The Welfare State, Reciprocity, & The Lack of Dignity

[CharlieK]

This rather lengthy essay clearly highlights the fact that the current Welfare System, as practiced in modern society, is in serious trouble. The main reason why is due to the almost total absence of human dignity, and a complete failure of Personal "reciprocity". Its thesis is that charity (welfare payments to the poor) springs from a basic human instinct. But that instinct is neither altruism nor a belief in equality. It is an instinctive expectation of reciprocity. In other words, we give to others in the instinctive expectation that we will get something back in return. We put resources into the common pot with the expectation that everyone else will do likewise.

But this only works well in very small and limited groups, because it's a personal thing that is tangible with everyone. That is why local religious charities are so successful, and government programs are riddled with inefficiency and waste.

In modern societies the personal expectation is often violated, with welfare recipients giving nothing back. Thus, it offends our basic expectation of reciprocity, and feels wrong. Consequently, the Leftist opposition to welfare reform is founded -- once again -- on a denial of basic human instincts, which are rarely understood.

For those who aren't anthropologists(I am a Physical Anthropologist), the concept of reciprocity is not something that one thinks about regularly. However, it is the primary instinctual behaviour of human interaction, and is studied almost exclusively, by anthropology students, when studying primitive, and advanced societies. In other words, it is the societal glue which cements humans together.

Plainly spoken, stature is enhanced by the 'gift giving' process. The more a person gives to others, the more his/her statue is enhanced within that society. They also expect something in return, just as the recipient subconsciously knows that he/she is expected to return that gift(reciprocate) in order to enhance his/her reputation. Not only is it practiced among humans, but apes, monkeys, and other more advanced creatures. It's the natural order of society, and it's structure.

But today's current welfare system completely bypasses the reciprocity process,.........with one destructive exception. Politicians instinctly recognize the import of the exchange process, and use welfare in order to enhance their own stature, and get reelected. Welfare recipients are expected to return the favour, with their votes. But that is only an abstraction, and does not enhance stature of the welfare recipient, because it is not conducted on a personal level. And that is why governmental welfare programs, as they stand, are destined to eventual failure, because they are not only inefficient, but do not promote self dignity of both parties involved in the process.

Note: This essay is rather long, and well worth the read, but I'm just going to highlight a short portion. I highly recommend you read the entire thing, because it is ground breaking, and tackles the 'give and take' process which is fundamental to human interactive society.
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Is Equality Passé?


Homo reciprocans and the future of egalitarian politics.

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis

A man ought to be a friend to his friends and repay gift with gift. People should meet smiles with smiles, and lies with treachery.
--The Edda, a thirteenth-century colection of Norse epic verse

Is equality passé? We think not. The welfare state is in trouble not because selfishness is rampant (it is not), but because many egalitarian programs no longer evoke, and sometimes now offend, deeply held notions of fairness--notions that encompass both reciprocity and generosity but that stop far short of unconditional altruism towards the less well-off. Recasting egalitarianism to tap these sentiments should be high on the agenda of those who worry about the human toll being taken by poverty, inequality, and insecurity in the United States and in the world.

The US public remains deeply committed to helping those in need. A 1991 ABC/Washington Post poll found that twice as many people were "willing to pay higher taxes" to "reduce poverty" as were opposed. In 1995, 61 percent expressed willingness to pay more taxes to "provide job training and public service jobs for people on welfare so that they can get off welfare." Almost three quarters of those surveyed by Time in 1991 agreed (more than half of them "completely") with the statement: "The government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep."

Many also think, however, that policies to pursue these objectives are either ineffective or unfair. In a 1995 CBS/New York Times survey, for example, 89 percent supported a mandated work requirement for those on welfare. It is thus not surprising that egalitarian programs have been cut even in the face of increases in measured inequality of before-tax and -transfer income. For the most part voters have responded to the cuts with approval rather than resistance.

