by Adam Perkins
Returning to the theme of this book, if welfare generosity is reduced and the point of reproductive equilibrium is achieved, welfare claimants will no longer be a reproductively favoured group and thus the welfare state will no longer proliferate the employment-resistant personality profile. Of course, reaching reproductive equilibrium merely prevents the proliferation of employment-resistant individuals by reducing the proportion of children who are born into disadvantaged families. There is a separate, moral issue, which is whether it is right that the welfare state should encourage the birth of any children into disadvantaged households, given that they tend to suffer miserable lives and also, as shown by the Troubled Families Programme, tend to impose a significant per capita burden on the public purse.
This is, of course, just one of many moral concerns generated by the welfare state: for example, it is plausible that working alongside colleagues of different cultural backgrounds aids integration and that the welfare state, by removing the need to work for a living, is perpetuating cultural divisions. The welfare state might also reduce the effort that children put into their school work, since it guarantees them with an income in the event that their school grades are too low to gain them employment. Similarly, a welfare state that pays benefits to claimants irrespective of whether they have a criminal record is likely to sap the motivation of citizens to refrain from crime. The welfare state might also affect family structure since, by providing a safety net to pay for the raising of a woman’s children in the event of abandonment by their father, it may cause contemporary women to be less focused than women in earlier eras on finding a conscientious and agreeable mate who will stick around and help raise their children. This raises the ironic and tragic prospect that state benefits are increasing the risk that children will miss out on a far more important benefit, namely a loving and supportive father.
These moral issues may or may not turn out to be important, but they are a matter for the philosophers amongst us: the aim of this chapter is instead to attempt to understand why Dawkins’ advice to disconnect reproduction amongst welfare claimants from subsistence has been ignored. Dawkins suspected a deliberate political motive: ‘Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion’ (Dawkins, 1976, p. 126).
Dawkins’ theory that existing welfare policies have been deliberately designed to encourage reproduction amongst claimants is striking, but I suspect the real explanation for flawed welfare policies is more mundane. I think that the governing elite in such key domains of society as politics, media, academia and the law – what we might dub ‘the intelligentsia’ – tend to live in leafy, affluent neighbourhoods and also tend to work in jobs that are interesting, prestigious and well paid. Therefore, the notion of someone opting out of work to live on welfare benefits must seem incomprehensible to them. I work in academia and therefore could be counted in the ranks of the intelligentsia. But I have a somewhat different perspective to most of the intelligentsia because, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, my scientific career was preceded by several years of low-paid work (for example, two and half years labouring in a clothing warehouse) as well as spells of unemployment during which I claimed benefits. Furthermore, my adverse financial circumstances have meant that for the last 12 years I have lived in one of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the UK where I have seen first-hand the corrosive effects of well-meaning but flawed welfare policies upon social functioning.
This prolonged experience of life at the base of the economic pyramid has given me an admiration for the welfare state, yet also an understanding of just how tempting the prospect of £26,000 per annum in handouts can be if it means one no longer has to endure decades of repetitive, boring and physically exhausting labour. Indeed, the extent of this temptation is apparent when we consider that £26,000 per annum is more than twice the annual take-home pay of a person working full time on the UK minimum wage (approximately £11,752 per annum at the time of writing).
Whilst I cite the geographical, financial and social detachment of the intelligentsia as a reason for their tendency to design self-destructive welfare policies that erode work motivation and increase the number of children born into disadvantaged households, I am not seeking to blame them. I am merely saying that the intelligentsia are not the right people to design welfare policy. As support for this argument, I can point to the fact that political leaders in the Western world tend to come from privileged families and often move straight from education into the corridors of power, having spent little, if any, time living and working in ordinary neighbourhoods. Like all stereotypes, there are notable exceptions to this rule, but at the time of writing it applies to the leaders of all the major political parties in the Westminster parliament.
Nor am I the only person to have noticed the detachment of the intelligentsia. For example, George Orwell observed: ‘This is the really important fact about the English intelligentsia – their severance from the common culture of the country’ (Orwell, 1941, p. 48). More recently, the former policeman and author Stuart Davidson made similar, if more tongue-in-cheek, observations about the English judiciary:
I’m sure lots of you, like me, are kept awake at night by the idea that some of our prisons are overcrowded. It’s certainly been worrying Lord Chief Justice Phillips of Worth Matravers lately.
