Is social conservatism essential for a strong society?

The more you look at the actual sociological data (rather than the dominant ideological clap-trap) the more it seems that social conservatism is the essential glue needed for that strong, stable society we crave for. Maybe Harinam & Henderson are selective in their data for this article but it makes a compelling case.

Go to church.

But why do some areas exhibit higher rates of upward mobility than others? For Carney, social capital is the key. Places with more civic activity, regardless of income, have more upward mobility. In fact, Chetty, calculating an area’s “social capital” score, found a strong correlation between civic activity and upward mobility, with religiosity (e.g. going to church) leading the way. Both white working-class and black inner-city neighbourhoods lack the civic institutions that allow for upward mobility. Furthermore, research suggests that a 15% increase in the proportion of people who think others are trustworthy raises income per person by 1%.

Take personal responsibility and follow the 'success sequence'- "graduate from high school, work full-time, and not have children outside of marriage"

According to Haskins and Sawhill, individuals in families that adhered to the success sequence had a 98 percent chance of escaping poverty. By contrast, 76 percent of those that did not adhere to any of these norms were poor. In a 2003 analysis of census data, the authors demonstrated that had the poor followed the success sequence, the U.S. poverty rate would have fallen by more than 70 percent.

Support the family and marriage

Whereas 8 percent of children born to married parents end up in poverty as adults, 27 percent of children born to unmarried parents live as impoverished adults. According to a study by social scientists Robert Lerman, Joseph Price, and Brad Wilcox, “Youths who grow up with both biological parents earn more income, work more hours each week, and are more likely to be married themselves as adults, compared to children raised in single-parent families.”

The authors report that not only does controlling for family make-up pretty much eliminate differences between races but that the single best thing to reduce social pathologies like depression, alcoholism, suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence is to cut the rates of child abuse. And child abuse is dramatically higher where children are born outside marriage.

It's one article and I'm sure there's plenty to question but it matches the work on child and young people of Robert Putnam as well as robust evidence on how social stability benefits the less well off far more than it does us well-connected middle-class folk. What is very clear, however, is that the collapse in traditional families sits right at the heart of the problems we see in inner-city communities. And it's no surprise that, for these communities, the people who look to escape a world of poverty, violence and drugs turn to the stability of the church as pretty much the sole wholesome thing on offer.

I am mixed on the matter of social conservatism given its association with anti-gay messages and a traditional, essentially subservient role for women. But the argument here is compelling - finishing school, getting a job and keeping a job, getting married and staying married is still the best route out of poverty. Our social policies should, therefore, focus on supporting these outcomes - well-funded schools with good discipline and a focus on outcomes, real support for people in work aimed at keeping them in work and a substantive and genuine commitment to reward marriage.

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Why it's good to admit to being wrong every now and then...

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I used to work with a chap - forget his name, it was along time ago before I came to Bradford - who, when I'd point out a mistake in his stats or similar, would smile and say: "I may occasionally be in error but I'm never wrong." To be fair this was said with a smile while the mistake was corrected - I always liked him for that.

It was quite a while after this that I discovered Rousseau's idea of the General Will and, importantly, that my colleague's quote was more or less a description of how (paradoxically) the General Will is intrinsically right. Now the problem with this collectivist take on will is, as I'm sure folk have already noticed, that we need to have a way of knowing what that General Will is actually saying.

We can point to democracy as a means of determining what the General Will is saying except that, as us Brits have just discovered, democracy doesn't do this - is 52/48 a statement of General Will to Leave the EU or merely the result of a democratic contest? So, if we can't use voting to determine General Will (and the recent referendum reminds us of this fact) how do we decide? Or maybe the General Will - even badged as 'Common Good' or 'Common Purpose' - really doesn't exist?

For Actualists and latterly Fascists, the answer was simple, the General Will was embodied in the leader and his advisors (in themselves the leaders of the state's 'corporations' - army, business, organised labour, academia and so forth). But we're still stuck with the idea that somebody or some thing is the embodiment of that General Will - meaning, of course, that that person or body is intrinsically right. As the wags might say: "I may have my faults but being wrong isn't one of them!"

