What is breed dependency

That's a key reason the government should require welfare recipients to work as much as they can. What could be called "workfare" thus tends to increase long-term earnings among potential recipients.

High as it is, that debt is about to soar. More than 78 million baby boomers are retiring onto Social Security and Medicare in the next 15 years or so. Under Obamacare, Medicaid is set to explode as well. That will crowd out virtually all other government spending, including national defense.

Future Congresses could impose deep cuts in social welfare programs across the board or raise massive taxes to support these exploding programs. The results would be chaotic and unpredictable. News: Romney remarks: Plain truth or huge mistake? We can reduce dependency on government and focus benefits on those who are truly needy.

For example, by including work requirements and promoting marriage being raised in a married family significantly reduces a child's chances of being in poverty , we'll help rekindle the American Dream for everyone. All poverty programs should be reviewed to make certain they're helping people instead of harming them. Social welfare programs should help people up, not hold them down. Join the conversation on Facebook.

That translated into rising incomes from farming and enterprises in the short term, and—thanks to higher spending on nutrition, health care, and education—the hope for greater earnings potential in the long term as well. As in the Mexican cash-transfer program, spending on alcohol and tobacco did not rise after the transfer. They also used cooking fuels that produced less indoor air pollution, which is linked with poor respiratory health.

Along with money spent on food, all this helps explain why children in transfer villages were healthier. Program villages saw twice the rate of progress in reducing the number of underweight girls as control villages. The proportion of to year-old girls in school was 65 percent in villages that received transfers, compared to 36 percent in villages not benefiting from the program.

As in Kenya, the cash transfers were associated with people working longer hours and making more money thanks to investments in assets including livestock. If resources for indirect subsidies from housing through food were redirected toward cash payments to the poorest, more and more sustainable poverty reduction could be achieved at less cost.

To be clear, the most generous plausible cash-transfer program would do little to make a poor Kenyan or Indian as rich as the average American. The hundred-fold rise in average incomes that requires would take massive political and institutional reform alongside many billions invested in health, education, and infrastructure.

The United States, for its part, tried an unconditional cash-transfer program 40 years ago and found it worked, too. As in the developing world, the payments were associated with reduced child malnutrition, improved school attendance, and growth in household assets.

Unlike outcomes in Kenya and India, the results in the U. But this occurred primarily among second- and third-earners in a family rather than the primary usually male worker, and was concentrated among women who responded to the transfers by taking more time to return to the workforce after having a child. These programs, alas, were never scaled up, forgotten in the welfare-reform battles of the s and 90s. But is it time to revive the idea—not only in America, but around the world?

A poverty constituted by moral disorder prejudices the prospects of the individuals affected far more than the disadvantages inherent in the poverty constituted by low family income alone.

Irving Kristol also criticised the value-free approach of economists and the willingness of the entertainment industry to treat the assault on social norms as a business opportunity. Conservative and communitarian critics of AFDC argued that the program enabled recipients to live beyond the reach of social institutions that formed and maintained character.

They claimed that this deficit of character could lead to a cluster of social ills. Richard V Reeves of the Brookings Institution has argued that character formation is the key to solving problems like economic inequality. Moral character refers to traits like kindness and humility while performance character refers to traits or skills like industriousness or prudence that enable individuals to succeed as students, workers and parents.

This idea of character is similar to that of communitarian thinker Amitai Etzioni and of economist James Heckman. Some conservative thinkers argued that underdeveloped character led to behavioural poverty. What is distinctive about behavioural dependency is its moral or attitudinal component, manifest in an inability to cope on the part of many able-bodied adults. Two of its major causes are, on the one hand, female-headed households and, on the other, nonwork.

In these two areas in particular, little progress can be made in reducing dependency apart from a heightened sense of personal responsibility. Critics argued that the welfare system was one of the major causes of female headed households and non-work. Rector and others argued that the welfare system had not only led to an increase in drug and alcohol abuse but also an increase in crime. This was part of a broader criticism of American society.

