DOUBLE STANDARD:

SOCIAL POLICY IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES

 By James W. Russell

Honorable Mention - Association for Humanist Sociology "Best Book Award 2007"

Endorsements - Francis Fox Piven, John R. MacArthur, Levon Chorbabajian, Grary Craig

Review by Tuck Amory from Humanity & Society

Radio Interview by Wayne Norman (WILI-AM, 1-17-08) - 45 minutes

Radio Interview by Dori Smith on Talk Nation - 30 minutes

Pacifica Radio Network Interview on Sprouts-15 minutes

Table of Contents

Preface to Double Standard

About the Author

Author’s Web Page

Contact

Today Europeans see their strong welfare states as necessary counters to the worst features of unrestrained capitalism, and pay high taxes to support generous social benefits.  Americans, to the contrary, have been conditioned to shudder at the very idea of a welfare state, instead upholding a laissez-faire faith in market solutions to social problems.  They pay low taxes and have few tax-subsidized benefits.

In this extensive study, James W. Russell explains the development of social and welfare policy models, comparatively examining the way in which Europe and the United States have handled the social problems of poverty, inequality, unemployment, family support, health care provision, ethnic and racial conflict, and crime. Russell demonstrates that the disparate European and American social policy orientations have produced social ways of life that are now in contention for the future of western society.

           ASSOCIATION FOR HUMANST SOCIOLOGY "BEST BOOK AWARD 2007" - Honorable Mention 

"This is a powerful indictment of "American exceptionalism" and the costs it imposes on the poor and working class in the United States.  In a period in which the neoliberal dismantling of state regulation of capitalism is taken as common sense, Russell demonstrates the signfiicant impact that state policies can have in protection people from the dehumanizing consequences of capitalism.  While so much of contemporary political activism and critique takes an understandable harsh line on the work of governments and systems, Russell reminds us in a clear and refreshing way that large systems can create social policies and systems of distribution and delivery that make the world a better place.  Fighting to establish these policies and protecting those that exist are worthy political goals and ones a sucessful left must understand."

                      -Association for Humanist Sociology Award Committee

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ENDORSEMENTS

This is a wonderful book, erudite and sophisticated, yet lucid and to the point.  Russell offers us a sweeping portrait of the development of social policy in Europe and America, and helps us to understand not only the differences between the European and American welfare states, but why those differences are so important.

                        -Frances Fox Piven, President-elect, American Sociological

                        Association and author of Regulating the Poor

James Russell restores my faith in sociology as the best line of
inquiry into nagging political questions that too often get assigned to
narrow-minded economists. We need books like this to combat academic
provincialism as much as to correct social inequality.

              -John R. MacArthur, Publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of The   

           Selling of Free Trade

Russell's tools are clear writing, tight argumentation, and impeccable logic.  He uses them to calmly and surgically dismantle the myth of American superiority as he explains how and why Americans receive far fewer social welfare benefits than their European counterparts.  A real eye-opener.

           -Levon Chorbajian, University of Massachusetts

Comparative social policy has begun to acquire a deserved status in
recent years and this detailed and engaging book is a significant and
welcome addition to the canon. At a time when policy transfer, from the
US to the UK, between European states, and from the 'West' to the
'East' and vice versa, is the subject of much heated political and
policy debate, this careful analysis draws out similarities and
differences between welfare regimes in a thorough-going, evidence-based
manner. It is also strongly recommended for its attention to the impact
of history and ideology.

                      -Gary Craig, University of Hull, UK

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REVIEWS

By Tuck Amory, Urban Studies, Worcester State College, Humanity & Society 30:4 (November 2006)

With the publication of Double Standard, Social Policy in Europe and the United States, James W. Russell has made a significant contribution to our understanding of inequality, social problems, and social policy.  In this lucid little gem of a book, Russell covers much important territory succinctly and efficiently.  Unlike many books in the policy area, which often tend to limp or bog down in minutia, this book moves quickly and seemingly effortlessly, taking the reader to a new level of understanding of a complex subject. 

     Russell compares the approaches to social policy in Europe and the United States, as the two predominant competing paradigms of our time.  As Russell states, “There is an intense struggle occurring over the future of the welfare state in the post 1989 world order,” which makes this book’s analysis particularly crucial and timely.  The quality of life in modern capitalist democracies and perhaps even their survival, may hinge on the outcome of the struggle between these two models.

      Perhaps the most fascinating and useful contribution Russell makes in his very helpful book is distinguishing between four different traditions that “inform” our contemporary thinking about inequality, social problems, and social policy.  These four differing traditions, which often become blended in confusing and complex ways in contemporary thought on these issues, are:

• Christian/Augustinian
• Laissez Faire/Calvinist
• 19th Century Liberal/Enlightenment
• Social Democrat/Socialist

     In the Augustinian tradition, which is central to contemporary Catholicism, inequality and social hierarchy are accepted as inevitable and God’s will.  In a nutshell, “the poor will always be with us.”  As Russell states, in this tradition, “social problems . . . arise, not from given social arrangements, but because of the problematic [God given] human condition itself.”  Thus, the Augustinian tradition is at important levels inherently conservative and leery of secular intervention into social policy areas.  This, however, is complicated by the fact that Augustine also stressed that the more powerful within his organic hierarchical community had important obligations to the less powerful members.  This emphasis on social solidarity and reciprocal obligations can often be seen clearly in contemporary and historical Catholic movements for social justice and assisting the poor.

