by Adam Perkins
Finally, approximately 68 per cent of the population are born with an average-sized dose of the genes for being difficult to socialise. This section of the population is easily swayed by their upbringing: they could go either way, towards employment-resistance or solid citizenship, depending upon whether they are neglected during childhood. As there are so many more of these children and because their personalities are so sensitive to their upbringing, the treatment of this easily swayed majority during childhood is the most important causal factor in the future development of human capital in society. Based on this analysis, I suggest that this is the mechanism by which the welfare state does the most damage to the human capital of the population, because it boosts the numbers of children with average genetic profiles who are born into disadvantaged households and who are thus at risk of being swayed towards employment-resistance by neglect.
To obtain an approximate estimate of the scale of this environmental effect of the welfare state on personality, relative to its genetic effects, consider that the UK contains approximately 63 million people at the time of writing. The normal distribution tells us that approximately ten million of these people (16 per cent) will carry a relatively low dose of the genes for being difficult to socialise, ten million of them (16 per cent) will carry a relatively high dose and 43 million (68 per cent) will carry an approximately average dose.
Government figures show that approximately 800,000 children were born in the UK in the last year, about 110,000 of them into workless households. Had the previous 15 years not seen a 50 per cent increase in welfare generosity, that latter total would have been approximately 15 per cent smaller (about 14,000 fewer children per year; Brewer et al., 2011). The normal distribution tells us that of those extra 14,000 welfare babies born per year in response to the increased financial incentives of the welfare state, about 2,240 (16 per cent) will carry significantly lower than average doses of genes for being difficult to socialise. These are the children who have a low risk of developing employment-resistant personalities regardless of their upbringing and will tend to become solid citizens, even if neglected. About 2,240 (16 per cent) will carry significantly higher than average doses of genes for being difficult to socialise. These are the children who have a high risk of developing into employment-resistant adults, regardless of their upbringing.
As a caveat, I should emphasise that this latter number is a conservative estimate, since employment-resistant adults are over-represented in the welfare-claiming sector of the population (Vaughn et al., 2010) and so babies born to welfare claimants will on average receive a larger dose of genes for employment-resistance than children born to non-claimants. However, pinning down the size of this subsidiary genetic effect is not something we have the knowledge to do at this stage, so it is safer to assume genetic parity with the rest of the population for now.
These genetic outliers are a sideshow, since the normal distribution also tells us that a far larger number of these extra babies born per year to workless families will carry an average-sized dose of genes for being difficult to socialise (approximately 9,548 of the 14,000 extra babies; 68 per cent). These are the children who are at high risk of being swayed towards employment-resistance by neglect, according to Lykken’s model of socialisation. We have already seen that approximately 60 per cent of children born into households populated by employment-resistant adults will be neglected (Tonge et al., 1975) and so we can estimate that 5,728 of these easily swayed children will suffer neglect. But we can’t assume that all of them will be converted into employment-resistant personalities by neglect: some might be taken into high-quality foster care, or encounter a positive role model outside the family, such as an inspiring teacher or sports coach. This brings us back to David Lykken, who concluded: ‘In the worst home environments, a large fraction of all offspring will remain unsocialized’ (Lykken, 1995, p. 563).
Based on the Lykken model of socialisation, his use of the phase ‘a large fraction’ implies a plausible conversion rate is somewhere between 50 and 100 per cent. If we split the difference with a 75 per cent conversion rate, this means that we can estimate that every year in the UK, 4,296 genetically average children (that is, 75 per cent of 5,728 of the neglected children mentioned in the previous paragraph) who have been born into workless households in response to increased generosity of the welfare state will be swayed towards employment-resistance via neglect. This is approximately twice the number of extra babies born with a larger than average dose of genes for being difficult to socialise (2,240 children). So we can see that the environmental effect of the welfare state on personality is approximately twice as large as the genetic effect, but both of them count when it comes to lowering the human capital of the nation. So we can see that by increasing the generosity of welfare benefits by 50 per cent back in 1999, the UK has acquired approximately 6,536 extra employment-resistant individuals per year (4,296 + 2,240). In total therefore, we can estimate that this 50 per cent increase in welfare generosity 15 years ago has since endowed the UK with approximately 210,000 extra children born into disadvantaged families. Of these extra children, approximately 98,040 are more employment-resistant than average.
Almost 100,000 extra employment-resistant individuals created by the welfare state over the last 15 years may sound like a bad thing in principle, but in a nation of 63 million people, can such a relatively small number in practice impose a significant financial drag on society? We have already seen in Figures 8.1 and 8.2 that environmental effects alone are sufficient to cause individuals who suffered childhood disadvantage to impose a burden on society that is approximately four times greater than that of the average individual. But that fourfold burden is not suitable for producing an estimate of the absolute financial cost to society of each disadvantaged individual because, for example, they may have worse criminal records than average citizens and therefore end up having been jailed more often by the age of 40 than average individuals.