In his book Out of Control Brzezinski complained about a broader loss of self-control associated with consumerism and a breakdown in ethical standards. Similar to the way 19th century reformers like Frederic Almy compared dependency to a contagious disease, more recent critics of income support have likened it to a contaminant or toxin.

I am not talking here about an unemployment problem that can be solved by more jobs, nor about a poverty problem that can be solved by higher benefits.

The more of this toxin received by a child's family, the less successful the child will be as an adult. As in the 19th century, more recent critics of the income support system argue that welfare dependency is transmitted from parents to children. There are a number of different ideas on how dependency is transmitted.

One idea is that jobless parents and jobless communities are less able to develop character in children. Economists James Heckman and Tim Kautz conceptualise character as a set of skills that include conscientiousness and perseverance.

They argue:. Character is a skill, not a trait. At any age, character skills are stable across different tasks, but skills can change over the life cycle. Character is shaped by families, schools, and social environments. Skill development is a dynamic process, in which the early years lay the foundation for successful investment in later years.

Other researchers and commentators focus on attitudes and social norms rather than on skills. For example, according to a recent paper published by the Life Course Centre in Australia:. Political scientist Lawrence Mead draws on the earlier idea of a culture of poverty to argue that disadvantage is perpetuated through families and that the income support system prevents individuals from escaping.

In a paper he wrote:. It is chiefly through dysfunctional parents that the malign influence of past injustice reaches forward to blight our own time.

Those earlier parents failed, in part, because they were ground down by a hostile or indifferent society. Today society may be more enlightened. It provides chances to get educated and get ahead, and to try again if one fails, that were unknown a century ago.

But it cannot—without abolishing the family—interrupt the transmission of a heritage of defeat. In the past, according to Mead, reformist movements like the labour and civil rights movements emerged thanks to strong families that generated strong citizens. More recently Mead has sparked controversy by claiming that culture explains why disadvantaged minority groups are more likely to experience poverty and rely on income support. The s debate over welfare reform took place against a broader background of debates over the role of government.

Some left of centre thinkers abandoned the socialist idea that government could radically alter the structure of society to overcome economic injustice. The old debate was about social structure, about whether the market or government should organize society.

It took competence for granted, meaning the capacity of the downtrodden to get ahead. The current debate is about competence, and it takes social structure for granted. Most experts believe that the disadvantaged have enough opportunity to escape poverty and dependency, if not to earn mainstream incomes. They debate rather whether the poor are personally able to work or otherwise function better than they do. Essentially, liberals say no and conservatives yes. In the UK, sociologist Anthony Giddens cited Oscar Lewis and argued that welfare dependency could become linked to cultures of poverty.

The American debate over welfare dependency has influenced the way Australians talk about income support policy. During the s it became more common to refer to income support payments such as Newstart Allowance as welfare and to frame the problem policymakers needed to address as welfare dependency rather than as poverty or unemployment.

He stressed the psychological aspects of dependency arguing:. Their concern that handouts encouraged dependency was, however, a very general one, in the early s raised most often by them in the context of industry policy. By the s, however, they were discussing welfare dependency in terms of the development of an underclass culturally alienated from mainstream values and aspirations.

Other commentators expressed similar views. Debate over the idea of welfare dependency has continued. Their submission rejected the idea that income support was a cause of entrenched disadvantage. The idea of welfare dependency has shaped the Australian debates over drug testing for income support recipients and over the cashless debit card—a measure designed to prevent income support recipients from spending payments on gambling, alcohol and illicit drugs.

Over time, welfare dependence sucks the life out of people and can diminish their capability. It can impact on confidence and mental and physical health.

