“Never working families” – a misleading sound-bite?

In this guest post, Lindsey Macmillan and Paul Gregg look at the claim that there are generations within families who have never worked. From their position as probably the foremost experts on intergenerational worklessness in the UK, they find the evidence wanting…

The government and indeed all major political parties have expressed concern about low social mobility in the UK. These concerns were based on evidence that Britain became less meritocratic for a generation leaving school in the late 1980s than it was previously. Recently, frequent references have been made by politicians about the issue of intergenerational worklessness in the UK, citing families with two or three generations who never work and how we need to deal with this ‘culture of dependency’.

“Our recent *Housing Poverty* report concluded that Britain’s social housing estates, once stepping stones of opportunity, are now ghettos for our poorest people. Life expectancy on some estates, where often three generations of the same family have never worked, is lower than the Gaza Strip” – Iain Duncan Smith MP (2009)

Despite the frequency of these statements and unlike the picture for social mobility, there has been no hard evidence on the subject. Before the process of policy-making begins, the onus is on researchers and politicians to assess both the scale and nature of any problem here.

Why don’t we want to pay unemployment benefits? Pt.1

Inspired by Ben’s recent batch of posts on the benefits system, I wanted to spend some time talking a bit more about how people on benefits are perceived, and how and why that might have changed over time.

In his detailed discussion of conditionality and deservingness, Ben drew attention to the pretty steep decline in people’s support for unemployment benefits. His graph of data from the British Social Attitudes survey (reproduced below) show that, since the mid-90’s, the proportion of people agreeing that “Unemployment benefits are too high and discourage work” has gone from around 40% to almost 60%. I’m interested in why that should be. What has been going on over the last 15 years or so to result in so dramatic a drop in support for these benefits?

What Will it Take to End Teenage Pregnancy in the US?

Remember the culture wars? If you tuned into the chatter on contraception and religious freedom in the last couple weeks, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was 1985 all over again. The Obama administration wants to require all employers to include contraception in their health insurance at no cost. The Catholic Church balked at this requirement as it applies to Catholic universities and other religious institutions. The Administration countered with a compromise, kind of.

The issue of contraceptive policy is often framed as a matter of religious freedom or sexual liberation, but it is also a very serious social policy question. Ben pointed me to these interesting graphics from the Economist that show stunning 25-year declines in teenage pregnancies, birth rates, and abortions for whites, blacks, and Hispanics in the United States. The widest disparities, between blacks and whites in teenage pregnancy rates, are narrowing substantially over time.

A few things that inequality causes

Of the endless stream of papers that flash in front of my eyes every week, a large number are ‘Spirit Level style’ – that is, they look at the relationship of inequality and a ‘bad thing’ between countries/areas. If I blogged about each of these then there would be no room for anything else on the blog, but I thought this week I’d summarise four that particularly caught my eye. They variously cover crime, the family burden of caring for children with special needs, self-perception, and intergenerational mobility – which if nothing else, tells you that people with a lot of different interests are doing this kind of research…

Moving on – a social experiment

At a time of economic crisis, so the folk wisdom usually goes, any job is better than no job – no matter how badly paid or how poor the prospects. Yet perhaps surprisingly, all the talk in the UK is now about job quality: how do we create the sorts of jobs in Britain that people find rewarding, that help the economy grow, and which produce real income increases for everyone?  New Labour’s failures are now seen to be around predistribution (market rewards before taxes and benefits) rather than redistribution, to borrow Jacob Hacker’s now-popular term.

So perhaps there’s never been a better time to look at the largest social experiment ever-attempted in the UK, which tried to help people move on at work, and whose final results were revealed late last year.  In this post, I summarise the complex set of results of the experiment in the UK.

Unemployment Disparities in Three Pictures

Any way you look at it, the unemployment numbers released this week are good news for American workers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the economy added 243,000 new jobs (at least after applying seasonal adjustments), and the official unemployment rate dropped to 8.3 percent. The official unemployment rate is an important indicator, but as I have said before it masks some important disparities between groups and does not capture discouraged workers that drop out of the work force, nor does it factor in that some workers are part-time because of economic circumstance (rather than choice).

Drawing on BLS data from 2008 to 2012, I have created three pictures that dramatically underscore these differences. (These data are easily available in tabular form, if you want to check them out.)

European Social Policy in Defense of the Welfare State: the British and the Italian Manifesto

Comparative social policy tends to underline policy differences (e.g. in the worlds of welfare literature), but common austerity trends in Europe are leading to similar internal reactions. In Italy and in the UK, social policy academics have produced two  documents to defend welfare state intervention: “In Defense of Welfare” (by the Social Policy Association) and “The Manifest for the welfare of the XXI century” (by the Italian Journal of Social Policy and ESPAnet-Italy, the equivalent of the SPA community in Italy). Comparing those documents allows to capture the ‘zeitgeist’ of European social policy.