Egalitarians now defend their programs on moral and empirical grounds that many people, even among the less well-off, find uncompelling. In the face of a hostile public, some egalitarians have soured on what they consider to be a selfish electorate that identifies with materialistic middle-class values and is indifferent to the plight of the less fortunate.

[CharlieK]

We believe this pessimism is fundamentally misdirected. It misunderstands the opposition to egalitarian programs and the powerful sentiments behind it. It is not self interest that opposes the welfare state, nor unconditional generosity that supports it. We will show that there is a solid foundation for cooperation and sharing in two basic human motives--we call them strong reciprocity and basic needs generosity. Moreover, we argue that hostility to contemporary forms of egalitarianism is evidence for, not against, that deep foundation, and that new egalitarian initiatives are fully compatible with it.

Understanding the predicament of egalitarian politics today thus requires a reconsideration of Homo economicus, the unremittingly selfish prototype whose asocial propensities have provided the starting point for deliberations on constitutions and policies from Thomas Hobbes to current debates on welfare reform. We do not wish to replace this textbook figure, however, with a cardboard-cutout altruist, an equally one-dimensional actor willing to make contributions to others no matter the personal cost. While such motives may seem admirable to some, we doubt that unconditional altruism can explain the success of the welfare state, nor its absence explain our current malaise. In experiments and surveys people are not stingy, but their generosity is conditional.

Moreover, they distinguish among the goods and services to be distributed, favoring those which meet basic needs, and among the recipients themselves, favoring those thought to be "deserving." Strong reciprocity and basic needs generosity better explain the motivations that undergird egalitarian politics than does unconditional altruism. By "strong reciprocity" we mean a propensity to cooperate and share with others similarly disposed, and a willingness to punish those who violate cooperative and other social norms--even when such sharing and punishing is personally costly. We call a person who acts this way Homo reciprocans. Homo reciprocans cares about the well-being of others and about the processes determining outcomes--whether they are fair, for example, or violate a social norm. He differs in this from the self-regarding and outcome-oriented Homo economicus. We see Homo reciprocans at work in Chicago's neighborhoods, in a recent study that documented a widespread willingness to intervene with co-residents to discourage truancy, public disorders, and antisocial behaviors, as well as the dramatic impact of this "collective efficacy" on community safety and amenities.1

Homo reciprocans is not committed to the abstract goal of equal outcomes, but rather to a rough "balancing out" of burdens and rewards. In earlier times--when, for example, an individual's conventional claim on material resources was conditioned by noble birth or divine origin--what counted as balancing out might entail highly unequal comfort and wealth. But, as we will see, in the absence of specific counter-claims, modern forms of reciprocity often take equal division as a reference point.

We do not wish to banish Homo economicus, however. The evidence we introduce shows that a substantial proportion of individuals consistently follow self-regarding precepts. Moreover most individuals appear to draw upon a repertoire of contrasting behaviors: whether one acts selfishly or generously depends as much on the situation as the person. The fact that Homo economicus is alive and well (if often in the minority) is good news, not bad, as people often rely on asocial individualism to undermine socially harmful forms of collusion ranging from price-fixing to ethnic violence. Pure altruists also doubtless exist and make important contributions to social life. In short, egalitarian policy-making, no less than the grand projects of constitutional design, risk irrelevance if they ignore the irreducible heterogeneity of human motivations. The problem of institutional design is not, as the classical economists thought, that selfish individuals be induced to interact in ways producing desirable aggregate outcomes, but rather that a mix of motives--selfish, reciprocal, altruistic and spiteful--interact in ways that prevent the selfish from exploiting the generous and hence unraveling cooperation when it is beneficial.

The strong reciprocity of Homo reciprocans goes considerably beyond the outcome-oriented motives that define Homo economicus. We call these self-interested forms of cooperation "weak reciprocity." Examples include market exchange and cooperation enforced by "tit-for-tat" behavior--what biologists call "reciprocal altruism." Such actions are costly to the giver but still self-interested because they involve the expectation of future repayment. Strong reciprocity, like the biologists' concept of altruism, imposes costs on Homo reciprocans without prospect of repayment. Yet unlike the vernacular usage of "altruism," it is neither unconditional nor necessarily motivated by good will towards the recipient.