The purpose, the structure and the dignity which comes from work is lost and sometimes dependency crosses over to the next generation. Policymakers and commentators in other English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom and New Zealand have also been influenced by debates in the US. During the s and 70s policymakers in countries like the US and Australia were focused on the problem of poverty. However, conservative critics of anti-poverty policy did not accept poverty as the problem and propose different solutions: they changed the problem.

The shift from poverty to welfare dependency helped make popular intuitions about the effects of income support programs and suspicions about the moral character of disadvantaged individuals and groups seem more legitimate. This debate revived ideas that had first become influential during the 19th century. These older ideas were combined with a conservative interpretation of culture of poverty theories to argue that income support programs and social services often did more harm than good.

One of the key ideas in the literature on welfare dependency is that the dependent are immune to opportunity. Even when education, training and job opportunities are available, people mired in dependency will not take advantage of them. This is a defining feature of the problem of welfare dependency. From this perspective, the problem cannot be solved simply by providing income support recipients with opportunities for education, training and work or access to services designed to overcome barriers such as lack of access to childcare or transport.

Those who argue that dependency is the key problem do not necessarily deny the reality of problems like racial discrimination. Not all commentators who embrace the resistance-to-opportunity theory advocate the same policy responses. Those who attribute loss of self-discipline and motivation to the experience of living on income support are likely to argue for the abolition of income support programs or reforms such as compulsory participation in work programs that make income support less attractive and less damaging to recipients.

Those who attribute problems of self-discipline and motivation to a broader culture of poverty are likely to be less optimistic about the ability of welfare reform to solve the problem on its own.

Lawrence Mead falls into this second group. In his latest book— Burdens of Freedom: Cultural Difference and American Power —he argues that there is a broader population of people in poverty who fail to take advantage of opportunity because they see themselves as helpless and at the mercy of their environment. The message for government is usually to do less rather than more.

This is because clients, beyond the very young, seldom internalise the strictures deeply enough to affect their subsequent lives. Even prisons, the most rigid of institutions, produce little inner change. Thinking more broadly about social policy, Charles Murray has argued that often the best government can do is to stop making things worse. There are some things that social policy can destroy, but you cannot reverse the process. There is a line used in criticism of me about how the corpse with the knife sticking in it is dead, but pulling out the knife is not going to cause the corpse to spring back to life.

I agree with that to some extent. As the committee discovered, Australian academics and those engaged with the welfare sector do not see the term welfare dependency as simply another term for income support receipt. One of the most hotly debates issues in social policy is the extent to which changes in individual behaviour can reduce poverty and disadvantage.

In contrast, Saunders and Tsumori claim that individual behaviour is an important cause of disadvantage and that even those who are not responsible for their own disadvantage can do a great deal to improve their circumstances.

Some writers who use the term dependency not only suggest than long-term recipients fail to take advantage of opportunities to support themselves through work but also that certain ethnic or racial groups or classes of people are particularly likely to become dependent. Judging by way of category is the epitome of dehumanizing.

It curtails the individual's opportunities and livelihood, and contributes to what is often a self-fulfilling, systematic cycle of disadvantage for an entire group. The morally and politically charged nature of the debate over welfare dependency is particularly challenging for bureaucrats and government researchers who are expected to clearly separate fact and value and avoid engaging in political controversies.

Welfare dependency is not a morally or politically neutral idea. Most of these families were single parent families. The federal government provided partial funding and set rules that state administrators were required to follow. The charity organisation society movement began in London in The societies were opposed to what they saw as the indiscriminate distribution of relief.

These societies were first formed in England and spread to other countries including Australia, Canada, the United States. They became part of an international movement whose members shared ideas and techniques. During this period most countries relied on private charity as well as public assistance.

Reformers saw their job as attacking the causes of poverty not just relieving the symptoms. They sometimes referred to their approach as scientific philanthropy. Charity organisation societies have attracted criticism for focusing on individual rather than social and economic causes of poverty. It has a long history. It was used in Australia during the Great Depression of the s to refer to unemployment relief which could be in the form of cash, ration tickets or rations.