     This is very different from the second tradition of Laissez Faire/Calvinism.  In this tradition, poverty was a sign of God’s disfavor.  There was no social solidarity in the hyper-individualist Laissez Faire tradition.  Everything was the responsibility of either worthy or unworthy individuals.  Thus, this tradition, the dominant American tradition, is even more antagonistic to state interventions into social problems than the Augustinian tradition.  Russell correctly cites Cloward and Piven’s analysis in Regulating the Poor that American social policy will go in an egalitarian direction only under dire and pre-revolutionary circumstances and, even then, only temporarily.

      The third tradition of the Enlightenment and 19th Century Liberalism does have some commitment to social melioration.  But, as Russell points out, this only goes so far.   According to Russell, “the main drift of [the] Enlightenment . . . .carried the assumption that human beings are fundamentally rational and . . . .they should use their capacity to perfect their societies.”  This Enlightenment assumption, however, did not really apply to inequality.  As Russell states, “That was as far as the Enlightenment notion of equality went.  It embraced formal legal and political equality, but did not challenge the existence of unequal economic and social classes.”

     Only the fourth tradition, the Social Democratic, actively encourages state intervention to rectify or balance inequality in terms of “outcomes.”  That tradition (which until recently was heavily infused by socialism) seeks to create “counter policies” to the Laissez Faire approach to economic and social planning, which has been most associated with the United States but is now being imitated by many other countries.

      While reading Russell’s schema of the four traditions, one feels one’s own thinking in this often thorny and miasmal area becoming clearer.  The irrational swirl of debate over social policy becomes more understandable and more manageable after reading Russell.  One can see how the four traditions have shaped and influenced one’s political and philosophical opponents in interesting and predictable ways.  Russsell’s book gives you a better map by which to navigate the labyrinthine area of social policy.  Russell’s writing is very balanced and dispassionate in the best sense, yet one can see where his sympathies clearly lie.  He walks this delicate tightrope with great mastery and adroitness.

     In the final half of his book, Russell does a cogent job of demonstrating empirically with very well organized and presented data that the “minimalist American welfare state” creates the highest levels of income inequality, poverty, unemployment, child poverty, elder poverty, health care costs, infant mortality, incarceration, homicide, and virtually all other social problems to be found in modern industrial democracies.  Although much of this is no surprise, Russell brings these points home lucidly and brilliantly.  One seems to register these realities at a new and more profound level after reading Russell’s book.

     Certainly, Russell argues convincingly that the comprehensive welfare states of Western Europe have major advantages over the minimalist welfare system in our country, and he does all this in only 160 pages of text.  Quite a tour de force!

     Unfortunately, as lucid, rational, and convincing as Russell’s argument is, it may not prevail against the powerful forces of propaganda and obfuscation coming from the Conservative Noise Machine in America.  Books like Gerald Gill’s Meaness Mania, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgato’s No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda, and Paul Pierson’s Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment, show the concerted onslaught on humane and progressive values that has been waged by the Right in America during the past generation.  This is no criticism of Russell, who shows himself to be fully aware of this threat in noting that “liberals in the United States have become so defensive that they rarely publicly identify themselves as [liberals].”  Let’s hope his book contributes to saner times; lucid intelligence can never hurt.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

  1. Introduction: From Social Problems to Social Policies

  2. The Social Worldview of Medieval Christianity as Prologue

  3. Secular Transitions and Assumptions

  4. Marx, Durkheim, and the Limits of Laissez-faire Capitalism

  5. From Theory to Ideology

  6. Origins of Social Policy in Europe and the United States

  7. Alternative Approaches to Social Policy

  8. Social Cohesion and Inequality

  9. Poverty

10. Unemployment:  The Sword of Damocles

11. Support for Child Raising

12. Support for the Aged

13. Health Care

14. Ethnic and Racial Policy

15. Incarceration as Social Policy

16. Summary:  Principles for Progressive Social Policy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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PREFACE to DOUBLE STANDARD

Americans would have been stunned at the headline in the Spanish newspaper:  “Government Wants to Convert Assistance to Dependent Persons into the Fourth Pillar of the Welfare State."   At a time when entitlement programs had long been in the crosshairs of American public policy with both the Democratic and Republican Parties attacking them as wasteful, unaffordable, and ill-conceived, the government of Spain, a country in the second rank of European prosperity, was precisely intending to build an entirely new major one. More revealing still was that the newspaper used the concept "welfare state" as a non controversial fact of life, unlike in the United States where it connotes a negative state of affairs to be avoided at all cost.