Recently, his Lordship suggested that offenders should only be sent to jail ‘as a last resort’ and that they should really be rehabilitated in the community.
I think they should be rehabilitated chez Phillips, where Lord Phillips can develop a better understanding of what persistent acquisitive criminals are really like while Lady Phillips (nee Christylle Marie-Thérèse Rouffiac) keeps an eye on the family silver … I’ve no idea where the LCJ’s houses are (he’s probably got several), or what they’re like, but I’ll hazard a guess. They will be imposing and beautiful pads in low crime areas. They will have walls around them and plenty of open ground that burglars have to cross before they get to the alarmed and well-made windows. He’ll probably have a dog or two, and possibly a live-in housekeeper. The local nick will know exactly where he is and they will be on tenterhooks in case they get a call to get out there (if he hasn’t got a panic button or some sort of direct comm-link). His neighbours will be charming people with diverse interests, large cars and lots of antique furniture. If he encounters muggers, burglars or general ne’er-do-wells (outside his professional life) it will only be because of extreme carelessness on his part. He certainly won’t be glassed in the back garden of the King’s Head for brushing the arm of an unemployed yob who has drunk nine pints of Stella.
My question is this: when it comes to deciding how criminals should be dealt with, why should we trust Lord Chief Justice Phillips of Worth Matravers?
(Davidson, 2011, pp. 10–11)
I have included this quote not only to back up Orwell’s claim that the English intelligentsia are out of touch with ordinary life, but also because it provides a second illustration of the knock-on effect of flawed welfare policy on other areas of life. The topic of this book is not penal reform, but one theme that I will mention in this final chapter is the idea that welfare legislation, because it meddles with reproduction, has the potential to cause economic headwinds for society that may not be immediately obvious. For example, based on the link I showed in Chapter 9 between the employment-resistant personality profile and violent crime, if the intelligentsia really are serious about reducing prison overcrowding, then instead of sparing criminals from prison, they should help to shrink the problem at source by urging the cessation of welfare legislation that increases the number of children born into disadvantaged households.
Based on the assumption that welfare legislation in developed nations reflects the attitudes of the intelligentsia that created it, it would seem that the int
elligentsia generally believe that supporting a few freeloaders is a price worth paying for protecting unemployed people from starvation. Unfortunately for the intelligentsia, if the welfare trait theory is correct, it will only be possible for them ignore the problem of growing numbers of people with the employment-resistant personality profile for a decade or two. This is because, as we saw earlier in this book, the employment-resistant profile is associated not only with being work-shy but also with antisocial behaviour; if the welfare state continues to boost the number of children born into disadvantaged households, the intelligentsia will eventually get a rude surprise once the employment-resistant sector of the population becomes sufficiently numerous to invade genteel neighbourhoods, as happened briefly during the London riots of 2011.
The problems that occur when the employment-resistant personality profile becomes widespread are also mentioned in Stuart Davidson’s book Wasting Police Time. In this brilliantly observed book, which I quoted from earlier in the chapter, Davidson describes his experiences during several years working as a policeman in the English midlands town of Burton-upon-Trent up until 2007. During his duties, Davidson observed the negative effects on the quality of life for innocent people, especially children, of the employment-resistant personality profile.
More specifically, in many of the households that Davidson visited, there are echoes of the households of the problem families studied by Tonge and colleagues in Sheffield in the 1970s, in that the adult residents have plenty of free time (because they are unemployed) yet do not spend that time wisely, on such worthwhile activities as cleaning their residence or looking after their children properly:
In the small hours, I had to go and see an 18-year-old girl who’d had an argument with her boyfriend. He’d stormed out and she was frightened he was going to come back and attack her.
She lived in a grubby flat, behind a flimsy wooden door with a cheap Yale lock and screw holes where the old one had been before it was kicked off in an earlier row. Inside the detritus of a disordered life lay everywhere; bedsheets, children’s clothes, toys and sweet wrappers strewn throughout the place, a couple of photographs of the kids on the walls and an overflowing bin in the kitchen next to a cat bowl full of Whiskas. In the corner of the living room was a television, with DVD and CD players and a Nintendo Gamecube alongside. A stack of DVDs, CDs and games were shoved behind the telly. The dirty walls were painted pink and the local authority, as part of its environmental drive, had put in double-glazed windows. There were no books and no dining table.