The term seems to be unique to Australia and entered common use when unemployment increased during the s. Neoconservatism refers to the ideas of a loose grouping of American public intellectuals who began to influence policy debates in the early s. Early neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol and Daniel Moynihan were focused on domestic policy issues. Later neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle were focused on foreign policy—particularly in relation to the Iraq war.

It is the the early form of neoconservatism that is most relevant to this paper. Outside of the US the term is often used so loosely it is almost meaningless.

Early neoconservatives like Kristol and Moynihan began as supporters of progressive causes but became disillusioned in response to what they saw as the failure of anti-poverty policies during the s.

At the time there were few social scientists sympathetic to the American conservative movement. The few high-profile figures there were tended to be economists. The neoconservatives filled a gap and attracted funds from business. According to Cas Mudde:. Unlike traditional conservatives, the neoconservative based their critiques on solid social science and emphasized the unintended consequences of state policies.

They believed in the importance of ideas for politics and preferred a career as an intellectual over that of a politician. According to the neoconservatives, virtue underlies both democracy and the market and should be protected and encouraged by the state. It is used in a number of difference senses. Neoliberalism is often used as a polemical term. Most people accused of being neoliberals or supporters of neoliberalism would not describe themselves this way. In its polemical sense it can refer to a set of policies as well an ideology or theoretical approach that justifies them.

Some of those who use neoliberalism to refer to policies and processes argue that neoliberal practice is often at odds with neoliberal ideology. The problem is that it captures the ideology of neoliberalism, not its reality. The comparative sociology of actually existing neoliberalism reveals that it involves everywhere the building … of a Centaur-state, liberal at the top and paternalistic at the bottom.

Then neoliberal Leviathan practices laissez faire et laissez passer toward corporations and the upper class, at the level of the causes of inequality. But it is fiercely interventionist and authoritarian when it comes to dealing with the destructive consequences of economic deregulation for those at the lower end of the class and status spectrum. Another approach is to treat neoliberalism as a political philosophy—a form of classical liberalism that has been reshaped by economic theory.

For example, Rachel Turner defines neoliberalism by four generic principles:. Neo-liberalism has modified the principles of pure laissez-faire so as to afford the state the primary responsibilities of securing law and order, providing public goods and preserving the constitutional rules that safeguard the market order. What neo-liberals object to is an all-embracing corporate state of the kind found in Western societies in the post-war era.

For instance, they do not deny the need for the existence of some form of welfare system, but they insist that a distinction has to be made between an institutional welfare state and a residual system of provision. Writers who focus on neoliberal ideas generally distinguish between various schools of thought within neoliberalism. For example, French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault distinguished between German neoliberalism ordoliberalism and American neoliberalism.

The most confusing use of the term neoliberalism originated in the US during the s. It was a precursor to the Third Way politics of Bill Clinton. This use of the term emerged independently of other uses and was taken up by journalists rather than academics. We still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out.

But we no longer automatically favour unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have come to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative. This neoliberalism was identified with figures such as Robert Reich and Paul Tsongas and magazines such as the New Republic and the Washington Monthly.

Because many of these reinvented liberals advocated smaller government and freer markets, some writers would later identify them with neoliberalism in the polemical sense. The English poor law was a system for relieving poverty that emerged in the 16th century, was significantly reformed in and finally abolished in It was administered by local authorities. Poor law institutions were built around the idea that providing support could encourage problems such as idleness.

The former are generally beneficial, but the latter, for the most part, injurious; so much so, in many cases, as greatly to outweigh the value of the benefit. The same argument was made by Thomas Fowle, a clergyman and social reformer.

These include encouraging idleness, encouraging selfishness from friends and relatives, and interfering with trade. In an effort to deter claimants from seeking support when they were able to work, the new law required applicants to leave their homes and enter a workhouse. Poor relief refers to financial or in-kind assistance given to people in poverty by charities or government.

