I wonder whether economic rationalism, as the Washington Consensus is called in Australia, is actually rational or if it is simply mean.
Years ago, in my only brush with the law, I had to appear in the small claims tribunal as a witness. The law courts building is adjacent to the police station and across the road from the large public hospital. As I waited to be called I could see people travelling to and between the courts and the hospital, and they all seemed rather downtrodden. In fact they looked like people to whom life had not been kind, walking from one large heartless institutional machine to another. It seemed clear that these institutions chewed people up and spat them out, and it occurred to me that there was another institution missing from the picture – by and large they’d already been well masticated by the educational system before they reached this point.
Poor socio-economic status is well understood to be related to poor health. But it’s not simply a matter of access to medical services, although that matters. Relative social status, social cohesion, the quality of inter-personal relationships, personal safety, and a healthy physical environment all affect how healthy a person is likely to be, as does social-cultural background, health education, gender, diet and occupation. In a similar way it’s possible to break down the factors which affect education, and again socio-economic status is a major predictor of success.
Health, education, economic, and legal outcomes have an intimate synergy. Good nutrition is important to concentration in school. Better educated groups have lower rates of drug addiction. Incarceration is a major cause of health problems. Poverty goes hand in hand with poor mental health, anti-social behaviour, and learning difficulties. Taking population groups as a whole, it surprises no one that these factors reinforce one another in both a positive and a negative direction. Improving any one area causes flow on benefits in health, education levels, and income, and decreases rates of crime. The reverse is also true: for example increasing rates of incarceration causes a flow on decrease in educational levels, increased drug use, HIV levels, and mental health problems, and consequent impoverishment of the community.
There is a concept of the deserving and the undeserving poor. This is the idea that some people are poor because of a failing of will or morals, and deserve no help. That’s a complete red herring. I don’t care if someone gets something they don’t deserve because as a matter of pragmatism, never mind compassion, we should first look at whether the benefits outweigh the costs for society as a whole, for changes in policy in these areas.
Increasing education funding has been shown to produce
benefits to individuals in the form of higher personal income, and benefits to society in more rapid economic growth and higher tax receipts, with lower rates of crime and welfare.
The feedback effect of benefits to health and the follow on benefits to future generations greatly magnify the advantage of the increase in funding. The benefits of increasing health spending are particularly obvious in undeveloped countries and for prophylactic and early intervention programmes in developed countries. Similarly sentencing policies which keep prison populations low and emphasise rehabilitation keep people out of the cycle of poverty and ill health caused by incarceration.
A person whose mental illness or back problem was fixed in their 20s might live a productive life, save the state the cost of the welfare and instead contribute taxes, add to the economy, and raise well educated and productive children. A person who attends rehabilitation rather than prison might avoid contracting hepatitis or becoming addicted to drugs. There was at least a possibility that life could have been better for each person I saw that day walking to the hospital or the courts. For most of those people that possibility had now passed, or at least become remote.
For a proportion of the population there may be nothing society can achieve by spending money, no matter how well targeted. There must surely be a point of no return, where extra spending achieves no benefit, but the potential synergistic benefits between education, health, and the law would seem to be great. Rather than investigate these possibilities, or find good ways to target funding, the religion of the market and “user pays” is leading instead to cutbacks in social programs, welfare, and public education. Politicians jockey for position as the most “tough on crime”. I’m not convinced of the existence of the trickle-down effect, but whatever the benefits of letting the rich keep more of their money, there may nevertheless be value in social programs for the poor. I would argue that there’s a moral dimension, but there is no excuse not to examine the options from a pragmatic point of view.