The Welfare Trait
Page 8
The delineation of these two reproduction strategies has its roots in the work of Fisher (1930) and Dobzhansky (1950) but was more fully articulated by MacArthur and Wilson (1967) who labelled them as r selection and K selection, respectively. Since no organism exists in a perfect ecological vacuum, it is generally accepted that no species is completely r selected or K selected, but instead there is an r–K continuum upon which species are positioned according to the extent to which they favour offspring care over rate of reproduction. For example, insect species tend to be closer to the r selection end of the r–K continuum, whereas vertebrate species tend to be closer to the K selection end of the r–K continuum (Pianka, 1970). Within species there may be individual differences in the tendency to lean towards r or K selection: in humans, r–K selection theory predicts that a reproductive strategy resembling r selection is optimal in environments where vital resources such as food and shelter are freely available, whereas in environments where vital resources must be competed for, a reproductive strategy resembling K selection is optimal (Geary, 2005).
This analysis by Geary links r–K selection theory to the welfare state in two ways. The first link is that by granting claimants extra resources per child produced without requiring work in return, a welfare state eliminates competition for vital resources and swings the evolutionary advantage away from K selection and towards r selection. In the jargon of economics, the welfare state reduces the opportunity cost of each child born by reversing the usual pattern: in contrast to employed citizens, whose salaries are not linked to family size, welfare claimants gain financially from the birth of each child.
The second link is provided by studies that suggest the employment-resistant personality profile is associated with a preference for r selection, regardless of whether there is a welfare state. Historical evidence for this claim comes from a classic study by Julius B. Maller (1933), who analysed demographic data collected from the entire population of New York City in 1930, before the advent of the welfare state in the USA. In this study, Maller took advantage of the fact that the data were available separately for each of the health areas in New York City (at the time it was divided up into 310 health areas, each containing about 23,000 people). These health areas were small enough to provide separate sampling of different neighbourhoods, yet large enough to generate reliable average scores for each of the variables that Maller was interested in. By computing the average scores on the variables within each health area, Maller could therefore evaluate associations between different variables across the health areas.
This study predates modern concepts of personality and so the list of variables analysed by Maller did not include personality questionnaire scores. However, Maller did measure the rate of juvenile delinquency in each health area, computing this as the number of juvenile delinquents arraigned in that area during 1930 per 1000 children of court age (aged 6–15). Since juvenile delinquents on average score significantly lower on conscientiousness and agreeableness than non-delinquents (John et al., 1994), Maller’s juvenile delinquency variable provides a plausible proxy index of the proportion of individuals in a particular health area who possess the employment-resistant personality profile.
Maller’s results suggest that there is a link between the employment-resistant personality profile and rapid, irresponsible reproduction, since he found that juvenile delinquency was significantly positively associated with birth rate, death rate and infant mortality and significantly negatively correlated with school attendance and school progress. Furthermore, this finding has been backed up, using completely different methods, by modern research in the USA. For example, a study in 2006 that used modern personality questionnaires found that a preference for the r-selected reproductive style was positively associated with the following characteristics: ‘impulsivity, short-term thinking, promiscuity, low female parental investment, little or no male parental investment, little social support, disregard for social rules, and extensive risk-taking’ (Figueredo et al., 2006, p. 246). From this analysis, we can see the r-selected personality profile approximates to the employment-resistant personality profile.
Viewed as a whole, these data suggest that people who are already inclined by their personality characteristics towards r selection (that is, having lots of children and investing little effort in their upbringing) are also more likely than average – because of those same personality characteristics – to be less than satisfactory employees and thus end up unemployed and claiming benefits. When claiming welfare benefits, these people are then further encouraged to follow an r-selected reproductive strategy by a welfare state which provides extra resources for each child born.
Conversely, people who are already inclined by their personality characteristics towards K selection (having fewer children and looking after them conscientiously) are also more likely than average to be employed (due to being especially conscientious) and will therefore tend not to claim as many welfare benefits. Since salaries do not increase for every child born, workers are further encouraged by that financial reality to follow a K-selected reproductive strategy.
This is where the problem with the welfare state occurs, because we already know that the people who happen to have a personality profile that inclines them towards employment-resistance are not equally spread throughout the population, but instead are over-represented in the welfare-claiming sector of the population (for example, Vaughn et al., 2010). If we now accept that the employment-resistant personality profile corresponds to an r-selected reproductive style, we can see that it is likely that the welfare state will increase the number of children born into disadvantaged households because it is providing a financial incentive to have more children to people who are already inclined to behave that way in the first place. In colloquial parlance, the welfare state is pushing at an open door and, because being born into a disadvantaged household raises the risk of developing the employment-resistant personality profile (Heckman et al., 2013), we can see that the extra children that result from this concatenation of policy, personality and reproductive strategy are less likely than average to end up developing into conscientious, agreeable and economically productive adults.
