Searching for New Welfare Models: Citizens' Opinions on the Past, Present and Future of the Welfare State 9783030582272, 9783030582289

Table of contents :
Prologue
Contents
Chapter 1: Searching for Welfare North and South
A Brief History of the Welfare State
The More Specific Motives Behind Our Search
References
Chapter 2: Welfare in Canada: Now and in 20 Years
A Brief Sketch of the Political Situation in Canada
Elements of Welfare
Healthcare (13 Persons)
Education (12 Persons)
General Corrections of the System Toward Equality (10 Persons)
Care for Elderly (9 Persons)
Basic Income (Social Care) (8 Persons)
Environment Care (5 Persons)
“Localization” (4 Persons)
Housing (Social Care) (4 Persons)
Daycare (3 Persons)
Other
Now and Then
Predictions for the Future
Memories of the Past
References
Chapter 3: Welfare in the South: In 20 Years and Now
The Australian Welfare System in Brief
Elements of Welfare
Healthcare (10 Persons)
Income Support (8 Persons)
Aged Care (8 Persons)
Affordable Housing (6 Persons)
Education (5 Persons)
Social Problems (5 Persons)
Other
The Future and the Past
The Actual Future
The Past
Comparisons with Canada
References
Chapter 4: The Future Welfare in Sweden
Some Characteristics of the Swedish Welfare System
Welfare’s History in Sweden
Production and Consumption
Global Solutions (10 Persons)
Welfare in 20 Years as Designed by the Respondents
Care for the Elderly (20 Persons)
Healthcare (18 Persons)
Education (12 Persons)
Infrastructure (Transport and Housing) (5 Persons)
Other (Police, Emergency Services) (2 Persons)
Predictions of the Future
Optimists
Pessimists
Mixed Opinions
Ten Years Earlier
Local Problems, Global Solutions?
References
Chapter 5: The Welfare State: Will It Stay or Will It Go?
The Basis of the Future Welfare
The Finances
The Workforce
The New Trends
E-health
Robotization
Basic Income
References
Instead of an Epilogue…
References
Index

Citation preview

Searching for New Welfare Models Citizens’ Opinions on the Past, Present and Future of the Welfare State Rolf Solli Barbara Czarniawska Peter Demediuk Dennis Anderson

Searching for New Welfare Models

Rolf Solli • Barbara Czarniawska  Peter Demediuk • Dennis Anderson

Searching for New Welfare Models Citizens’ Opinions on the Past, Present and Future of the Welfare State

Rolf Solli School of Public Administration University of Gothenburg Göteborg, Sweden

Barbara Czarniawska Gothenburg Research Institute University of Gothenburg Göteborg, Sweden

Peter Demediuk Victoria University Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Dennis Anderson Brandon University Brandon, MB, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-58227-2    ISBN 978-3-030-58228-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58228-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Prologue

We believe that the ways welfare has been, is, and will be organized are both intriguing and important; many scholars think so, too. The idea behind our study was to contrast, or rather complement, the traditional studies of the welfare sector that either collect statistics (which is useful), conduct surveys (also useful, but mostly for sampling the dominant discourse), or engage in speculative reasoning (mostly done by economists and political scientists). We wanted to elicit opinions and reflections from citizens representing different generations in three welfare states; our goal was to illustrate the ways they think about the organization of welfare. We believe that we have realized that goal.

Contents

1 Searching for Welfare North and South 1 2 Welfare in Canada: Now and in 20 Years11 3 Welfare in the South: In 20 Years and Now33 4 The Future Welfare in Sweden53 5 The Welfare State: Will It Stay or Will It Go?69 Instead of an Epilogue…85 References87 Index93

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CHAPTER 1

Searching for Welfare North and South

Abstract  In our opening chapter, we briefly present the history of the welfare state. While it is common to attribute its beginnings to the Beveridge Report from 1942, it is obvious that this important institution has much changed during the more than 89 years of its existence. Therefore, we decided that it would be both intriguing and useful to learn what citizens of three welfare states think of that institution at present, and how they imagine its future. The chapter then presents details of our three-country, interview-based study and a description of the methods and questions we used. Keywords  welfare state • institution • New Public Management “Public relief is a sacred debt. Society owes maintenance to unfortunate citizens.” Paragraph 21 of the 1793 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen

© The Author(s) 2021 R. Solli et al., Searching for New Welfare Models, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58228-9_1

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A Brief History of the Welfare State The honor of creating the notion of a welfare state is commonly attributed to Sir William Beveridge, the Liberal economist who, in the 1940s, chaired the UK government’s inter-departmental Committee. The Committee carried out a survey of Britain’s social insurance and allied services, including worker’s compensation, and in 1942 produced the so-called Beveridge Report (Dahrendorf 1995: 154). The best proof that such an attribution is honorary lies in the fact that it took the UK 20 years to implement the report’s recommendations. Nothing peculiar about it: just a clash between the verbs “to institute” and “to institutionalize”. It may take a day to institute something new, but institutionalizing it may require 50, or even 200 years for the innovation to become a collective practice that is justified and taken for granted (Czarniawska 2009). Although the institution of the welfare state is now 80 years old, it cannot be expected to look identical to that proposed in the Beveridge Report. Originally called Social Insurance and Allied Services, the 300-­ page long Report announced a fight against “Giant Evils” of the then UK society: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. Arbitrary help given by charities was not enough to cope with these evils; therefore, an idea was formed of an all-encompassing system (Abel-Smith 1992). Again, as observed by a Canadian historian Susan Pedersen, “‘The welfare state’ was neither a British invention nor a British product. All advanced industrial societies became welfare states in the twentieth century, even the anti-­ collectivist United States” (2018: 5). There were many variations of welfare state and, although born from the best of intentions, all shared an in-built paradox, so well discerned by the Frankfurt School: The welfare state, as Offe and Habermas have pointed out, cannot guarantee that the individual citizen will be protected from social or economic hardship. It holds out the promise of securing the welfare of individuals within the framework of a capitalist economy, but over that economy it has but nominal control. (…) This state (…) is more or less excluded from the economic system in terms of central decision making, and even its most potent weapon, taxation, is dependent upon the overall dynamic of the economy. The capacity of the welfare state to “deliver” welfare remains ultimately dependent upon the capacity of capitalism itself to avoid crises which endanger human welfare. (Watts 1980: 177)

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Although the paradox remains (and indeed can be seen as a partial explanation of the triumphant entry of the New Public Management; Hood 1991), so do giant evils, old and new, though the ways of dealing with them have changed. In Sweden, claimed Beata Agrell (2014), the “people’s home” (an endearing synonym of the welfare state) started crashing in the 1960s. But it was in the late 1970s that the media started talking of “the demise of the Swedish model” (Czarniawska-Joerges 1993). In Australia, according to Rob Watts (1980), collapse of its welfare state was visible by 1975. In Canada, the fate of the welfare state and its forms fluctuated as governments changed; some writers see the 1960s as the period of establishment of a “proper” welfare state in Canada. Still, Allan Moskovitch (2015) spoke of an “erosion of welfare state” in Canada over the past 40 years. These changes were a starting point of a transdisciplinary research program “Searching for new welfare models”, undertaken by a group of researchers from Sweden, Australia, and Canada. These three countries are considered to be good examples of an institutionalized welfare state, and they exhibit both similarities and differences that may prove illuminating. Canada and Australia share the same origins and the same language; Canada and Sweden, although on two different hemispheres, are both Northern countries. All three countries have an Indigenous population, which may present larger or smaller problems in organizing welfare. A reader may notice absence of New Zealand in this research focus. After all, New Zealand was, for several decades, considered “the Mecca” of welfare solutions. It earned this moniker because of its enthusiasm for imitating the UK in the introduction of the New Public Management (NPM). At present, however, the NPM is mostly under critique (see next section for more details) and the research program described here belongs with several others attempts to reach beyond NPM (see e.g., a special issue of Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 2015, 19/2).