To quantify in financial terms the burden on society imposed by the extra 98,040 UK residents who possess the employment-resistant personality profile, we must first recall that under current government regulations, the most a workless household in the UK can take home in benefits is £500 per week (£26,000 per year). At an average of 2.3 people per UK household, it is reasonable to assume that each extra employment-resistant individual will cost the UK taxpayer an extra £11,304 per year in welfare benefits alone, since the prominent feature of the employment-resistant personality profile is a high risk of unemployment. For example, in Chapter 2 we saw that the study of problem families in Sheffield by W. L. Tonge and colleagues showed that only nine of the 33 problem families contained parents who had worked for more than 10 per cent of the previous three years, compared to 23 out of 33 of the comparison families.
These welfare costs take no account of any of the other costs that employment-resistant individuals typically cause to the taxpayer. Perhaps the most obvious of these is criminality. For example, Tonge and colleagues (1975) found that criminality was more than six times higher in the problem families than in the comparison families: the 66 adults in the problem group had 495 criminal convictions (446 for the men and 49 for the women) whereas the 66 adults in the comparison group had 81 convictions (79 for the men and 2 for the women).
Importantly, the higher rate of convictions in the problem group was not caused by one or two super-prolific criminals, but instead reflected a general tendency towards crime in the group as a whole: only three of the men in the problem group had no convictions (9 per cent) compared to 12 in the comparison group (36 per cent). As Tonge and colleagues matched the two groups of families on affluence, these criminality differences cannot be explained away as an artefact of differences in poverty between the problem and comparison families.
To estimate the extra criminal costs resulting from the extra 98,040 employment-resistant individuals born in the UK since 1999 due to welfare incentives, we are fortunate to be able to call upon a detailed analy
sis of the costs by Brand and Price (2000). This showed that 60,730,000 criminal incidents cost the UK approximately £55 billion in the year 1999/2000. This works out at a cost of approximately £934 per crime at current prices. Tonge and colleagues showed that problem family adults by the age of 30–40 had accumulated approximately seven convictions each, whereas the adults from the comparison families on average had accumulated only one conviction. Therefore we can see that crimes perpetrated by each employment-resistant individual studied by Tonge and colleagues would have cost approximately £7,000 in today’s prices. This means that the criminality of employment-resistant individuals increases their per capita cost to society by about £500 per year of adulthood. If this crime cost is added to the benefits cost, we can see that each employment-resistant personality costs approximately £12,000 per year.
But welfare benefits and criminality are just two facets of the extra costs caused by employment-resistant individuals. For example, we may recall that the adults of the Sheffield problem families not only had significantly worse work and criminal records than the adults of the comparison families, but also had significantly more children and were significantly more neglectful of those children. Moreover, those children were themselves significantly more criminally inclined than the children of the comparison families: of the 55 comparison children who were over the age of criminal responsibility at the time of survey (ten years old), seven (13 per cent) had a conviction. In contrast, of the 95 children in problem families who were over the age of criminal responsibility at the time of survey, 31 (32 per cent) had a conviction.
This finding means we can say that each of the 98,040 employment-resistant individuals born in response to welfare incentives since 1999 will cost the public purse at least an extra £12,000 per year. At a national level, this allows us to estimate that the welfare-induced proliferation of employment-resistant personalities due to increased welfare generosity since 1999 is costing the UK taxpayer upwards of £1.2 billion per year.
But costs are relative and it is only when we compare the cost to society of an employment-resistant person to that of an average person that we see what a burden on the public purse employment-resistant individuals really are. For example, at the time of writing, the UK government needs to borrow approximately £120 billion per year in order to keep the nation going. If we divide that cash sum by the number of people in the UK (approximately 63 million at the time of writing), we can see that on average each person in the UK costs the public purse approximately £1,900 per year. Since our initial estimate suggests that a person with the employment-resistant personality profile costs the nation approximately £12,000 per year, we can now see that employment-resistant individuals cost the nation approximately six times as much per year compared to the average person. Note that this is likely to be an underestimate since the value for the average person includes individuals with the employment-resistant personality profile.
Cost estimates at a national level are a tricky business and so, as a sanity check, it is important to compare my estimate of the per annum cost to the nation of each employment-resistant individual to estimates by other researchers of the per annum costs to the public purse of individuals with antisocial personality characteristics. For example, including the average cost of welfare, medical care, juvenile corrections, police time, legal expenses, trial costs, probation officers and imprisonment, but not including the value of property stolen or destroyed by the antisocial individual, nor the heartache and stress that their behaviour causes to others, nor the cost of negligent parenting, Westman (1994) estimated that each individual with antisocial personality disorder in the USA costs the public purse $51,362 per year.