    In fact, Americans have been trained to shudder at the very idea of a welfare state. As individualists, the thought of accepting public assistance is repugnant, a sign of failure. Europeans, to the contrary, view a welfare state as being a benefit to all members of society. Middle as well as lower class persons benefit from free health care and everyone benefits if the welfare state insures social cohesion and peace in the population. The United States abhorrence of developing an extensive welfare state is directly related to it having the highest murder and crime rates in the western world. Instead of investing in a welfare state, it invests in a prison system, with the result that it now has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

    European social programs provide safety nets so that downturns in economic life, such as unemployment, or in physical life, such as accidents and sickness, are not economically ruinous. But if Europe finds virtue in government programs providing basic social security, the United States finds it in the opposite: insecurity. It has a system of minimal social safety guards, seeming to believe that the fear of economic ruination propels economic productivity from its citizens.

    One of the consequences of the American culture of economic and social insecurity is a national obsession with getting rich quick through winning lotteries or law suits. The new American dream seems to be that opportunity will come knocking in the form of getting rich through a successful law suit. The heightened litigiousness of the United States results in it having the highest per capita number of lawyers in the developed world.   Becoming rich, aside from dramatically improving material living standards, is the surest way to escape the country’s omnipresent economic and social insecurity.

    At the same time Americans, and those attracted to the American model in Europe, point to the double facts that the United States economy has been growing at a faster rate than the European and that it has a lower rate of unemployment. They interpret these facts as proof that the extensive European welfare state has weakened economic performance. They argue further that the high taxes necessary to support the welfare state divert capital from private investment and provide a disincentive for Europeans to work hard.

    The arguments though are built upon a fundamental fallacy:  that growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a perfect measure of a society’s economic and social performance.  GDP is a measure of the total goods and services produced within a society. It does not distinguish between useful and harmful goods or necessary and unnecessary ones. If I suffer a robbery and then go out and spend a lot of money on security devices for my house, GDP grows. But we would hardly say that something good has happened. If I spend a lot of money at fast food restaurants on super sized meals and then have to spend even more money to pay for the negative consequences to my health, GDP grows. But we would hardly say that it has grown for good reasons.

    Just as a body can grow a cancer that threatens its overall health and survival, consumerist societies can grow in ways that are not socially healthy.  Faster rates of GDP growth may produce more employment, but the question is employment at doing what?  If it is employment that is fulfilling to workers and socially useful to society, it is one thing. If it is employment at unfulfilling jobs that produce harmful or wasteful goods or services, it is quite another.

    Economic growth thus in and of itself is not a panacea. It is the type of growth that counts. Societies can take either a laissez faire approach to economic growth or one that attempts to guide it as much as possible in the public interest.

    This is a book about different approaches--primarily American and European--to solving major social problems through the development of relevant social policies. While a major theme is to point out the much greater development and, I believe, advantages of European approaches over that of the United States, I do not wish to imply that these are stark night and day differences.

    There are clear overlaps between the approaches, with some American programs--most notably the Social Security System--being appropriate bases for developing a more comprehensive and adequate set of social programs in the United States. The issue is not to develop a European approach in the United States. Rather, it is primarily to build on some of the programs and principles already in place so as to bring the United States up to western world standards of health care, family support, poverty reduction and other social programs designed to deal with common outstanding social programs. If Europeans can develop social programs that are successful in diminishing social programs, so too can Americans.

    Not so long ago those of us brought up during the Cold War years saw the future in terms of capitalism versus socialism. 1989, surely a world historical year, changed all of that. The disintegration of most of the "actually existing" socialist countries has removed socialism as a viable option for completely reorganizing societies for at least the near future.  That does not mean, however, that socialism is dead. Who knows whether at some point in the future it may reemerge as an alternative socio-economic system. For the present though, the competition has shifted from capitalism versus socialism to competition between alternative models of capitalism--between capitalist societies with comprehensive welfare states, as represented by those in Western Europe, and those with weak ones, as represented by the United States. It is a competition between models that allow socialist or at least semi-socialist solutions to capitalist problems and those that doggedly insist on maintaining or attaining as pure a capitalism as possible. If socialism is off the present world's stage as a complete model, it still has a role to pay in terms of developing ways to humanize capitalism as much as possible and perhaps prepare the way for some future development of a humane, prosperous, and democratic socialism.

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1. Luís Matías López, "La Cuarta Edad: el gobierno quiere convertir la atención a las personas dependientes, ancianos en su mayoría, en el cuarto pilar del estado de bienestar,"  El País (Madrid), Domingo section, July 25, 2004, 1

2. Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York:  W.W. Norton, 1996), 49.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CONTACT

James W. Russell

Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work

Eastern Connecticut State University

Willimantic, CT 06268

U.S.A.

e-mail:  RussellJ@easternct.edu

telephone:  860-465-4631

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