Social Value in Public Policy

Bill Jordan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030604202
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030604219
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política pública

This book considers the role of social value in the making and implementation of public policy, taking into account how concepts such as subjective well-being (SWB) can be used to measure the expected impact of enacted policies. It argues that there is no evidence that markets have contributed to greater well-being, and that moments of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, represent an opportunity to re-orientate policymaking and policy implementation away from those which favour markets, and towards those which place subjective well-being at their core. Following this premise, the author explores the elements that should be considered in a future society that prioritises social value.

© The Author(s) 2021

B. JordanSocial Value in Public Policyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60421-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Bill Jordan¹

(1)

University of Plymouth, Exeter, UK

Bill Jordan

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

Social value is created in human interactions, and is the basis for our well-being. But these interactions are influenced by the policies of governments, and hence well-being can often be undermined by them. This book will consider how such policies, which reduce the levels of social value accumulated in economies and societies, could be minimised, and how relationships which enhance social value (and hence well-being) could be strengthened and enhanced. The coronavirus pandemic has greatly re-enforced longstanding tendencies in US and UK societies, and caused a dramatic collapse in national income and in well-being, but it also supplies an opportunity to re-assess social policies across the board.

Keywords

RelationshipsServicesWell-beingInequality

End Abstract

The recession caused by the coronavirus lock-down had especially severe effects on face-to-face activities – those which could accelerate the pandemic’s spread. Services of this kind had been forming an ever-growing proportion of employment in advanced economies, especially the USA and UK. In the latter in March, 2018, there were almost 33 million workers in services of all kinds, almost five and a half million of whom were (despite programmes of privatisation) in the public sector, out of a total labour force of some 40 million. Around a million workers in all were immediately laid off in the pandemic, and some of their employers faced bankruptcy.

The dominance of service employment in these economies dated from the 1960s, when industrial production started to be relocated to the Far East and South America; by 1980, this had been identified as the ‘globalisation’ of economic activity, with China’s rapid growth as its totem phenomenon. But the other obvious consequence of the market-minded public policies which became the orthodoxies under Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s leaderships was a growing inequality of earnings in the populations of the two nations.

Both countries’ governments (under their respective major parties’ regimes) had opted to offset the very low wages which characterised much service employment, especially in the private sector, with subsidies from the public purse. In the first 20 years of their expanded coverage in the UK (and Ireland, where they still are) these were called Family Income Supplements; at the end of the century, a Labour government adopted their US name of Tax Credits, recognising that they worked as a kind of income tax in reverse, and in this century the UK’s were renamed ‘Universal Credit’ (UC).

Face-to-face services were also important factors in an approach to assessing the quality of life in our societies which became prominent at the turn of the century (Kahneman 1999; Helliwell 2003; Layard 2005). Here the concept of Subjective Well-being (SWB), which could be measured through mass surveys, allowed comparisons to be made between genders, classes, marital statuses, occupations, age groups, districts and so on. But it was also possible to make international comparisons, and to determine which policies and social trends (e.g. spending on public services, and rates of family breakdown) increased SWB, and which reduced it.

The striking finding about these statistical comparisons, especially in the USA and UK, was that average SWB had not risen in the decades since the 1970s, when its measurement was first systematically recorded. This had provoked animated debates among economists, psychologists, political scientists and sociologists, about the nature and causes of this stagnation in levels of happiness, since scores for SWB in developing countries continued to rise as their economies were growing.

Part of the explanation clearly lay in the rise in inequality, especially in the Anglophone countries; more equal societies, such as the Scandinavian ones, did better (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). But the least happy of all in all types of society were poor people forced to take low-paid work (or to work longer hours in such jobs) on pain of losing all or part of their benefits or state subsidies to their wages (Haagh 2019). This applied even to beneficiaries in Sweden, one of the most equal societies with the highest average levels of SWB; ‘workfare’ participants there were no more contented than the citizens of Brazil or Turkey.

So it matters how incomes are redistributed as well as how much. A large part of the reason for this was revealed by studies of the components of SWB. Ill health and long-term disability were the largest factors reducing levels below the average, but all kinds of relationships were the main components in well-being and unhappiness – more significant than income levels. Divorce and separation, widowhood and unemployment were leading negative factors.

This suggested that SWB itself was strongly influenced by the quality of relationships, and that interpersonal transactions, both formal and informal, contributed directly to well-being. ‘Social value’ (Jordan 2007, 2008) was therefore an appropriate term for what was accumulated when such transactions were predominantly positive, and reduced when they were negative – stigmatising, imposed or coercive, as in compulsory ‘workfare’ or ‘welfare-to-work’ schemes (Jordan 2010a, b, 2019, 2020; Standing 2011, 2017).

It is important to recognise that the distinction between those interactions which enhance and those which diminish social value is not simple and absolute. An example will illustrate this. The prison and probation services in England evolved over centuries; prisons were chaotic local institutions until the 1830s, when they began to be re-organised, with new buildings constructed on the principles of Bentham’s Panopticon (1791), allowing inmates in single cells to be regularly observed by staff. These institutions were managed by the Home Office, with the aim of isolating prisoners from each other, and the hope that – with guidance from a chaplain – they could reflect on their actions and emerge as reformed characters.

The probation service was gradually established as an adjunct to the magistrates’ courts from the 1870s, and was pioneered by religiously motivated staff; it was formally recognised and became a national organisation in the first decade of the twentieth century. Both prison governors and probation officers were strongly influenced after the First World War by reformers (the prisons especially by Sir Alexander Paterson, who had introduced education and sport to open establishments, along the lines of the middle-class boarding school traditions). They were committed to the idea that offenders could respond to kindness and care, informed by new psychological influences as well as religious ones, and expressed in personal relationships.

The transformation achieved by this movement was most vividly captured by Brendan Behan in his Borstal Boy (1958), an account of how he, as a very young IRA activist who had attempted a terrorist attack, completely changed his view of English society and of human relationships more generally through his experiences of kindness, concern and counselling in a young offenders’ institution. This led to him becoming a distinguished Irish literary figure.

The point here is that the English prison system was still coercive, in the sense that all inmates were held against their will. Furthermore, as I can attest from having worked for a year as a prison officer in the mid-1960s, and for ten years as a probation officer thereafter, these institutions still contained some staff whose motives were primarily ones of control and containment. But there were also some in prisons, and many in the probation service, who saw their relationships with offenders as opportunities for changing the orientation of those who had broken the law, and encouraging t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Genesis of the Social Value Problem
• 3. How Social Value Works
• 4. Social Control and Social Value
• 5. The Dynamics of Social Value
• 6. The Value of Care
• 7. Class Conflict in the Post-Pandemic World
• 8. Unconditional Welfare: The Universal Basic Income
• 9. Conclusions
• Back Matter