To assess the validity of this hypothesis, this chapter summarises three sources of evidence. First, I describe associations between personality and reproduction in Britain prior to the introduction of the welfare state, as detailed in Greg Clark’s 2007 book A Farewell to Alms. This seminal work uses biographical data (for example, last wills and testaments) to show that the unusually stable geo-political nature of British society for seven centuries or so prior to 1800 meant that the most economically successful citizens typically raised twice as many children as citizens of average economic success and that the least economically successful citizens typically raised no surviving children at all. Clark was not able to administer personality questionnaires to his subjects but, since we already know from Chapter 2 that occupational success is positively associated with scores on conscientiousness and agreeableness, Clark’s work allows us to infer that in pre-welfare state times, in the UK at least, these pro-employment personality characteristics conferred an evolutionary advantage. Equally importantly for the theory in this book, Clark’s work also supports the more general notion that personality can evolve in response to changes in society.
Second, I summarise some studies that have measured associations between personality and reproduction in developed countries in the welfare state era (that is, from approximately 1945 onwards). These studies show that employment-resistant personality characteristics have gradually gained the evolutionary upper hand since then, with the result that people with employment-resistant personality profiles now produce significantly more children than average citizens do. This idea is supported by my own research on Australian and US citizens and also on US citizens by the research of Markus Jokela and colleagues.
Third, I summarise data on welfare and reproduction. To do this, I first cite government data from t
he UK showing that welfare claimants on average have significantly more children than employed citizens. Finally, I cite US and UK studies which indicate that the number of children born to welfare claimants tracks welfare generosity, with increases in welfare generosity causing them to have more children, and reductions in welfare generosity causing them to have fewer children.
These latter data are useful to my argument because they contradict the stereotype that large families are wholly a product of poverty or ignorance, instead showing the opposite: as financial benefits per child increase, so does the number of children born to claimants, in a dose-dependent manner and apparently through deliberate discontinuation of contraception. For example, in the UK, it has been shown that increases in the generosity of child benefit funding in the UK over the last decade of approximately 50 per cent per child have increased the number of children born to claimants by approximately 15 per cent (Brewer, Ratcliffe & Smith, 2011). Similarly, in the USA, less generous welfare payments per child beginning in the mid-1990s caused claimants to have fewer children through a decline in pregnancies rather than an increase in abortions (Argys, Averett & Rees, 2000).
More generally, in line with the notion that welfare claimants modulate their behaviour according to changes in welfare provision, it has also been discovered that spells on welfare support tend to be longer when welfare generosity increases, suggesting again that the citizens who claim welfare (despite being less conscientious on average than those who work) are nevertheless conscientious enough to monitor the generosity of government welfare schemes and tailor their economic decisions according to whether it is financially worth forgoing work for welfare (O’Neill, Bassi & Wolf, 1987).
I then devote the rest of this chapter to revisiting the study of problem families by Tonge et al. (1975) mentioned in Chapter 2. These data are important to my argument because the exceptionally detailed nature of their study is capable of providing more information than census-style studies on the links between welfare and family size. The take-home message from their study is that it is the employment-resistant personality rather than poverty that leads to the reproductive strategy of having many children who are then neglected.
We know this because Tonge et al. (1975) focused on comparing the poverty of the problem families and the comparison families, and what they found was intriguing: whilst the problem families were relatively impoverished for the standards of the day, so too were the comparison families. Tonge and colleagues went as far as to describe the comparison families as strikingly underprivileged, with two-thirds of them being close to the poverty line and seven comparison families being below the poverty line. Yet despite these far from affluent financial resources, the comparison families managed their lives adequately, were mostly in employment and generally behaved as solid, capable citizens. Moreover, of crucial importance here, the comparison families had fewer children than the problem families and on average their children were better cared for. This finding means that any differences in the number of children between the problem families and the comparison families cannot be explained away as side effects of significant differences in affluence or social class, but instead reflect some other causal factor, such as possessing a personality profile that increases responsiveness to the perverse incentives of the welfare state.
