This book presents an important episode in the twentieth-century history of the United Kingdom: the largest public housing scheme ever undertaken in Britain (and at the time of its planning, in the world). Built between 1921 and 1934, the London County council's Becontree Estate housed over 110.000 people in 25,000 dwellings. Andrzej Olechnowicz discusses the early years of the estate, looking in detail at the philosophy behind its construction and management policies, and showing how it eventually came to be denigrated as a social concentration camp exemplifying all the political dangers of a mass culture. He investigates life on the estate, both through an appraisal of the facilities provided and , as far as possible, through the eyes of the inhabitants, using interviews with surviving tenants from the inter-war period. Thus he is able to show how high rents excluded many families in greatest housing need, and how tenants found it difficult to adjust to the costs of suburban living. This is a wide ranging study that deals with both the `nuts and bolts' of mass housing, with ideas on citizenship and the creation of communities.

Should a citizen's right to social welfare be contingent on their personal behaviour? Welfare conditionality, linking citizens' eligibility for social benefits and services to prescribed compulsory responsibilities or behaviours, has become a key component of welfare reform in many nations. This book uses qualitative longitudinal data, from repeat interviews with people subject to compulsion and sanction in their everyday lives, to analyse the effectiveness and ethicality of welfare conditionality in promoting and sustaining behaviour change in the UK. Given the negative outcomes that welfare conditionality routinely triggers, this book calls for the abandonment of these sanctions and reiterates the importance of genuinely supportive policies that promote social security and wider equality.

The European social security law, i.e. the European regulations on the coordination of social security for migrant workers, has been evolving for over 60 years. This book is the result of a dialogue between academia and practitioners in Germany and Greece on practical issues regarding the implementation of the coordination regulations. On the one hand, it reviews the recent case law of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the interpretation of EU social security law. On the other hand, the book provides accounts of how specific issues are resolved by and between national social security institutions. It explores the exchange of experiences of various administrative authorities, both within and outside the reflection of the ECJ's existing case law. Furthermore, the discussion on transnational social security rights in the EU and on issues such as the posting of workers or platform work highlight the existing and future-practical-challenges in this field.

The growing proportion of older people in Western countries means that the proper provision of suitable care facilities is of increasing importance. This timely new book is based on solid practical research carried out over 12 years in over 300 different establishments, and offers a conceptual framework for evaluating group residences for older adults, and new procedures for measuring their quality. It also proposes guidelines for designing new facilities as well as improving existing facilities.

Published with the IZA, this volume presents Richard Easterlin's outstanding research on the analysis of subjective well-being, and on the relationship between demographic developments and economic outcomes. In both fields, his work has laid the foundations for enlarging the scope of traditional economic analysis and has increased our understanding of behaviour in several important domains, such as fertility choices, labour market behaviour, and the determinants of individual well-being. In various seminal contributions, Easterlin has demonstrated the importance of material aspirations and relative economic status for human behaviour. This book is a collection of 11 of his key papers, revised and edited to make a cohesive book. New material includes an Introduction from the editors, two section Introductions from Easterlin, and an Epilogue from Easterlin.

In this book Lesley Jacobs challenges the view, now prevalent in North America and Western Europe, that the primary function of a nation's social policy should be to provide support only for the poorest people instead of social services accessible to all its citizens. In an interesting and distinctive argument he develops and defends the idea that access to basic rights such as education, health care, adequate housing, and income support can provide a solid moral foundation for redistributive state welfare programmes, maintaining that any nation which purports to take rights to basic liberties seriously must also be fully committed to the principles of the welfare state. Dr Jacob's thesis addresses a pressing political and philosophical problem at the heart of the policies and structure of the modern state.

This book brings together contributions from a range of social welfare settings, including child welfare, unemployment, mental health and substance abuse treatment, to examine how interprofessional collaboration and service user participation are realised or challenged in multi-agency meetings. It provides empirically grounded analyses of specific aspects of multi-agency work and offers a distinctive conceptual framework for understanding and analysing interaction during meetings in various social welfare settings. Based on audio and video recordings, the authors provide clear examples of actual practices of social welfare professionals and demonstrate how the realisation of collaborative and integrated welfare policy is contingent on effective interactional practices between professionals and service users.

Despite the commonly held perception that most northern citizens embraced racial equality, As Long As They Don't Move Next Door graphically demonstrates the variety of methods including violence and intimidation, unjust laws, restrictive covenants, discrimination by realtors and mortgage lenders, and white flight to suburban enclaves used by whites to thwart the racial integration of their neighborhoods. Author Stephen Meyer offers the first full length national history of American race relations examined through the lens of housing discrimination, and he forces readers to confront and re-evaluate the deep and enduring division between the races. Although this is a discomforting analysis, which concludes that housing discrimination still exists, it is only a clearer understanding of our shared racial past that will enable Americans to create a successful prescription for fighting intolerance. An original and captivating study that illuminates overlooked groups and individuals committed to the national struggle for civil rights, this is important reading for anyone interested in African-American history."

