Assessing the Welfare State: The Politics of Happiness
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While there is a vast and highly contentious literature devoted to understanding the economic, social, and political consequences of the welfare state, little attention has been paid to the fundamental question of whether social security programs actually improve the overall quality of human life. We attempt such an appraisal, using the extent to which individuals find their lives to be satisfying as an evaluative metric. Considering national rates of satisfaction in the industrial democracies from the 1970s to the present, we find that citizens find life more rewarding as the generosity of the welfare state increases, net of economic or cultural conditions. The implications for social policy are discussed.Keywords:
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This contribution delineates the formal and dynamic characteristics of generosity. It traces the origins of the trait of generosity to a complex interplay of hard-wired capacities for concern and altruism with gratifying experiences of early infancy and identifications with the generative parental qualities during later childhood and adolescence. Five pathological syndromes (namely, unrelenting generosity, begrudging generosity, fluctuating generosity, controlling generosity, and beguiling generosity) seem to exist in this realm. Technical implications of the notions outlined in this paper include: (i) having and maintaining an attitude of generosity towards the patient, (ii) listening and intervening with an attitude of generosity, (iii) recognizing and accepting the patient's healthy generosity, (iv) diagnosing and interpreting the patient's pathological generosity, (v) unmasking and interpreting defenses against generosity, and (vi) discerning and utilizing the countertransference to generosity. The paper also touches briefly upon miserliness, the opposite of generosity, and upon sociocultural dimensions of the matters involved.
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GENEROSITY AS A COSTLY SIGNAL Sara Kafashan Advisor: University of Guelph, 2012 Dr. Pat Barclay Some researchers argue that generous behaviours, such as large charitable donations, may serve as costly signals to broadcast one’s resources. Others, however, acknowledge that generosity may advertise one’s physical ability (e.g., rescuing a person from danger) and/or honestly signal one’s cooperative intent (e.g., volunteering at a homeless shelter). Although the evidence illustrates that generosity may be a costly signal of at least three fundamentally different qualities, researchers have not acknowledged the different forms of generosity and, instead, continue to treat generosity as a unidimensional construct. The aim of the current research was twofold: (1) assess the underlying qualities that may be signalled via generosity, and (2) explore female short-term and long-term mate preferences for generous acts that may signal different qualities. As hypothesized, generosity signalled three qualities: an individual’s resources, physical abilities, and/or cooperative intent. Contrary to predictions, however, there was no difference between female short-term and long-term mate preferences.
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The paper examines the generosity of the European welfare state towards the elderly. It shows how various dimensions of the welfare regimes have changed during the recent 10-15 years and how this evolution was related to the process of economic integration. Dimensions include general generosity towards the elderly and more specifically generosity towards early retirement and generosity towards the poor. Using aggregate data (EUROSTAT, OECD) as well as individual data (SHARE, the new Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe), the paper looks at the statistical correlations among those types of system generosity and actual policy outcomes, such as unemployment and pov-erty rates among the young and the elderly, and the inequality in wealth, income and consumption. While the paper is largely descriptive, we also try to understand which economic and political forces drive social expenditures for the elderly in the European Union and whether spending for the elderly crowds out spending for the young.
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This paper examines the generosity of the European welfare state toward the elderly. It shows how various dimensions of the welfare regimes have changed during the past 10 to 15 years and how this evolution is related to the process of economic integration. Dimensions include general generosity toward the elderly and, more specifically, generosity toward early retirement and generosity toward the poor. Using aggregate data (EUROSTAT, OECD) as well as individual data (SHARE, the new Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe), the paper looks at the statistical correlations among those types of system generosity and actual policy outcomes, such as unemployment and poverty rates among the young and the elderly, and the inequality in wealth, income and consumption. While the paper is largely descriptive, it also tries to explain which economic and political forces drive social expenditures for the elderly in the European Union and whether spending for the elderly crowds out spending for the young.
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The paper examines the generosity of the European welfare state towards the elderly. It shows how various dimensions of the welfare regimes have changed during the recent 10-15 years and how this evolution was related to the process of economic integration. Dimensions include general generosity towards the elderly and more specifically generosity towards early retirement and generosity towards the poor. Using aggregate data (EUROSTAT, OECD) as well as individual data (SHARE, the new Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe), the paper looks at the statistical correlations among those types of system generosity and actual policy outcomes, such as unemployment and pov-erty rates among the young and the elderly, and the inequality in wealth, income and consumption. While the paper is largely descriptive, we also try to understand which economic and political forces drive social expenditures for the elderly in the European Union and whether spending for the elderly crowds out spending for the young.
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European Social Survey
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The paper examines the generosity of the European welfare state towards the elderly. It shows how various dimensions of the welfare regimes have changed during the recent 10-15 years and how this evolution was related to the process of economic integration. Dimensions include general generosity towards the elderly and more specifically generosity towards early retirement and generosity towards the poor. Using aggregate data (EUROSTAT, OECD) as well as individual data (SHARE, the new Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe), the paper looks at the statistical correlations among those types of system generosity and actual policy outcomes, such as unemployment and poverty rates among the young and the elderly, and the inequality in wealth, income and consumption. While the paper is largely descriptive, we also try to understand which economic and political forces drive social expenditures for the elderly in the European Union and whether spending for the elderly crowds out spending for the young.
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Abstract This article describes an overview of key findings from the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Project (CWEP). CWEP compiles major features of the generosity of unemployment, sickness and public pension programs over the last several decades in 21 countries. Describing and extending earlier work to measure the institutional variation in major social insurance programs over time, we provide previously unpublished methodological details of widely used measures of program generosity; measures which have appeared in over 200 analyses during the last decade and a half. We find a high level of variation in wage replacement and benefit conditionality across programs in most countries; calling into question the notion of an historically stable configurations of characteristics, at least during the last 45 years. For instance, our research shows that several prototypical social democratic welfare states experienced the highest declines in generosity in the last three decades. Furthermore, we also show that, as late as the mid‐1970s, some ‘social democratic’ welfare states still trailed some ‘conservative’ welfare states, including prototypical ones like Germany.
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