A farewell to alms
Let’s begin this section with a thought experiment: imagine that your country is populated entirely by individuals with the employment-resistant personality profile but you need treatment for cancer. Who are you going to turn to? Is it likely that an individual with the employment-resistant personality profile will conscientiously study to acquire the knowledge required to become a competent oncologist, let alone be capable of the smooth, cooperative team work required to treat you successfully? What about when an engineer is required to design and build a new sewer system for your neighbourhood? How about if a new medicine is needed to treat a neurodegenerative disease that is killing a beloved member of your family?
All these highly skilled jobs and thousands of others like them are vital for the effective running of the modern world. Yet they are unlikely to be performed adequately by people with the employment-resistant personality profile because, as we saw in Chapter 2, regardless of intelligence level, their personality characteristics impair their willingness to work diligently and cooperatively.
With these considerations in mind, it seems plausible that modern, developed democracies thrive because people with the employment-resistant personality profile are vastly outnumbered by people with diligent, cooperative pro-employment personalities who are predisposed to study hard at school, to work for their living and, equally importantly, pay the taxes that fund infrastructure development. We know this is true because of studies of the epidemiology of antisocial personality traits. For example, Neumann and Hare (2008) studied a stratified random sample of 514 non-incarcerated US residents between 18 and 40 years of age (196 men, 318 women) via an industry-standard scale which uses a structured interview format to tot up the number of antisocial personality traits displayed by each participant (the PCL: SV; Hart, Cox & Hare, 1995).
This analysis showed that approximately 70 per cent of the participants displayed fewer than three antisocial personality traits, well within solid citizenship territory. In this study, a score of 13 symptoms or more was used to indicate a possible diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder: only 1.2 per cent of the population reached this cut-off (see Figure 4.1). This scale records instances of antisocial acts that the majority of the population have never committed, so it represents what is called a half-normal distribution.
Similar results have been found in the UK. For example, a survey of a representative sample of 638 non-incarcerated UK residents revealed that 70.8 per cent of the sample (452 individuals) displayed no antisocial personality traits at all and were what could be called solid citizens. Eleven individuals (1.7 per cent of the sample) scored high enough to be rated as possibly displaying antisocial personality disorder and one person scored high enough to be rated as probably displaying it (see Figure 4.2). The UK population is approximately 63 million at the time of writing. Using the findings summarised in Figure 4.2 as a rough guide, we can estimate that there are about 100,000 people living in the UK (1 in 600 of the population) with personality profiles that are sufficiently antisocial to cause severe adjustment problems and about 1,000,000 people living in the UK (1 in 60 of the population) who are sufficiently antisocial to have some adjustment problems.
Figure 4.1 Distribution of antisocial personality traits in a sample of 514 US residents
Source: Neumann and Hare (2008).
Overall, the findings shown in Figures 4.1 and 4.2 suggest that in the USA and UK approximately 70 per cent of the population are solid citizens, with only relatively few individuals distributed down the scale towards full-blown antisocial personality disorder. According to recent advances in economic history, it wasn’t always this way: in his seminal 2007 book A Farewell to Alms, the leading economic historian Greg Clark challenged previous theories that the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century because of the relatively sudden development of a stable society in Britain in the preceding century or so. According to Clark’s research, compared to the rest of the world, Britain became unusually stable in political and economic terms from approximately AD 1100, much earlier than had previously been suspected. He argues that this much longer period of stability allowed a gradual, evolutionary change in the personality profile of the population towards greater cooperation and diligence (in the jargon of personality research, that is higher scores on conscientiousness and agreeableness). It was this relatively slow change in personality that he suggested ultimately triggered the Industrial Revolution.
Figure 4.2 Distribution of antisocial personality traits in a sample of 638 UK residents
Source: Coid et al. (2009).
More specifically, Clark argues that the Industrial Revolution h
appened where and when it did because the increase in stability and peace of Britain from about 1100 significantly increased the economic pay-offs for cooperative, diligent and pro-social behaviour. Clark is not claiming that Britain from 1100 to 1800 was wholly tranquil but, in comparison to mainland Europe during the same time period, it was relatively sheltered from invasions, border changes, natural disasters and other agents of geo-political chaos. The sheltered and stable nature of British society from that time not only facilitated the accumulation of wealth through cooperative, diligent business endeavours but also the transmission of that wealth between generations via reliable pathways such as a legally binding system of wills and testaments, as well as reliable registers of property. Moreover, the stability of British society permitted increased scrutiny of the government by the people, as signified by such measures as Magna Carta, with the result that acts of despotism by the ruling elite (for example, imprisonment without trial and feudal payments) became progressively more difficult, further enhancing the opportunities and incentives for British people of that era to work steadily towards economic success.