Westman’s estimate is backed up by the results of a study of 135 persistent juvenile criminals in Minneapolis, which found that a single offender cost the public purse $239,551 over four years ($59,888 per annum; Wiig, 1995). In today’s prices with today’s dollar/pound conversion rate, we can see that these estimates indicate that each person with antisocial personality disorder costs the public purse approximately £48,000 per year, some 25 times as much per year as the average person (£1,900 per year) and approximately four times as much as an individual with the employment-resistant personality profile (£12,000 per year).
Viewed as a whole, these previous estimates by Westman (1994) and Wiig (1995) provide reassurance that my estimate is sensible, since we have already seen evidence in Chapter 4 that the employment-resistant personality profile represents a milder version of antisocial personality disorder and so should be less costly to the public purse, as indeed is the case. The notion that the employment-resistant personality profile is intermediate in severity between normality and antisocial personality disorder is further backed up by the study of problem families in Sheffield by Tonge et al. (1975). This showed that, despite their pervasive pattern of dysfunctional, employment-resistant behaviour, only two of the 66 adults in the problem group met the criteria for antisocial personality disorder. Reassuringly, none of the 66 adults in the comparison group met these criteria.
Conclusion
The Lykken model of socialisation means that, of the 15 per cent more children that have been born to workless families in the UK due to 50 per cent rises in welfare generosity in 1999, almost half of them will possess the employment-resistant personality profile. This occurs by a combination of environmental and genetic mechanisms, in a ratio of two to one. The financial cost to society of this welfare-induced proliferation of employment-resistant personalities is likely to be upwards of £1.2 billion per year (98,040 × £12,000), or approximately 1 per cent of overall welfare spending, which in 2014, the UK government announced is to be capped at £120 billion.
9
Further Evidence for Welfare-Induced Personality Mis-Development
Theories that are unsuitable for testing by laboratory experiments require corroboration via circumstantial evidence. This is a less satisfactory form of corroboration but it is still valuable, as Charles Darwin demonstrated by his use of circumstantial evidence to convince the scientific establishment of the validity of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Much has been made of Darwin’s use of what could be dubbed ‘positive’ circumstantial evidence; that is, chance observations that fit the theory of evolution by natural selection (for example, the Galapagos finches). But less attention has been paid to Darwin’s use of what could be dubbed ‘negative’ circumstantial evidence; that is, the lack of chance evidence that contradicts evolution by natural selection. For example, in the first edition of the Origin of Species Darwin dealt with the issue thus: ‘If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case’ (Darwin, 1859, p. 219).
In the case of the welfare trait theory, my argument hinges on the discovery that childhood disadvantage encourages the formation of aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking personality characteristics (Heckman et al., 2013). This finding is crucial because it means that a welfare state which boosts the number of children born into disadvantaged households will also undermine the nation’s stock of human capital by boosting the number of children in the population who develop employment-resistant personality profiles. To paraphrase Darwin, ‘If it could be demonstrated that childhood disadvantage benefits personality formation, by encouraging the development of conscientious and agreeable personality characteristics, then my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such study.’
With regard to ‘positive’ circumstantial evidence for the welfare trait theory, most nations of the Western world have had some form of welfare state in place for approximately seven decades. If the welfare trait theory is valid, we should therefore be able to see some signs that the employment-resistant personality profile has begun to proliferate over the last 70 years or so. The chief purpose of this chapter is to summarise circumstantial evidence that fits th
is idea.
First, I return to a topic that was touched upon in Chapter 1, namely economic studies in Scandinavia that have explored the effect of the welfare state on work motivation, both within and between generations. We shall see that the results of these studies fit the welfare trait theory, as they show that increased welfare generosity encourages fraudulent claims and also that the willingness to defraud the welfare state increases with each generation.
These data from Scandinavia are reassuring, but it is unsurprising that they corroborate my theory since it was in part based on them. To prevent the welfare trait theory becoming just another uninformative, circular theory that is corroborated by the evidence that formed it, we need to find corroborating evidence that is consistent with the theory and yet did not inspire its creation.
We will therefore begin our escape from circularity by examining anthropological research on behaviour in small-scale, tribal societies that have existed more or less unaltered for many centuries. Such societies provide a natural experiment that can shed light on the capacity of a population’s economic and social environment to shape its behavioural style – that is, its personality profile. These studies are therefore well placed to corroborate the notion presented in this book that, by altering the economic and social landscape of a nation, the welfare state has the potential also to alter the personality of its population. More specifically, if the welfare trait theory is correct, we should see signs in societies in which survival chances are disconnected from forward planning, diligence or cooperation – as is the case in the modern welfare state – that the personality profile of the population resembles that of employment-resistant welfare claimants in the Western world. Conversely, we should find that societies in which survival chances are boosted by behaving in a well-planned, diligent and cooperative manner – as was the case in Britain between AD 1100 and 1800, according to Clark (2007) – are populated mostly by individuals with conscientious and agreeable personality profiles. As we will see, this is approximately the pattern that anthropologists have found, but such research does not measure reproduction and so has limited value as corroboration for the welfare trait theory.