This book brings together two major trends influencing economic and social life: population ageing on the one side, and migration on the other. Both have assumed increasing importance over the course of the 20th and into the 21st century. The book offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on the challenges posed by the globalisation of the life course to welfare states' old age and family policies. Through a variety of case studies, it covers a wide range of migration scenarios: those who migrate in later life; migrants from earlier years who age in place; and old people who hire migrant caregivers. It shows how both local and global economic inequalities intersect to frame interactions between ageing, migration, and family support. Across a wide variety of situations, it highlights that migration can both create risks for older people, but also serve as an answer to ageing-related social, economic, and health risks. The book explores tensions between national and global contexts in experiences of migration across the life course. As such this book offers a fascinating read to scholars, students, practitioners, and policy makers in the fields of aging, migration, life course, and population health.

A survey in 1776 recorded almost 2,000 parish workhouses operating in England, while the number in Wales was just nineteen. The New Poor Law of 1834 proved equally unattractive in much of Wales - some parts of the country resisted providing a workhouse until the 1870s, with Rhayader in Radnorshire being the last area in the whole of England and Wales to do so. Our image of these institutions has often been coloured by the work of authors such as Charles Dickens, but what was the reality? Where exactly were these workhouses located - and what happened to them? People are often surprised to discover that a familiar building was once a workhouse. Revealing locations steeped in social history, Workhouses of Wales and the Welsh Borders is a comprehensive and copiously illustrated guide to the workhouses that were set up across Wales and the border counties of Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. It provides an insight into the contemporary attitudes towards such institutions as well as their construction and administration, what life was like for the inmates, and where to find their records today.

Despite many well-intentioned efforts to create, revise, reform, and establish an effective child welfare system in the United States, the system continues to fail to ensure the safety and well-being of maltreated children. Out of Harm's Way explores the following four critical aspects of the system and presents a specific change in each that would lead to lasting improvements. rk, The Book of David, which helped raise awareness of - Deciding who is the client. Child welfare systems attempt to balance the needs of the child and those of the parents, often failing both. Clearly answering this question is the most important, yet unaddressed, issue facing the child welfare system. - Decisions. The key task for a caseworker is not to provide services but to make decisions regarding child abuse and neglect, case goals, and placement; however, practitioners have only the crudest tools at their disposal when making what are literally life and death decisions. - The Perverse Incentive. Billions of dollars are spent each year to place and maintain children in out-of-home care. Foster care is meant to be short-term, yet the existing federal funding serves as a perverse incentive to keep children in out-of-home placements. - Aging out. More than 20,000 youth age out of the foster care system each year, and yet what the system calls emancipation could more accurately be viewed as child neglect. After having spent months, years, or longer moving from placement to placement, aging-out youth are suddenly thrust into homelessness, unemployment, welfare, and oppressive disadvantage. e number of adoptions increased, while the length of time The chapters in this book offer a blueprint for reform that eschews the tired cycle of a tragedy followed by outrage and calls for more money, staff, training, and lawsuits that provide, at best, fleeting relief as a new complacency slowly sets in until the cycle repeats. If we want, instead, to try something else, the changes that Gelles outlines in this book are affordable, scalable, and proven.

This collection of twelve essays reviews the history of welfare in Britain over the past 150 years. It focuses on the ideas that have shaped the development of British social policy, and on the thinkers who have inspired and also contested the welfare state. It thereby constructs an intellectual history of British welfare since the concept first emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. The essays divide into four sections. The first considers the transition from laissez-faire to social liberalism from the 1870s, and the enduring impact of late-Victorian philosophical idealism on the development of the welfare state. It focuses on the moral philosophy of T. H. Green and his influence on key figures in the history of British social policy like William Beveridge, R. H. Tawney, and William Temple. The second section is devoted to the concept of 'planning' which was once, in the mid-twentieth century, at the heart of social policy and its implementation, but which has subsequently fallen out of favour. A third section examines the intellectual debate over the welfare state since its creation in the 1940s. Though a consensus seemed to have emerged during the Second World War over the desirability and scope of a welfare state extending 'from the cradle to the grave', libertarian and conservative critiques endured and re-emerged a generation later. A final section examines social policy and its implementation more recently, both at grass roots level in a study of community action in West London in the districts made infamous by the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, and at a systemic level where different models of welfare provision are shown to be in uneasy co-existence today. The collection is a tribute to Jose Harris, emeritus professor of history in the University of Oxford and a pioneer of the intellectual history of social policy. Taken together, these essays conduct the reader through the key phases and debates in the history of British welfare.

