THE great 20th-century conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter thought the left had overlooked a major selling point in pressing the case for public — i.e., government — control over productive capital. “One of the most significant titles to superiority,” he suggested, was that public ownership produced profits, which means not having to depend on taxes to raise money.
The bulk of the left never took up Schumpeter’s argument. But in an oddly fitting twist, these days the mantra of public control in exchange for lower taxes has been embraced by a surprising quarter of the American political leadership: conservatives.
The most well-known case is Alaska. The Alaska Permanent Fund, established by a Republican governor in 1976, combines not one, but two socialist principles: public ownership and the provision of a basic income for all residents. The fund collects and invests proceeds from the extraction of oil and minerals in the state. Dividends are paid out annually to all state residents.
Texas is another example of conservative socialism in practice. Almost 150 years ago the Texas Permanent School Fund took control of roughly half of all the land and associated mineral rights still in the public domain. In 1953, coastal “submerged lands” were added after being relinquished by the federal government. Each year distributions from the fund go to support education; in 2014 alone it gave $838.7 million to state schools. Another fund, the $17.5 billion Permanent University Fund, owns more than two million acres of land, the proceeds of which help underwrite the state’s public university system.
Similar socialized funds — sometimes called sovereign wealth funds — are common in other conservative states. The Permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund, with a market value of more than $7 billion accumulated from mineral extraction, is almost a direct expression of Schumpeter’s doctrine: Socialized ownership has helped to eliminate income taxes in the state.
Such “socialism, American style,” can produce odd reversals of conservative-liberal political alignments. One of the largest “socialist” enterprises in the nation is the Tennessee Valley Authority, a publicly owned company with $11 billion in sales revenue, nine million customers and 11,260 employees that produces electricity and helps manage the Tennessee River system. In 2013 President Obama proposed privatizing the T.V.A., but local Republican politicians, concerned with the prospect of higher prices for consumers and less money for their states, successfully opposed the idea.
The bigger the worse? A comparative study of the welfare state and employment commitment
Authors:
van der Wel et al
Abstract:
This article investigates how welfare generosity and active labour market policies relate to employment commitment. As social policy is increasingly directed towards stimulating employment in broader sections of society, this article particularly studies employment commitment among groups with traditionally weaker bonds to the labour market. This is also theoretically interesting because the employment commitment in these groups may be more affected by the welfare context than is the employment commitment of the core work force. A welfare scepticism view predicts that disincentive effects and norm erosion will lead to lower employment commitment in more generous and activating welfare states, while a welfare resources perspective holds the opposite view. Using multilevel data for individuals in 18 European countries, the article finds increasing employment commitment as social spending gets more generous and activating. This was also evident for weaker groups in the labour market, although the effect was less pronounced in some groups.
IN THE 1950s, when China’s civil war was only just over and life expectancy still below 45, setting a relatively young retirement age seemed sensible to China’s new Communist Party rulers. But 60 years on, a recent study showed the nationwide average age of retirement is still 53 even though the economy is transformed and the average life expectancy is now 75. With the number of pensioners set to soar, and the number of young workers able to support them unable to keep up, China has been making long-overdue changes at both ends of the demographic spectrum. Late last year it started to ease its restrictive one-child policy. Now it is planning an adjustment to the retirement age.
Allowing people to choose if they want more than one child may prove more popular, but raising the retirement age is likely to bring more economic benefits. Officials at China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MHRSS) have solicited advice from Chinese and foreign experts, including the World Bank and the International Labour Organisation. Many have advised raising standard retirement ages—currently 50 or 55 for women and 60 for men—by five years each.
The government has clearly signalled its intention to follow this advice. In October an MHRSS official openly supported the idea, and in November, an important meeting of senior party leaders included three “gradual” adjustments in retirement age in its official policy document. State media recently quoted a World Bank official saying the current arrangement is “not sustainable” and an MHRSS official has told Hong Kong media that adjustments are “inevitable”. As always, caution is the watchword. Yin Weimin, the MHRSS minister, said last month that officials mean to raise the retirement age and “will definitely introduce the plan before 2020”.
A program designed to move families out of high-poverty neighborhoods resulted in reduced rates of depression and conduct disorder among girls, but increased rates of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and conduct disorder among boys, according to a study published in the March 5 issue of JAMA.
Prof. Jens Ludwig, one of the study's authors, said this was a follow-up long-term analysis of families participating in the Moving to Opportunity residential-mobility demonstration sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Ludwig is the McCormick Foundation Professor of Social Service Administration, Law, and Public Policy at the University of Chicago; director of the UChicago Crime Lab; and co-director of the University of Chicago Urban Education Lab.
"The major surprise was the size of the findings," Ludwig said. "Moving out of high-poverty areas had very different effects on boys and girls, and both effects are large. For boys, the increase in PTSD is comparable to what you see from combat exposure among military veterans, while the reduction in depression among girls is equally massive."
Moving to Opportunity was designed to use housing vouchers to move families out of very distressed public housing projects into less disadvantaged neighborhoods with lower poverty and crime rates, with the goal of improving educational achievement and economic self-sufficiency. Between 1994 and 1998 the HUD program enrolled 4,604 volunteer low-income public housing families in five cities (Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York) and randomly assigned some but not others to receive housing vouchers.
The follow-up evaluations were conducted 10 to 15 years later, which meant participants who were in early childhood at the time of the randomization were in adolescence when researchers were evaluating long-term associations of the housing mobility program with mental disorders. Ludwig's co-researchers on the study include lead author Ronald C. Kessler from Harvard Medical School as well as other colleagues from Harvard, University of California-Irvine, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Congressional Budget Office.
The researchers found that girls whose families had the chance to move through Moving to Opportunity had much lower rates of major depression compared to the control group (6.5 percent versus 10.9 percent) and conduct disorder (0.3 percent versus 2.9 percent). On the other hand, boys whose families had the chance to move through Moving to Opportunity had significantly elevated rates of major depression (7.1 percent vs. 3.5 percent) and elevated rates of PTSD (6.2 percent versus 1.9 percent, respectively) and conduct disorder (6.4 percent vs. 2.1 percent).
