The Welfare Trait
14th February 2016
Adam Perkins is a Lecturer in the Neurobiology of Personality at Kings College, which probably means the old Institute of Psychiatry, world centre of psycho-research, where half an hour in the canteen with other researchers is better than most post-graduate courses.
Perkins has put together an interesting thesis: welfare states are shaping up dependency behaviours, generating an increasing number of employment-resistant persons, who contribute very little, soak up resources, and are likely to have more surving work-shy children.
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The central thesis of the book is that the benefits of a generous welfare state erode work ethics, and that the longer people live under welfarism, the more they depend on those benefits, and the more likely they are to cheat to obtain them. Dependent households have more children: for every 3% increase in UK benefits the number of children born to claimants rises by 1%, mostly due to discontinuing contraception. Perkins lays great stock on the findings of Heckman, Pinto and Savelyev 2013 that childhood disadvantage promotes anti-social behaviour. He argues that welfare dependency increases the number of children likely to be brought up badly, eroding human capital from generation to generation.