Abstract
Professor Stoesz has written a well-argued critique of the American welfare state that anticipates its future and the needs of American citizens. It is an encyclopedia of American failure of social purpose, fairness, and decency that is unusual in the literature. His reach across the political, social, and economic literature is profound and comprehensive and his cross-national comparisons add depth to his analysis.
The literature concerning the welfare state and the more frankly ideological material that addresses growing inequalities, notably in the United States but more broadly among industrial states, customarily claim rational authority. This is notable with much of Professor Stoesz’s references that insist on having identified the primary causes of a variety of social outcomes. Yet in fact, they have not and cannot since the methods of rationality cannot be applied to questions of broad social causation. Cause remains ideological, speculative, and uncertain. For all its impressive erudition, Thomas Pinketty’s (2014) conclusion that capitalism leads to inequality is at best an exaggeration of the observation that capitalism has been associated with inequality; it is also associated with phenomenal wealth. The better statement is that the inequalities of Western nations have been accepted and uncorrected or even that the bounty associated with capitalism is accepted broadly as a reasonable compromise with fairness. Yet these trade-offs and compromises have not been shown to be necessary.
As further examples, many analysts including the Nobel Economist Joseph Stiglitz, in his book The Price of Inequality (2013), argue that inequalities cause numerous social problems. But again, it is just as reasonable to argue that social problems of one sort or another have led to inequalities. It seems more defensible to conclude that the United States and other industrial nations have accepted the inequalities. Almost all of the data that these sources employ are observational (notably government fiscal data); hardly any are experimental. Attempts such as propensity scoring and economic modeling to correct statistically for impaired methods are interesting, provocative, and speculative but only this. The methodological requirements to test their accuracy are rarely if ever achieved and their inherent ambiguities remain unclarified. The naive claim that this is the best possible needs to confront the likelihood that the best is inadequate for serious decision-making. Indeed, the arcana of advanced quantitative analyses often obscure their own social biases and the political nature of decision-making.
Stoesz largely accepts the literature on its own terms. He is a loyalist to the possibilities of the welfare state and rational intervention and suggests that policy making has been distorted by illegitimate power, notably corporate interests and rich conservatives. Thus, some might criticize the implicit historicism that runs through much of his chapters. The chapters identify historical events and historical persistence as though institutionalization was the outcome of a natural, irresistible momentum. Others might argue that these subtle preferences for greater sharing (his sense of justice) are mistaken and unproductive or that indeed no distortion exists: the United States has what it wants. And so on and on as different referees become protective of their own insights. Yet his work is explicit about its assumptions and justifies them openly then builds logically toward his conclusions. To handle all the alternatives is to write a library of books or a few that become so dense as to serve better than Nyquil or scotch as a soporific. Stoesz has done a fine job within the framework of his task. He has produced a provocative work of scholarship that will endure for many years. The sweep of the work and its erudition are extraordinary.
The Dynamic Welfare State recalls a number of seminal works that described transitions between important social periods, a summing up of the social experience in the manner of The Institute for Research on Poverty’s early volumes. The volumes through the 1980s brought the social debate together as does Stoesz’s work. The more recent volumes, notably Cancian and Danziger (2009), are tired, limited, and repetitive as are similar technical papers—kitsch masquerading as the avant-garde—with more attention to the minutia of description than with broader concerns of social and political meaning. They add little to the literature or the social narrative. Similarly, the recent book by Garfinkel, Rainwater, and Smeeding (2010) summarizes welfare expenditures among wealthy nations and suggests a series of technical improvements to social insurance and additional spending on domestic programs. Yet it fails to come to grips with the political impediments to achieving greater equality or the social problems inherent in simple income transfers that perpetuate class differences. All of these works largely accept the inevitability of the current welfare state, making convenient assumptions about its expansion without much evidence to sustain their hopes. They also focus far too much on social insurance programs without addressing the long-standing indeed popular, inadequacies of their benefit structures, notably the huge portion of the society outside the reach of social insurance (and the workforce) on whom very little is spent through antipoverty programs and social services.
The vast social and economic inequality that has been growing since the early 1970s is the heart of Stoesz’s concern. Stoesz focuses intently on unmet needs and offers a mixed public/private solution to inequities and inequalities that attempts to co-opt the political drift of the nation. Certainly, Stoesz’s solution is more pragmatic than the posturing of much of the field that acts as though it has solved a political problem by offering small rational improvements to the efficiency trade-offs of existing programs. Stoesz’s work is controversial but so well documented that it will lead the current debate concerning the welfare state.