It seems to me that, in our sophisticated Western liberal democracies, this General Will has been embodied in a technocratic elite - a sort of Platonic administration by expert. Political decisions are sub-contracted to a process overseen by these experts - at the end of the process the politicians (defined here as the people we elect to represent us) do little other than rubber stamp the conclusions of the experts since these are 'scientific' or 'evidence-based'.

If we take the debate about standardised packaging for cigarettes as an example, we can see that the General Will was embodied in a small number of government bodies, academic departments and lobby groups rather than in the mass of response to the Department of Health's consultation on the proposal:

In total, 665,989 campaign responses were received from 24 separate campaigns. Around two-thirds of campaign responses received were from people who are opposed to the introduction of standardised packaging (total of 427,888 responses) and one-third of campaign responses received were from people who are in support (238,101 responses)...

The problem is that the opposition wasn't from those suitably (in the government's view) qualified to comment and they chose to assess only 'detailed' responses which, surprise surprise, split 53/43 in favour of standardised packaging. It doesn't matter whether or not you agree with the proposal for standardised packaging of cigarettes - the process of confirming the proposal post-consultation ignored the majority of responses because they were insufficiently 'detailed'.

The problem we have here is that there's a reluctance to admit that - regardless of how well 'evidenced' a policy might be, sometimes they are simply wrong. Indeed we know there's evidence of this with the standardised packaging policy:

“From a statistical perspective, none of these changes were different from zero. Over the timeframe of the analysis, the data does not demonstrate that there has been a change in smoking prevalence following the introduction of plain packaging.”

They also insert this important warning: “It is not possible to assign a causal relationship between the changes in the noticeabilty of health warnings or smoking prevalence and the introduction of plain packaging, as there have been a number of other confounding factors that have occurred before and during the period of this analysis.”

All this is merely illustrative of the problem with 'evidence' in making public policy. It's not just that we can't prove the counterfactual (what would have happened if we'd not made the policy decision) but also that appraising whether or not something works in social policy is really difficult - because of those confounding factors implicit in the second paragraph of the quotation above. Again this isn't an argument against the organised and systematic appraisal of public policy but rather a call for something different.

Put bluntly, it would be good for those experts to admit they were wrong every now and then rather than perform tortuous contortions aimed at explaining why, despite all the data (confounded or not) they really aren't wrong.

There is nothing weak about admitting a mistake - of fessing up and saying: "folks, I got that wrong!" Yet it seems that too many of us are constitutionally incapable of making that admission. We make predictions - often sweepingly on the basis of 'I'm an expert and I say' rather than actual research or analysis - and when they turn out wrong, the best we can do is sit quietly in the corner hoping no-one calls us out on our error. Some of the 'experts' are more brazen - denying that was what they predicted, shouting about how you've misunderstood what they said, and insisting that someone else is twisting their words to mean something different.

It's because of this - plus the patronising arrogance us clever folk use too much of the time - that polling tells us that much of the population simply doesn't trust what we're saying. Coupled with shouty and aggressive appeals to authority, we shove aside deductive reasoning and intelligent (if naive) questioning in favour of findings from a focus group of experts or determined by our partisan google searches. Treating the mass of the population as semi-sentient may seem right - what, after all, to those sheep know, they have to be led - but that mass of people doesn't forget and, given the chance, will stick two fingers up at you.

Truth is there isn't any General Will - or Common Purpose for that matter - but rather a moving collection of shared interests that never involve every person. Government - however hard you bash the social policy thing - is a pretty poor way of managing these shared interests. And the futher that government is from the things that actually matter to the folk who (in George Bailey's words) do all the living, working and dying round here, the less effective it becomes.

So my friends, make an effort - admit it when you get something wrong, a prediction doesn't turn out quite as you thought or a policy you backed is a failure. It will be a catharsis for you and will get you a damn sight more respect than trying to pretend you weren't wrong. And, of course, feel free to call me out on this too.

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On research and policy...

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This is a comment on research in education (from Tom Bennett) but it could apply across the whole of social policy:

I'm sure these people are engaged in the most rigorous of science, but the area that it addresses is devilled with darkest, emptiest aspects of bad educational research: small intervention groups, interested parties, cognitive bias, short term studies, conclusions that don't necessarily follow from the data, an aversion to testing a theory to destruction, etc. This matters, because huge and enormously expensive wheels are turning in education ministries around the world. Children's lives are chained to this wheel. Poor children can't afford to fix the mistakes of state education, as middle-class children can, through tutoring and familial support.