Written by a team of internationally respected experts, this book explores the conditions under which social policy, defined as the public pursuit of secure welfare, operates in the poorer regions of the world. Social policy in advanced capitalist countries operates through state intervention to compensate for the inadequate welfare outcomes of the labour market. Such welfare regimes cannot easily be reproduced in poorer regions of the world where states suffer problems of governance and labour markets are imperfect and partial. Other welfare regimes therefore prevail involving non-state actors such as landlords, moneylenders and patrons. This book seeks to develop a new conceptual framework for understanding different types of welfare regime in a range of countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa and makes an important contribution to the literature by breaking away from the traditional focus on Europe and North America.

This book explores two fundamental shifts in the paradigms of governance in Western bureaucracies: the widespread use of privatization, private firms and market methods to run core public services, and the conscious attempt to transform the role of citizenship from ideals of entitlement and security to new notions of mutual obligation, selectivity and risk. Mark Considine examines a key service of the modern welfare state unemployment assistance--to explain and theorize the nature of these radical changes. He has undertaken extensive research in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand--four countries which have been among the boldest reformers within the OECD, yet each adopting distinctively different models and programs.

This book examines the implications of The General Theory of Second Best for analyzing the economic efficiency of non-government conduct or government policies in an economically efficient way. It develops and legitimates an economically efficient economic-efficiency-analysis protocol with three unique characteristics: First, the protocol focuses separately on each of a wide variety of categories of economic inefficiency, many of which conventional analyses ignore. Second, it analyzes the impact of conduct or policies on each of these categories of economic inefficiency, primarily by predicting the respective conduct's/policy's impact on the distortion that the economy's various Pareto imperfections generate in the profits yielded by the resource allocations associated with the individual categories of economic inefficiency-i.e., on the difference between their profitability and economic efficiency. And third, it is third-best-i.e., it instructs the analyst to execute a theoretical or empirical research project if and only if the economic-efficiency gains the project is expected to generate by increasing the accuracy of economic-efficiency conclusions exceed the predicted allocative cost of its execution and public financing. The book also uses the protocol to analyze the economic efficiency of specific policies so as to illustrate both how it differs from the protocols that most applied welfare economists continue to use and how its conclusions differ from those produced by standard analysis.

The editors bring together examples of microsimulation modeling that are at the frontiers of developments in the field, either because they extend the range of techniques available to modelers, or because they demonstrate new applications for established methods. This volume represents the state of the art with chapters on the use of microsimulation for comparative policy research and for challenging conventional assumptions, combining microsimulation with other types of economic models and the much-neglected subjects of model alignment and validation. Data and case studies are taken from regions including Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America.

Why does poverty persist? A critical, but so far ignored, part of the answer lies in the fact that poverty is regularly created. Large numbers of people are escaping poverty, but large numbers are concurrently falling into chronic poverty.
This book presents the first large-scale examination of the reasons why people fall into poverty and how they escape it in diverse contexts. Drawing upon personal interviews with 35,000 households in different parts of India, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, and the United States, it takes you on an illustrative journey, filled with facts, analyses, and the life stories of people who fell into abject poverty and others who managed to escape their seemingly predetermined fates. Letting a farmhand's son or daughter remain a farmhand, even though he or she is potentially the next Einstein, is a tragedy that poor people witness time after time. Remedying this situation is crucial for making poverty history. This book addresses how equal opportunity can be promoted and how slum-born millionaires can arise in reality. Speaking to Barack Obama's message for more effective health care, OneIllness Away feeds directly into current public debates. Learning from thousands of individual experiences, this book presents a clear agenda for action and provides more effective ways of keeping people out of micro poverty traps.

A serious consideration of the debate on social security reform that is taking place in many countries around the world. Professor Seidman advocates the concept of 'funded social security' as a middle position between pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) social security and privatized social security, and constitutes a politically strategic alternative. His analysis covers two distinct components, fund accumulation and portfolio diversification. The concept of funded social security uses a mix of payroll taxes and portfolio investment income to finance benefits. With funded social security, the government contracts with private investment firms to manage the portfolio of the social security trust fund. It is entirely a defined-benefit plan without any individual defined-contribution accounts; each retiree's benefit is linked by a legislated formula to the retiree's own wage history. The benefit is an annuity - an annual benefit that continues as long as the retiree (or spouse) lives - and is automatically adjusted annually for inflation.

Western culture has 'faith' in the labour market as a test of the worth of each individual. For those who are out of work, welfare is now less of a support than a means of purification and redemption. Continuously reformed by the left and right in politics, the contemporary welfare state attempts to transform the unemployed into active jobseekers, punishing non-compliance. Drawing on ideas from economic theology, this provocative book uncovers deep-rooted religious concepts and shows how they continue to influence contemporary views of work and unemployment: Jobcentres resemble purgatory where the unemployed attempt to redeem themselves, jobseeking is a form of pilgrimage in hope of salvation, and the economy appears as providence, whereby trials and tribulations test each individual. This book will be essential reading for those interested in the sociology and anthropology of modern economic life. Chapters 1 and 3 are available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Tax-benefit models are powerful tools for the analysis of the impact of policy reform, in regular use around the world in government and research organizations. This study focuses on one particular model, POLIMOD. The authors provide an illustration of the type of analysis that can be performed, document the inner layers of data manipulation and model construction that shape its outputs, and examine the reliability of those outputs based on a validation against external sources.

