Six Social Myths

Today I take the opportunity of quoting a commentary which is not crap – it would have been in my book as part of my own commentary had I been clever enough to anticipate it.  The excerpts below come from an article in a magazine called Policy, from the Centre for Policy Studies in Australia, “the leading independent public policy ‘think tank’ within Australasia” and it is hard to find a better exposition of the Prolific Crap that sustains the welfare state.  I suppose it’s nice to know that we’re not alone in the world!

Six Social Policy Myths [Policy (Australia) Vol 24 No.1 Autumn 08]

Policy experts often think alike, even when the evidence contradicts them. This is how billions of dollars get spent on government programs that don’t work, argue CIS researchers Jennifer Buckingham, Andrew Norton, Phil Rennie, Jeremy Sammut, and Peter Saunders.

Myth 1: All children can benefit from an increase in government spending on institutional child care

What all this adds up to is that the research literature provides no strong evidence that child care is good (or bad) for all children. You would never know this from listening to the public policy experts in this field. They talk and act as if the research is clear and the issue is done and dusted. The truth is that governments are being pushed to commit ever-increasing amounts of taxpayers’ money to funding something that does not deliver the claimed payoffs. Australian child care advocates are convinced of the case for more child care and greater subsidies, but the evidence does not support their claims.

Myth 2: More government spending on education and training can solve the problem of joblessness

Recent research by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) finds that, far from benefiting from more education, low ability students often lose from it.

The point that is persistently overlooked in the education and training debate is that some people are simply not cut out for year 12 schoolwork, a university degree, or a technically skilled job....

Myth 3: High tuition fees are pricing students from poor backgrounds out of university

Strikingly, the more a working-class family earns, the less likely it is that their sons will go to university, although for daughters, university attendance rates do increase slightly as household income rises. The children of the poorest professional families have higher university enrolment rates than the children of the most affluent working-class families, which suggests that parental occupation has more of an impact on children’s educational outcomes than parental income.

A person’s family background has a big influence on whether they go to university, but it operates indirectly, via school results, and has little or nothing to do with income....

Myth 4: Poverty in Australia is getting worse, and higher welfare spending is needed to counter it.

But there are at least three reasons why we should refuse to go along with this.
The first is that the welfare lobby’s definitions of ‘poverty’ are entirely arbitrary.

Secondly, the report is not measuring ‘poverty,’ but income inequality.

[Thirdly].... Household incomes fluctuate, so most people who appear under any arbitrarily-drawn ‘poverty line’ do not stay there long.

Myth 5: Higher spending on preventive medicine will reduce health costs in the future.

But the authors of these studies admit they contain no evidence that access to and receipt of primary care reduces obesity (that it modifies individual behaviour) or that it lowers the incidence of chronic disease.(32) They also admit that improved health outcomes depend on an ‘appropriate balance’ between primary and secondary care.(33)

Meanwhile, a 2002 cross-country analysis of primary care across thirteen OECD countries found that those (including Australia) that had weaker primary care systems but spent more on secondary care achieved better health outcomes than the stronger primary-care-oriented countries.(34) Of course, prevention is better than cure, but only when it works.

Myth 6: Higher social expenditure creates a more caring society.

The unifying theme that underlies all of the myths we have examined is the belief that social problems require additional government spending to put them right.

Here, then, is the biggest myth of all—the meta-myth, if you like—which is embedded in the shared consciousness of the social policy establishment. It is the assumption that government is the appropriate agency for resolving people’s problems, and that we as individuals bear no responsibility for sorting out our own lives. For as long as this myth persists, ‘social problems’ will continue to grow, government budgets will continue to expand, and job opportunities for social policy experts will continue to multiply.

BACK SOON, WITH MORE REAL CRAP

Comments

[child care agencies]

Thanks for sharing this wonderful article with some great stuff.Yes,The biggest myth of all—the meta-myth, if you like—which is embedded in the shared consciousness of the social policy establishment....