket of welfare, the more people want to actually work. Put that in your ivory pipes and smoke it.

This isn’t a lone study that seems to show that reality really does have a liberal bias. A lot of us have anecdotally heard that in the United States it’s actually cheaper to give homeless people a house than it is to let them be homeless (the figures vary from state to state, but this New Yorker article is a good read on the matter).

Then there’s prisons. LOCK ‘EM UP! THROW AWAY THE KEY! CHOP THEIR BALLS OFF. Etc. These are usually refrains from people who think that tougher sentences will act as a deterrent to people from committing crime. I’m going to do two things here, first-off, some anecdotal information from the world of social marketing. You may or may not have noticed that drink driving ads have changed a wee bit. When they first started airing in New Zealand in the 1990s, the slogan was if you drink and drive you’re a bloody idiot. And the ads reflected this with you becoming bloodied and idiotic and smeared on roads, fences, gulches, other cars etc. Nowadays we are more likely to see ads that have the slogan ‘if you drink and don’t drive you’re a bloody legend’. They’ve replaced the negative deterrent focus of the ad with a positive enforcement of good behaviour. This is no accident (ha!) either. This is the result of research that shows that deterrents don’t work super well, but that offering to replace the bad behaviour with something positive does. That’s Social Marketing 101.

In 2005, the excitingly named “National Bureau  of Economic Research” released a paper on the efficacy of increasing severity of punishments. The hypothesis they were working to was:

Economic theory predicts that increasing the severity of punishments will deter criminal behavior by raising the expected price of committing crime.

It’s quite a long paper but in a nutshell, it concludes that this doesn’t work. And one of the major reasons this doesn’t work is because the people who are more likely to commit crime – ironically it’s usually the tired, the poor, the huddle masses yearning to breathe free – the less likely a deterrent is seen as a deterrent because hey, their life is pretty shit anyway.

Then at the other end of the scale is the Socialist utopia of Scandinavia. This Guardian article about the Norwegian prison system paints a fairly rosy picture of how awesome their system works and it seems that the statistics support it, Norway has the lowest recidivism rate of any country in Europe. This article about recidivism rates in the United States makes the case that countries that focus on rehabilitation rather than retribution make for more successful justice sectors.

I’m sure there are other left-wing tenets that will prove to be disastrously wrong, but the ones that I’ve been thinking about lately, yeah  they seem to have science on their side. So quit hating science Right Wing side of the Planet. It’s only trying to be your friend.

SAGE Publications. “Generous welfare benefits make people more likely to want to work, not less.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 31 March 2015. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150331074345.htm>.