This book explores the incentives and effects of modern welfare policy, contrasted with outcomes of global basic income pilots in the past seventy years. The author contends that paternalistic and counterproductive eligibility rules in the modern American welfare state violate the human dignity of the poor and make it nearly impossible to escape the "poverty trap." Furthermore, these types of restrictions are absent from expenditures aimed at middle and upper-income households such as mortgage interest deductions and tax-sheltered retirement accounts. Case examples from the author's years as a front-line social worker and interviews with basic income pilot recipients in Ontario, Canada, are woven throughout the book to better illustrate the effects of the current system and the hidden potential of more radical alternatives such as a universal basic income.

As America's haves and have-nots drift further apart, rising inequality has undermined one of the nation's proudest social achievements: the Social Security retirement system. Unprecedented changes in longevity, marriage, and the workplace have made the experience of old age increasingly unequal. For educated Americans, the traditional retirement age of 65 now represents late middle age. These lucky ones typically do not face serious impediments to employment or health until their mid-70s or even later. By contrast, many poorly educated earners confront obstacles of early disability, limited job opportunities, and unemployment before they reach age 65. America's system for managing retirement is badly out of step with these realities. Enacted in the 1930s, Social Security reflects a time when most workers were men who held steady jobs until retirement at 65 and remained married for life. The program promised a dignified old age for rich and poor alike, but today that egalitarian promise is failing. Anne L. Alstott makes the case for a progressive program that would permit all Americans to retire between 62 and 76 but would provide more generous early retirement benefits for workers with low wages or physically demanding jobs. She also proposes a more equitable version of the outdated spousal benefit and a new phased retirement option to permit workers to transition out of the workforce gradually. A New Deal for Old Age offers a pragmatic and principled agenda for renewing America's most successful and popular social welfare program.

This book brings together contributions from a range of social welfare settings, including child welfare, unemployment, mental health and substance abuse treatment, to examine how interprofessional collaboration and service user participation are realised or challenged in multi-agency meetings. It provides empirically grounded analyses of specific aspects of multi-agency work and offers a distinctive conceptual framework for understanding and analysing interaction during meetings in various social welfare settings. Based on audio and video recordings, the authors provide clear examples of actual practices of social welfare professionals and demonstrate how the realisation of collaborative and integrated welfare policy is contingent on effective interactional practices between professionals and service users.

Private pensions provision in the UK is in crisis, yet it is not the crisis often depicted in political and popular discourses. While population ageing has affected traditional pensions practice, the imperilment of UK pensions is due in fact to the peculiar way policy-makers have responded to wider social and economic change. Pensions are a mechanism for managing failed futures, yet this function is being impeded by the individualization of provision. This book offers a political economy perspective on the development of private pensions, focusing specifically on how policy elites have sought to respond to perceived crises of demographic change, under-saving, and fund deficits, and in doing so have absorbed imperatives to subject individuals to a market-led regime under the influence of neoliberal ideology. This terrain is explored through chapters on the historical and comparative context of UK pensions provision, the demise of collectivist provision, the rise of pensions individualization and the state's role as facilitator and regulator in this regard, and the financial and economic context in which pensions provision operates. By placing the UK system in a comparative context of pensions reform agendas across the world, this book offers an original understanding of the unique temporality and materiality of pensions provision as a set of mechanisms for coping with generational change and forecast failures in capitalist economies. It also presents a nuanced account of the extent to which the state acts to anchor the process of pensions rematerialization and, crucially, concludes by outlining a coherent and radical programme of progressive pensions reform.

The challenge of meeting the growing cost of welfare is one of the most pressing issues facing governments of our time. Glennerster's authoritative Understanding the cost of welfare assesses what welfare costs and how it is funded sector-by-sector. The book is written in a clear, accessible style, ideally suited to both teaching and study, and the general reader. This substantially revised third edition includes: * Discussion of the many funding issues now facing welfare states, such as demographic change, tax resistance, slow growth and austerity programmes * The theory and practice of devolved tax and budgetary responsibilities between UK nations and in comparison with other countries * New chapters on pensions and post-16 education * More regular and extensive comparative analysis Divided into 3 sections, covering Principles, Service funding, and The Future, the book Includes questions for discussion and suggestions for further reading, making it an easy-to-use, essential resource for both undergraduate and post-graduate students of Social Policy, Sociology, Politics and Public Administration.