Government run social insurance schemes provide protection from loss of income due to conditions such as unemployment, sickness, disability and old age. Social insurance schemes are at least partly funded by contributions from individual workers and employers. Unlike welfare or poor relief, under social insurance schemes only those with the required contribution history are entitled to claim benefits.

Benefits are not means tested. Johnson argued that:. Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.

As Whiteford shows, the proportion of the working age populations receiving an income support payment had increased significantly from when it was around 10 per cent. As explained later in this paper, this is a different idea to welfare dependency. See also Appendix A—key terms. In Pearson argued that Indigenous communities like those in Cape York should be able to opt out of mainstream income support arrangements and undertake their own reforms.

In the UK before marriage registers used the terms bachelor and spinster to refer to men and women who had never been married. American founding father Thomas Jefferson is an example. G Orwell, The lion and the unicorn: socialism and the English genius , The Orwell Foundation, website, essay published in When should governments lead rather than follow social trends?

Saunders was research manager at AIFS in — None of these writers, Perlman, Goodwin or Huppatz are endorsing the conflation of economic and psychological dependency.

N Fraser and L Gordon, op. A Furnham, Lay theories: everyday understanding of problems in the social sciences , Pergamon Press, Oxford, , pp.

The history of and eligibility criteria for AFDC are explained in more detail below. Searching databases of newspaper articles and other documents gives a rough idea of when the term entered common use in Australia. This is the only article from the s. The article cites US reports on teenage pregnancies. Parlinfo has 41 newspaper articles from the s and in the s. The number of articles continues to increase through the s and s. The two single years with the highest number of articles are and B Steensland, The failed welfare revolution: America's struggle over guaranteed income policy , Princeton University Press, Princeton, Google Ngram Viewer allows users to generate graphs showing the frequency share of words or phrases in the Google Books corpus.

For more information see What does the Ngram Viewer do? Google Books Ngram Viewer website. L Trilling, The liberal imagination: essays on literature and society , Secker and Warburg, London, , p.

Charles Murray is usually considered a libertarian. However, he manages to combine a libertarian approach to the size and scope of government with conservative approach to the analysis of social problems. G Pinckard, Suggestions for restoring the moral character and the industrious habits of the poor: also, for establishing district work-farms in place of parish work-houses, and for reducing the poor-rates , Roake and Varty, London, , p.

S Gurteen, How paupers are made: an address on the prevention of pauperism , Charity Organization Society of Chicago, Chicago, , p. Some social workers such as Charlotte Towle directly challenged the idea of pauperisation. L Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson: in two books : containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the president. M Harrington, The other America , op. D Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, op.

B Steensland, The failed welfare revolution, op. Later in his career Friedman explicitly denied that he was a conservative. We are liberals in the true meaning of that term—of and concerned with freedom. Hayek's Road to Serfdom , Booknotes, 20 November D Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan , op. There is some controversy about these research findings. The interaction of the means tests on these benefits created problems for work incentives.

Changes to the proposal attempted to deal with some of these problems through measures such as cashing out food stamps. See B Steensland, The failed welfare revolution , op.

M Isserman, The other American , op. For some historical background on how these two groups joined the conservative movement see L Edwards, The conservative revolution: the movement that remade America , The Free Press, New York, , pp. S Teles, Whose welfare? M Novak, et al, The new consensus on family and welfare: a community of self-reliance , American Enterprise Institute, Washington, p.

A Etzioni, The spirit of community: rights, responsibilities, and the communitarian agenda , Crown Publishers, New York , Domestic Policy, Up from dependency: a new national public assistance strategy. L Mead, The new politics of poverty , op. L Mead, Burdens of freedom , op. House of Representatives Select Committee on Intergenerational Welfare Dependence, Living on the edge : inquiry into intergenerational welfare dependence , House of Representatives, Canberra, , p.

For example, see L Mead, Burdens of freedom , op.