Crumbling Pillars: Social Security Futures

Social security rests on four pillars: the state, the market, the family and the community. The first three pillars are all collapsing, at the sametime as the state pillar is being undercut. The root cause of that collapse is 'destandardization' of various sorts. It no longer is the case that everyone's situation fits into one of a few broad categories, thus making our ordinary conditional and categorical social benefit programmes increasingly inappropriate responses to social need. One alternative might be to make responses to need utterly discretionary, with either state or voluntary sector suppliers. A better alternative would be to make social benefits utterly unconditional, ideally through the participation-income version of basic income. Our Present Predicament Social security famously rests on four pillars: the state, the market, the family and the community. Econocrats at the World Bank and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development remind us of that fact, hoping to persuade the state to step back and leave more space for those other sectors to shoulder a larger share of the burden. From Britain and America to Germany and Australia, politicians of the'radical centre' enthusiastically embrace that suggestion worldwide. They cut back public pensions and encourage people to take out private pensions instead (or in addition), as through compulsory private superannuation in Australia and the new Stakeholder Pension in Britain. They promote deinstitutionalization and 'care in the community', shifting the burden from public to private spheres for caring for everyone from frail elderly to the mentally ill. They try to move people from 'welfare to work', shifting people off public welfare rolls and on to private payrolls, whether by gentle means (the UK's 'workoriented interview', for example) or harsh ones ( such as the 'two years and you're out' policy at the core of the 1996 USwelfare reforms). They raise the age for young people being considered independent of their parents for purposes of means-testing of public benefits (to 18, now, for unemployed Australians), hoping thereby to force young people to rely on the resources of their families rather than the state. The proffered justifications for such policies are many and varied. In part, they are driven by ideology: the ethics of self-reliance, or the economics of efficiency and market forces. In part they are driven by demographics: the spectre of an 'old age crisis', with escalating pension and health care costs as the bulge of baby boomers works its way through the population. In part they are driven by spectre of' competitiveness' and globalization: in an open economy, it is said, we cannot expect to remain internationally competitive if we treat our workers any better than the worst-treated worker anywhere in the world. There are reasons to doubt each of those arguments, but for present purposes let us put most of that to one side. Here let us focus on just one central fact. Whatever else we say for or against such welfare reforms, all of those cutbacks in state provision are crucially predicated on the assumption that the other three pillars the market, thefamily or the community are actually capable of bearing more of the weight. That, I suggest, is radically untrue. All of those other pillars are themselves crumbling at the same time the state pillar is being chipped away. Consider first the family pillar. In future, the family is not going to be able to provide the support it used to do, for various reasons.Among them are these: Families themselves are breaking down more often than before. In peasant societies, multiplying your number of children was traditionally thought to be a good old-age insurance policy. Multiplying your number of ex-partners is not. In any case, children are less useful than they used to be. Families are having fewer children, and those they do have are increasingly mobile and hence less likely to live nearby when help is needed. Peter Townsend's classic study of The Family Life of Older People found that in mid-century Bethnal Greennearly ninety percent of the elderly had at least one of their children living within a five minute walk.That, clearly, is a thing of the past for most families nowadays. Women, who used to be the family's 'reserve army of carers', are increasingly entering the paid labour force, leaving little time to discharge unpaid caring functions. By the same token, the market is not the bulwarkof social security that it used to be. The reasons, again, are many and varied. Among them are these: The 'standard employment relationship' full-time, full-year, whole-life employment with the same firm is largely a thing of the past. People are increasingly having chequered employment histories. Occupationallybased social security benefits predicated on the assumption of the old 'standard employment relationship' will therefore be decreasingly beneficial to an ever-larger proportion of the workforce. 'Flexibilization of the workforce' contracting out and the like reduces labour costs largely by eliminating oncosts. Individuals or groups anxiously competing for contracts have pared expenses to the bone; and one of the first expenses they pare away is proper funding of their own long-term social security needs. It is a clear case of self-exploitation, strictly on a par with the competitive logic underlying Marx's law of increasing immiseraton (the only way firms can compete is to cut wages, thus immiserating their workers). In any case, personalized private social insurance schemes are bad investments compared to public ones. A study done at LSE for the Rowntree Trust found that the premium-to-payout ratios of privatized schemes there were systematically worse than public ones. That is perfectly understandablee. Set aside issues of profiteering and adverse selection (bad risks piling in, good risks opting out). It is simply inherent in the actuarial logic of small, botique, personalized insurance schemes that they need to have bad premium/payout ratios. In large and unsegmented insurance pools, the law of large numbers works to ensure everything can be counted on to balance out. In small,segmented pools, it is altogether too possible for everyone to suffer worse-than-average luck at any given moment; and smaller insurance pools simply have to charge higher premia to protect themselves against that down-side risk. Finally, the community sector is under pressures similar to those plaguing the other two, making it decreasingly capable of an independent response when the other sectors fail. 1) Increasing female labour force participation deprives the community sector of its previous pool of unpaid voluntary labour. 2) As voluntary labour is increasingly replaced by paid employees, the motivational distinctiveness of the charitable sector is increasingly lost. 3) Services which were previously provided by public agencies are increasingly contracted-out to private providers, either in the market ('privatefor-profit') or in the community ('private not-for-profit') sectors. In the process of competitive tendering, private not-for-profit providers are increasingly obliged to mimic private for-profit ones. In part, that is because they are competing for the same contracts, responding to the same 'tender briefs', trying to do the same things in the same ways. In part, it is because 'competition policy' requires parity among all tenderers, thus obliging non-profits to conform to the same rules and procedures that have long governed private for-profit providers in the market sector. The upshot, once again, is that the independence and distinctiveness of the voluntary community sector is increasingly compromised. The long and the short of the matter is thus that the state is backing out of the business of social welfare provision at just the same time as the other classic pillars of social security are being eroded as well. All the pillars are collapsing at once, for all too many people. Not everyone, to be sure: many people are still blest with stable marriages, caring kin and communities, secure employment and comfortable benefit entitlements. But increasing numbers of people are suffering increasing insecurities on all those fronts. For them, market, family and community pillars prove to be woefully inadequate substitutes for reduced state provision for social security.