Students of cultural and biological evolution have long wondered how individually costly but socially beneficial traits such as altruism might evolve in competition with genetically and economically rewarded selfish traits. Like altruism toward strangers, strong reciprocity thus represents an evolutionary puzzle, one that we will seek to unravel. But first we will show that Homo reciprocans is indeed among the actors on today's political stage, and most likely has been for the last hundred thousand years.

The Legacy of 100,000 Years of Sharing

Aside from unconditional altruism, there are two distinct reasons why people might support egalitarian policies. First, many egalitarian programs are forms of social insurance that will be supported even by those who believe they will pay in more than their expected claims over a lifetime. Consider unemployment, health insurance, or other social programs that soften the blows during the rocky periods that people experience in the course of their lives. Even the securely rich support ameliorating the conditions of the poor on prudential, that-might-happen-to-me grounds.

Assuming people are broadly prudent and risk-averse, then the insurance motive is consistent with conventional notions of self-interest. The second reason for supporting egalitarian programs, in contrast, is not fundamentally self-regarding: egalitarianism is often based on a commitment to what we are calling "strong reciprocity." It is little surprise that people are more generous than economics textbooks allow; more remarkable is that they are equally unselfish in seeking to punish, often at great cost to themselves, those who have done harm to them and others. Programs designed to tap these other-regarding motives may succeed where others that offend underlying motivational structures have been abandoned.

Both historical and contemporary experimental evidence support this position. Consider first the historical evidence. In his Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt, Barrington Moore, Jr. sought to discern if there might be common motivations--"general conceptions of unfair and unjust behavior"--for the moral outrage fueling struggles for justice throughout human history. "There are grounds," he concludes,

for suspecting that the welter of moral codes may conceal a certain unity of original form . . . a general ground plan, a conception of what social relationships ought to be. It is a conception that by no means excludes hierarchy and authority, where exceptional qualities and defects can be the source of enormous admiration and awe. At the same time, it is one where services and favors, trust and affection, in the course of mutual exchanges, are ideally expected to find some rough balancing out.2

Moore termed the general ground plan he uncovered "the concept of reciprocity--or better, mutual obligation, a term that does not imply equality of burdens or obligations." In like manner, James Scott analyzed agrarian revolts, identifying violations of the "norm of reciprocity" as one the essential triggers of insurrectionary motivations.3

One is tempted to consider strong reciprocity a late arrival in social evolution, possibly one whose provenance is to be found in Enlightenment individualism, or later in the era of liberal democratic or socialist societies. But this account does not square with overwhelming evidence of the distant etiology of strong reciprocity. The primatologist Christopher Boehm finds that

with the advent of anatomically modern humans who continued to live in small groups and had not yet domesticated plants and animals, it is very likely that all human societies practiced egalitarian behavior and that most of the time they did so very successfully. One main conclusion, then, is that intentional leveling linked to an egalitarian ethos is an immediate and probably an extremely widespread cause of human societies' failing to develop authoritative or coercive leadership.4

And anthropologist Bruce Knauft adds:

In all ethnographically known simple societies, cooperative sharing of provisions is extended to mates, offspring, and many others within the band. . . . Archeological evidence suggests that widespread networks facilitating diffuse access to and transfer of resources and information have been pronounced at least since the Upper Paleolithic . . . The strong internalization of a sharing ethic is in many respects the sine qua non of culture in these societies.5

Far from being a mere moment in the history of anatomically modern humans, the period described by Knauft and Boehm emerges roughly 100,000 years before the present and extends to the advent and spread of agriculture 12,000 years ago. In short, it spans perhaps 90 percent of the time we have existed on the planet.