Ideas@TheCentre

Fairness in the welfare state

We social scientists learn from an early age to be wary of the language of cause and effect. The natural sciences have developed causal laws of the form, ‘whenever A, then B’, but this kind of reasoning is rarely appropriate in the explanation of social phenomena.

Even the so-called ‘laws’ of economics, such as the ‘law of supply and demand’ or the ‘law of diminishing marginal utility’ are not laws in the way that Newton’s ‘laws of motion’ are. Natural science laws apply at all times everywhere in the universe, but the law of supply and demand refers only to a tendency in human behaviour (people usually buy less of something if the price goes up). At best, this is a ‘probabilistic law’, not a universal one.

One key reason that social science cannot provide watertight causal explanations of social phenomena is that we are dealing with human activity, and human beings are not automatons. It is true, for example, that most of us prefer to buy something at a cheaper price, but sometimes, for a variety of reasons, we opt for more expensive equivalents.

It’s not only economists who struggle with human volition. Political scientists will tell you that we are more likely to vote Labor if we work in manual employment and belong to a trade union, but there are plenty of manual worker trade unionists who vote Liberal. Criminologists know we are more likely to commit criminal acts if we have been neglected by our parents and grow up in a deprived area, but many such children turn out to be respectable and law-abiding.

This makes it problematic to talk of ‘causes’ in social science – only of ‘influences,’ ‘tendencies’ and ‘probabilities.’ Yet sometimes, something happens which makes one think (with the wisdom of hindsight): ‘Of course! It was inevitable!’ Sometimes, social life does seem to exhibit an awful predictability.

This week my Occasional Paper, Re-moralising the Welfare State, was published by the CIS. It is about morality and fairness in the welfare state. At one point I discuss the case of Jamie Cumming, a 36 year-old Scot living in Dundee who has been identified by the British press as ‘Britain’s most feckless father.’

When I wrote the paper, Cumming had fathered 15 children by 12 different mothers. Because he was unemployed, the maximum he was required to contribute to the upkeep of all these children under UK welfare rules was £5 per week (Australia’s welfare rules are no better). I suggest in my paper that this is unfair on taxpayers and that welfare rules like this reward and encourage irresponsibility.

Last week, just prior to my paper being published, Jamie Cumming was in the news again in the UK. He has fathered two more children by two more women, but this is not the reason he’s again made the headlines.

Cumming has been convicted of murder. Attending a friend’s birthday celebration at a Dundee pub, he got in a fight in the toilets, then went outside and finished off his victim, repeatedly stabbing him in the heart, lungs and liver. When the police arrested him, Cumming told them: ‘I’ve thrown my life away.’ His, and many other people’s lives too.

Was it inevitable that Cumming should end up killing someone? Probably not. But is it a surprise that he did? Not really. Cumming grew up lacking any sense of personal responsibility or self-control; a self-absorbed egoist. In this he was encouraged and supported by an amoral welfare state which, like an indulgent parent, happily handed out money but shied away from judging whether or not the recipient ‘deserved’ support.

So here is my social ‘law’: if the welfare state insists on rewarding irresponsible behaviour and refuses to distinguish deserving and undeserving cases, the inevitable result will be more and more Jamie Cummings.

Peter Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and author of Re-moralising the Welfare State, released on 13 March 2013.