Making Welfare Work: Reconstructing Welfare for the Millennium
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
The welfare system in the United Kingdom is broken. The number of claims has escalated and so, in consequence, have welfare expenditures. The social system does not encourage welfare recipients to become independent. Half the population of the United Kingdom lives in households drawing one of the major means-tested benefits. Research documents that means-tests paralyze self-help, discourage self-improvement, and tax honesty while at the same time rewarding claimants for being either inactive or deceitful.
In Making Welfare Work, Frank Field challenges the current political orthodoxy, particularly its emphasis on the role of legislation alone in bringing about social improvement in a welfare state. Field argues that the impact legislation has on personal character is pivotal to human advance in a welfare state. Welfare reconstruction needs to address and channel the differing roles of self-interest, self-improvement, and altruism, which are among the great driving forces in human character. A successful welfare state must reinforce these important forces which influence our nature because to create an imbalance between these three motive forces will always undermine welfare's objectives.
Field discusses in detail aspects of modern British society in dire need of change. These include the drug trade, benefit traps, permanent adolescence, the rise of part-time work, inequality in incomes, excluding the disabled, single parents, and the very elderly, for example. This clearly delineated, well-researched blueprint for success will be important reading for politicians and policymakers in all industrialized nations. Its author is well-positioned to revise and review the welfare policies of democratic societies.
About the Author
Frank Field has been the Labour Member of the Parliament for Birkenhead since 1979. He has been a front-bench spokesman on education and social security, chairman of the Commons Social Services Select Committee and is currently the chairman of the Social Security Select Committee. His recent publications include Losing Out: The Emergence of Britain's Underclass and An Agenda for Britain.
Making Welfare Work : Reconstructing Welfare for the Millennium,Frank Field,Transaction Publishers,0765806266,1979-,Economics - General,Europe - General,Great Britain,Politics / Current Events,Public Policy - Social Services & Welfare,Public welfare,Social Policy,Social Science,Sociology,Sociology - General,Welfare Economics,Welfare state,History / Europe / General,European Studies,Social Welfare
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