In Praise of Universality

Blog 2012 07 16 – Universality

I am often conscious that my parents’ generation had a vision of universality in social programs.  My parents saw this as meaning several important things:

1. Everyone would pay into the programs and everyone would be equally eligible to benefit from them regardless of need.
2. Such programs would be society’s way to make sure that everyone had a basic standard of living and of security no matter what catastrophe’s may happen.  We are our brother’s keeper.
3. It was understood that such programs would reduce inequalities and give everyone a fair chance at a good life.
4. It was understood that as individuals, we had to take care of ourselves and take care not to overuse the system so that the system would work. 
5. We would need a strong culture of mutual responsibility, one for the other.  The universality programs formed part of a social contract where people would have the right to fair employment and the responsibility to contribute to the fabric of society through working and paying taxes so that the system would work.

I have often thought that in my generation we have been gradually dismantling those programs – to my great sadness.  It seems that the word “universality” is not popular any more.  We hear questions like, “why pay for a rich person to have a benefit they don’t need and don’t want?”  We hear statements like, “Shouldn’t people be responsible for themselves?”

I have felt great attraction to these ideas about individual freedom and responsibility for self.  These libertarian ideas where there is no role for government and every person should take care of oneself seem attractive when your only goal is to be independent and to do whatever you want.  But the generation just leaving us now had seen the great depression.  They understood that to end up on the rails and begging for a day’s work and a bowl of soup is a possibility for anyone no matter how personally responsible they are and no matter how hard they work.  You can’t always do what you want and sometimes you need help.  They understood the power of working together for the common good.

Universality helps reduce the inequality between classes.  We learned from Wilkinson and Picket in The Spirit Level that a more equal society has better social outcomes of all types than a more unequal society.  It produces more stability, less violence, better health and education and more opportunity.

In Ed Broadbent’s book, Democratic Equality, I found a very clear explanation for why “Universality” is very important, and why we should not let it go, but rather reclaim it for ourselves and for generations to come:

• Bo Rothstein makes the case that the main source of the escalating differences between Sweden, for example, and the USA is whether the programs are universal or selective.  She finds unqualified support for universal programs.  Selective programs, requiring criteria and a means test, for example, are invasive of personal privacy, strip people of dignity, and are prone to problems of procedural justice.  Bureaucrats have to find some reason to justify their decisions – even if it is arbitrary.  There is a cycle of cheating, getting tough, and more cheating. P18, Democratic Equality.  I interpret this to mean that selective systems create bully bureaucrats and cheaters.  We make people bad instead of creating a climate for them to find their dignity and climb out of their poverty.  Universal systems provide a climate of worth and dignity and hope.
• If a program is universal, it’s benefit is a right.  If a program is selective, then it is altruistic – the rich taking care of the poor.  Where do you draw the line between who gives and who gets?  What is fair?  Do the needy deserve help or are they to blame for their own distress?  You avoid the control game – one side suspicious, looking for cheating and increasing the controls.  The other engaged in more evasion, lying, and cheating trying to avoid the controls. P20 Democratic Equality
• A universal policy is easier and cheaper to implement.  It requires fewer bureaucrats who have to make fewer decisions.  Because there is no cheating dynamic, you don’t need large numbers of enforcers or investigators.  There are fewer issues of abuse of power.  This is demonstrated by the United States having the highest health care costs in the world without the best health outcomes.
• Sweden deliberately chose universal social programs as a way of avoiding the problems of procedural justice.  It is not clear if the program actually saves enough money to pay for the costs of the needs of the poor but it definitely creates a more stable society (P21 Democratic Equality)
• In a universal system, the demand comes from the majority of the population.  If you took all the social programs in Sweden away, the people would still want education, healthcare, unemployment programs, and so on.  They would just have to buy insurance or otherwise pay for them out of their own pockets.  It would likely cost them a lot more.  If people chose not to buy insurance when they were young, when they got old we would still have to take care of them.  There is no evidence a democratic government can just let people rot because they didn’t plan ahead and catastrophe struck.  (p21)
• “. . . the Nordic type of welfare state is not an altruistic luxury established to take care of ‘the poor’. . .  Since the demand for social insurance and social services exists, the costs will be there, whether or not the demand is filled by government provision or market forces.  Most of the evidence seems to show that, due to the problem of asymmetric information in this area, mandatory and universal systems are more cost-efficient than private insurance systems. P27 Democratic Equality
• in the mid 1980’s, 54% of single-parent families in the USA and 46% in Canada lived in poverty compared to only 6% in the Netherlands and 7% in Sweden.  Out of 100,000 population, 580 were in prison in the USA compared to only 40 in Scandinavian countries.  Surely poverty could be a primary reason for this difference. P28  We note as Harper cuts social programs he is simultaneously planning for more prisons -- all likely if predicted consequences of Bill C-10 come through.

This is the battle the Quebec Students are fighting for in the Maple Spring.  Universal Education.

This is why we must fight for proper education funding for our schools at all levels.  This is why we must fight for single-tier universal health and promote the addition of pharmacare and dentacare.

But the big discussion must always be – how generous should the universal programs be? How will we finance them?  And how do we solve the problems of growing dependency if too many draw out and not enough contribute?  Why would anyone work if we had, for example, a guaranteed annual income system to redistribute wealth.

These are hard questions and will be explored further in future blogs, but for now, let us just say – the stresses that we feel in our society today – the global financial crisis; the loss of high quality jobs in favour of growth in the retail sector; the loss of jobs to other countries; the deep disparity between the rich and the poor that grows every day; the increasing number of catastrophic weather events as climate change accelerates; the potential conflict as oil and other resources decline in availability – these stresses must be addressed one way or another.  Either we will plan for a complete social restructuring of our society and put in place compassionate universal social programs to cushion the blow, or we will face increased chaos, public unrest, instability and violence.  Governments will move away from democracy towards police states.

Clarence Skinner was the great social justice minister for Universalism in the twentieth century.  In his book, What Religion Means To Me, (p14) He said:

“To me the highest type of religious experience is that which gives man a sense of unity and universality.  Most of our life is spent in narrow segments.  Our horizon is hemmed about by kitchen walls, office desks, narrow prejudices of race, class or creed.  In [our Universalist] religion, these partialisms, broken fragments of life, are lifted into a vast and profound oneness.  Our littleness becomes stretched to cosmic greatness.”

Let us all promote the values of universality and mutual responsibility one for the other in Canada and around the world.