Yet we persist with allowing ideological bias and personal preference to be presented as research by social scientists. As we keep saying, if you really want evidence-based policy you need to start with robust evidence not ideological bias.

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Why are there no right wing sociologists?

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Or for that matter academics in social policy fields?

In one respect this is a 'ha ha ha' sort of question - of course there aren't any right wing sociologists, it's all a load of lefty rubbish after all! But I ask in all seriousness because studying 'society' and developing policies reflecting social concerns and challenges is an important area of enquiry.

And it is overwhelmingly left wing - here's a tweet from Peter Matthews who lectures in social and community regeneration and stuff like that at Heriot Watt University:

I'd suggested that the discipline might benefit from actively recruiting people with a world view that isn't 'left wing' - conservative, libertarian, classical liberal, voluntarist. People whose default position isn't to blame it all on the evils of neo-liberalism or who say (to polite murmurings of assent from peers):

"This article argues that the cuts continue a thirty-year process of redistribution to the rich."

None of this is to say that academics shouldn't believe such nonsense but rather to assert that sociology and social policy would be better for seeking a better balance across the political spectrum - to join the real world rather than live in one where the most right wing opinion is just to the left of the current Labour leadership. The idea that the 'disciplinary basis of social policy' should be left wing explains why so many of us - despite caring deeply about social concerns and public policy issues linked to those concerns - find sociology and 'social policy' to be a load of biased lefty trash not worthy of consideration.

Not that this little jotting in a blog read only by the occasional aficionado will change any thing but perhaps sociology would benefit from some right wing thinking, a few conservative pebbles in its leftist sandals?

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Breaking the chains of community.

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There has been a terrible hoo-hah about the suggestion from Iain Duncan Smith that we might consider making it a little easier for people to relocate so as to get work. The criticisms fall into three camps: those from the Labour Party that involve making up what IDS said and comparing it to something they pretend Norman Tebbit said; those from well-meaning activists who claim that the proposals would “force” ordinary folk away from the bosom of their community thereby destroying everything good about society; and finally those who say it won’t work because there aren’t any jobs to be had anyhow.

It seems to me – whichever of these criticisms is taken – that they all rest on the supremacy of one particular take on community. And on the protection, sustenance and development of that “community” - even when the community has, for lack of employment, become wholly dysfunctional. We should “fix” the community rather than encourage its break up and decline. It strikes me that this belief in a sort of community stasis is potentially very damaging and does not reflect the reality of human nature or the evolution of societies.

In parts of our Northern cities (and in other places such as the mining villages of the Welsh valleys and County Durham) we have whole places that exist because of the need to house and support people who worked in particular industries. Today, whatever we may think about the reasons for the demise of those industries, they are no more and the reasons for such places must be questioned. Yet we persist – as we have done for thirty years and more – with the pouring of resources into these “deprived communities” hoping vainly for some miracle cure.

With the decline of mass industrial employment we have to question the point or purpose of places such as Bradford’s Holme Wood estate or the Seacroft estate in Leeds. Today, rather than these being full of homes for proud industrial workers they are become places where society’s flotsam and jetsam washes up. Approaching 70% of all “social housing” is now filled with vulnerable people – the folk housing people call “general needs” (who we would call ordinary folk on ordinary wages) simply don’t get housed in these places. Instead former council housing fills with the workless, with single parent families, with drug addicts and with alcoholics. Places that once were proud working communities have become sinks of despair – with the worst schools, the poorest access to care and the highest rates of crime.

As IDS put it a while back while speculating about the proverbial Martian's view of British social housing:

Let’s imagine the proverbial Martian were to land here in the UK today. Knowing nothing of our housing policies, you might ask him to go out and establish the purpose of social housing from what he sees.

On his return I fancy this would be his summary:

"Social housing is clearly there to separate the most disadvantaged, dysfunctional and vulnerable people from the rest of society. It’s an objective you have achieved very efficiently."

With nearly half of all social housing now in the 20% most deprived neighbourhoods, you couldn’t fault the logic. As you all know better than me, the contraction in social housing of the last thirty years has residualised the tenure. Many areas of social housing are blighted by fractured families, worklessness, educational failure, addictions, serious personal debt, anti-social behaviour and crime.