The writing is engaging and the book handles many complex issues directly and well. It is an accessible work that will engage students, specialists, and a broad range of intellectuals, policy makers, and the informed. This being said, the book seems to stretch reality at a number of points and has a few soft spots. It employs the label of “think tank” for a host of consultant and research firms (see table 1, p. 16) that glosses over their ideological core and obscures their commercial interests. The Brookings Institution in particular thrives on contracts and shifts its staff and perspective with the merging political preferences of each new federal administration. Still, Brookings and its staff boast of being the world’s leading think tank. While CATO, Heritage, and the rest certainly have political preferences and some receive substantial donations to produce tendentious material, much if not most of their money comes from competitive contracts and often from the Federal government. These firms are part of “the Beltway bandit” industry—Guttman, Wilner, and Nader (1976): anything for a buck and often from the federal government. They are not think tanks in the sense of providing independent, deeply reasoned advice. Universities, at least the better ones, are think tanks. The contracting authority of the federal government has typically been used to sustain its policies. It pays for budget justifications, the core function of these most obedient consultant firms. The thinking is channeled to prescribed ends. Perhaps ideological lobbies offering “factional studies” covers their function better than think tank. It often applies to university faculty as well.
Chapter 2, “The Triumph of Pragmatism,” is a wonderful statement but it lacks a good definition of pragmatism, which is not particularly surprising. Menand (2002), in his long and well-received book on the subject, similarly fails to define it well perhaps because the Pierces, father and son, and Dewey who were the core of pragmatic philosophy are often near unreadable. It seems in short that pragmatism has come to mean instrumental rationality within a democratic envelop: something on the order of let all voices be heard to define the values of policy and then evaluate policies on their outcomes. Pragmatism fundamentally justifies social science and its various adaptations to policy analysis. Like all philosophy, it has a hard time defining the rationality of goals. The chapter on pragmatism is a fine introduction to the next chapter on social engineering. Here Stoesz might return to his use of the phrase “welfare behaviorism” in one of his earlier publications at least to expand the negative connotations of social engineering that recall Orwell’s 1984 and Skinner’s Walden II (Stoesz, 2000). It seemed that he did not mean to be this condemnatory but rather attempted to handle the ambiguities and limitations of information, that is, the promise of empiricism and social science in policy making…pragmatism in a word.
Chapter 5 on medical care is a gem. However, the deficit is not greatly driven by Social Security and Medicare (largely funded by a dedicated tax although public funds underwrite much of Part B and D) but rather by Medicaid that is dependent entirely on general revenues. The largest reason for the deficit is reluctance of the American public to raise money for government purposes (Stoesz refers to this point later in the book). Industry has influenced a ton of federal legislation prior to the Affordable Care Act, notably the regulatory agencies such as FDA, SEC, ICC, and others. The problem is less one of growth than how the nation distributes its bounty; this is worth at least a nod in the book.
Chapter 10 would benefit from some consideration of Isaiah Berlin’s (1969) classic distinction between positive and negative liberty. European welfare states seem quicker to employ government to provide positive liberty (essentially, greater social equality that lies at the center of the theory of the welfare state) than the United States that continues to rely on the market and economic growth to provide welfare, allocating a smaller role to government. The chapter lists a refreshing number of reforms to the welfare state that would promote greater economic equality. Stoesz might also consider that a full jobs program and true quality education are the lynchpins of a welfare state. Both have been avoided by American social policy. Moreover, while the Harlem Children’s Zone is credibly effective, its successes are limited first by the need for motivated parents. Secondly, its application nationally is limited by the absence of a sufficient number of high-quality teachers. Furthermore, without addressing the fundamental problems of public school funding and teacher training, a proliferation of high-quality charter schools will decimate public education; Ravitch (2016) is eloquent on this possibility. By itself, economic reforms of the welfare state that only address income sufficiency at the low end will not attend to the larger problems of social inequality. Quality public education is central for its attention to social inequality.
Chapter 11 is a concise and elegantly crafted statement of the problems of the welfare state in the United States. However, complex organizations (bureaucracies) are not necessarily barriers to innovation: Universities are complex organizations; NASA, the Manhattan Project, and NIH among others have been notable successes. Additionally, the IRS and the Social Security Administration including Medicare have been efficient and adaptive. Chapter 10 is the actual conclusion to the book that outlines steps to reform; those steps might be justified more specifically as addressing Stoesz’s five problematic propositions.
In the end, Stoesz’s wonderful book argues for a series of technical solutions to address the problems of welfare and inequality in the United States once the political dominance of self-serving commercial elites is diminished. Yet the technical problems of inequality cannot be handled without the deep but unlikely transformation of the nation’s embedded romantic ethos (Epstein, The Masses are the Ruling Classes, 2017). The difference in these two perspectives is not amenable to a definitive empirical test, only to a balance of evidence—a weak substitute that may account for the decision of many departments of political science to rename themselves departments of politics. (A world-class modesty prevents me from touting my own work.)
While The Dynamic Welfare State is thankfully not written as a textbook, it may well become a popular course adoption. The book lays out a progressive future for American social welfare while seating its argument on a clear series of assumptions about the nature of political power in the United States.