The whole place smelled catty, stale and unaired.
The girl – like so many who spend their lives catering to the whims of the moment – had been out on the town that night. She had left her kids with her boyfriend, and that had been at the bottom of the row. He was not the father of the children and had taken umbrage when she came home, late and smashed out of her face. He restrained himself from delivering the beating he doubtless felt she deserved, but she feared his restraint wouldn’t last forever.
‘He had a right go at me,’ she said, still drunk, and clearing a pile of unwashed children’s clothes away so I could sit down. ‘I don’t want him here anymore.’
The children were well-behaved and dressed in dirty pyjamas. It was 3am and they had been up for hours. They were eating crisps and staring at me with dark-rimmed, saucer eyes. A wave of depression came over me, as it always does whenever kids are involved. There was nothing I could do about the young woman’s situation because she had not been the victim of a real crime. (he hadn’t actually beaten her up)
But I started talking to her.
‘This isn’t great is it?’ I said. ‘Your kids up at this time of night, the police here. Never mind this idiot, you need a bloke with a job, someone who can provide for you and the kids. He hasn’t got a job, has he?’
‘I’m going to college myself soon,’ she said. I’ve heard this a hundred times before.
‘He’s no good for you, though, is he?’
‘I know that,’ she said. ‘We’ve broken up twice before. But this time it’s for real. He’s not coming back in here, no way.’
If I had a pound etc. etc.
‘Have you ever thought about getting married? Finding someone to take you on, make a commitment to you, that sort of thing?’ I said.
She said she was only eighteen and, therefore, too young to marry. I looked at the children; I wanted to point out the obvious, but refrained. Instead, I said, ‘Do you get any help looking after the kids?’
‘My sister comes round sometimes,’ she said, drifting off. There wasn’t much else I could usefully say, or do, so I left.
Davidson’s conclusion after his visit to the young woman goes as follows: ‘It had been a profoundly miserable experience, and one experienced by every street copper all over the country, all the time: young mums, bringing up children in relative squalor, with no aspirations and no ability to see further than the next few hours.’ Critiquing Davidson’s analysis of this event from a scientific perspective, it is interesting to see how similar it is to the finding by Tonge and colleagues that problem families in Sheffield suffered from a lack of foresight, which you may recall went as follows:
This is a curious set of values. It adds up to a complete failure to plan for long-term action. It takes forethought to do all that these families failed to do: to take out motor insurance and TV licence, to accumulate household comforts, to limit family size; and education is above all a long-term endowment insurance. This is a style of life which shuts its eyes to the future.
(Tonge et al., 1975, p. 117)
Despite being separated by more than 30 years in time, as well as by geography and professional experience, Davidson’s conclusion and that of the Sheffield researchers both point squarely to a lack of foresight as underpinning this form of dysfunctional existence. Supporting Einstein’s view that science is just an extension of everyday thinking, Davidson has replicated the finding of Tonge and colleagues even though he did not have their scientific resources and training and was not (presumably) aware of their work.
Even more interestingly, Davidson then backs up the theme of this book by identifying a causal link between the welfare state and the mis-evolution of personality towards employment-resistance:
Like so many others, she had been soft-soaped by welfare agencies anxious to preserve the independence of the girl and her ability to make ‘informed choices’. The problem is that the choices they make are, almost invariably, the wrong ones, and the result of all this is the systematic neglect of young children and the growth of our underclass.
(Davidson, 2011, p. 32)
This evidence from Davidson and others like him is anecdotal rather than experimental, but it is an important sanity check for the argument in this book because it demonstrates a convergence of opinion from different sources, professional backgrounds and locations, all of them saying that personality and the welfare state are connected, and not in a good way.
The nightmare scenario of the employment-resistant personality profile becoming the norm across the entire nation due to welfare-induced personality mis-development is only a scenario. It may happen or it may not, but my point is that unless we address this issue scientifically we won’t know either way. What I seek is a society in which we help our children to climb the stairway of human capital rather than pushing them down it. As James Heckman and colleagues have shown, one way to do this is to provide disadvantaged children with intensive preschool tutoring. As we have seen in this book, another way is to adjust the generosity of state benefits so that they no longer increase the number of children born into disadvantaged households. Since one disadvantaged child is one too many, I’ll end this book with a question: why not do both?
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