Too many tenants find themselves on estates where welfare dependency is a way of life, cut off from the job opportunities, social networks and wealth the rest of us enjoy. Inadvertently and incrementally, a damaging social apartheid has emerged as social housing has changed.

So why do we want to keep such places going? Why not provide routes up and out from these places for those who have the motivation to get up and go look for work elsewhere – somewhere there might just be some? Why not provide a little incentive for people to escape from the stigma of the sink estate? And why do we seemingly insist – with our tales of “hollowed out communities” and reinforcing decline – on sustaining the unsustainable. On some kind of depressing ‘all for one and one for all’ principle – if y’all can’t have then no-one gets.

We are told all the time that “community” is good. That we shouldn’t challenge the idea of community or question its basis as the centre of social policy. And that the protection and development of community must sit at the centre of government actions in deprived places. Sometimes – just sometimes – community might not be the right answer.

Sometimes breaking the chains of community might just be a liberation for people.

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The broken society revisited (plus a little on big government)

Since Julian Dobson has smothered me with kind words and references to West Ham winning the world cup it would be churlish to return to the debate. However, I am nothing if not a churl!

It seems to me that we are – as we often do in these debates – tearing down carefully constructed straw men. There are a few things that should be said to develop the thesis on the ‘broken society’ and the significance of Government as a factor in this thesis. But first I should discuss what we mean by “broken society” – it is after all a loaded term.

I have a vacuum cleaner sat under my stairs. It is broken but can be repaired. Perhaps this is what we mean by “broken” in this context. I certainly hope we don’t mean “broken” in the manner of a broken glass – beyond the possibility of repair! To continue the vacuum cleaner metaphor, we have some parts of our society that are not working properly and those broken parts affect how well the whole operates – to the point maybe of threatening its viability.

I would also like to remember what one person said on the subject of society:

“I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

A great deal of rubbish has been said about what this means but, in the context of government, it defines a very important point in the debate. Government – whatever its intent – is not a neutral player, a benign agent. And my biggest worry is that the delivery of social and welfare services directly through the coercive agency of taxation affects incentives – society’s problems become somebody else’s problem – the surest way to vanish something as Douglas Adams observed.

Government squeezes out individual social initiative by giving people the incentive to disengage

The next element of Julian’s post relates to myth-making (hence the West Ham references). Now leaving aside the contribution of mythopoeia to human joy and understanding – I am concerned not to confuse longitudinal study with the creation of myth. My argument wasn’t that the late 1960s and early 1970s represented some sort of mythic shangri la of social condition but that, after a long period of social stability, certain indicators of social breakdown (crime, worklessness, etc.) began to increase dramatically at that point. I’m certainly not suggesting we return to a time when homosexuality was barely tolerated, when racism was so ingrained we hardly blinked at language that would get you fired today and where women in senior positions were so unusual as to be borderline weird!

However, the telling of stories is an integral aspect of how we understand the world in which we live – those stories provide empathy, understanding and appreciation to the dry, dusty facts & figures. But stories are dangerous since they can also use emotion to mislead and misdirect – the construction of socialism and fascism is founded on the preference for the qualitative over the quantitative in our search for understanding.

The problem with Government is that 30 years of relentless pressure (redoubled in the past ten years) on these social problems and challenges have resulted not in the end of poverty, the elimination of crime or the banishing of unemployment but in these problems becoming more intractable, a permanent feature of our society’s landscape. Despite directing one pound in every ten we earn to the relief of poverty throughout that period, there is no sign of poverty’s elimination.

The big government discussion isn’t about the aims – it is an observation that decades of bureaucratic initiative (if that isn’t an oxymoron) have failed. David Cameron quite rightly seeks an alternative – perhaps looking to that new age of mutuality and private initiative presaged in David Beito et al’s The Voluntary City.

I close with two quotes from the great Ronald Reagan:

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”

And

“I know in my heart that man is good.That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there's purpose and worth to each and every life.”

It is this sentiment that informs my thinking rather than a narrow, selfish perspective. Given the right incentives and the means people will respond to their neighbour’s suffering – but so long as governments proclaim a misplaced capability to solve the problems we will not grasp any incentive and respond.