The More Specific Motives Behind Our Search Over the past 40 years, the welfare organization has undergone major transformations in most countries. Today welfare can be organized by public, private, and non-profit organizations, as well as by informal actors (social entrepreneurs are on the increase). This change from a mainly state-run welfare system of the past creates particular challenges for governance and collaboration. The organization of welfare has acquired a

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great variety of forms, which is accompanied by a variety of ownership models. For a long time, it seemed that NPM would indeed be the best way to deal with this complex situation. After all, it contains control mechanisms, such as key performance indicators, process management, managementby-objectives, management accounting—to mention just the best-known of a growing number of managerial technologies (Hood 1991; Nilsson 2014). Yet the evaluation of the consequences of these technologies almost invariably shows that they are doing more harm than good. For example, the introduction of many new control mechanisms grew from the assumption that competitive businesses operating on a market are more efficient and effective than service organizations of the public sector (Czarniawska and Solli 2014a). In contrast, several studies show that higher efficiency and productivity are achieved when organizations collaborate, not when they compete with each other (see e.g. Lindberg and Blomgren 2009). There is no doubt that both the present and the future organizing and managing of the welfare sector represents quite a few serious challenges. To quote but one example: In 1971, a government commission was set up in Sweden to investigate what form futures studies should take. It was led by cabinet minister Alva Myrdal and its final report had the title “Choosing One’s Future”. The Government followed its recommendation and in 1973 the Secretariat for Futures Studies was established, which was originally accountable to the Prime Minister’s Office1. In 1982, the Secretariat presented a report called “Time for Care”. The project suggested, among other things, an expansion of outpatient care, as the in-­patient care was found to be excessively resource consuming. It has been pointed out that effective care requires time; time given by some people (the staff) to other people (the patients). Careful calculations showed that it would be impossible to recruit sufficient staff to ensure that there will be enough caretakers to offer the proper level and duration of care. If the required numbers of care workers could have been sourced, unemployment would have fallen to almost zero as soon as 2006, and there would have been nobody left to recruit. (One mistake in the report was the assumption of the

1  In 1987, the Government decided to transform the Secretariat into an independent institution, whereupon the Institute for Futures Studies was established. http://www.iffs.se/en/ about-us/history-of-the-institute/, accessed 2019-07-13.

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introduction of the 30-hour working week; had it happened, the predictions of the Secretariat would be completely correct.) In 2010, the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR) published a projection/estimate of the costs of their operations in 2035. The main factor driving up the costs is the demographic change: By 2035, the numbers of people over 85 may grow by 76 percent. Accordingly, the number employees in the public sector must increase from about 800,000 in 2010 to 1,500,000 in 2035. Assuming a normal employee turnover and a necessary expansion of the care sector, about 70 percent of any given age cohort must be employed in care. This leaves 30 percent of the workers to do everything else, thus, it becomes clear that new ways of dealing with welfare needs must be found. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how problematic the situation can be, even without the 30-hour working week. Some neoliberal politicians, and some researchers, still seem to believe that NPM is the solution to welfare problems. Let us take a look at their arguments. A market means that several producers exist who compete on price and/or quality of their products and services. They meet with customers, who should receive all relevant information permitting them to choose rationally. According to market economists, the market will wipe out weak businesses and the strong will be left, as good performance is a result of competition. If the market works well, the winners will be constantly challenged by new competitors. The supply would answer the demand, which requires freely set prices, ensuring that the customers will get what they need at a fair price. At the same time, customers must never be completely satisfied, because demand will diminish. Sometimes it may seem that competition works as intended. After privatization, many new pharmacies opened in Sweden (though for some reason they are always located nearby the old ones, leaving whole areas deprived of pharmacies as before). International companies came to Sweden to bid on train services. Medical companies with clear business ideas successfully compete with the medical centers that are overflowed with patients. And if public tenders do not work as intended (Czarniawska 2002), the parties can appeal to the Public Tenders Act, and the tender will usually be reissued (Furusten 2014). Of course it may happen that a tender fails, admit their advocates, but such events are not unknown in the history of markets, and if some products and services are not delivered in the right quality and quantity, and at the right time, such problems usually

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concern products and services that the customers can do without. This can be said of great many products and services, but not of health care, education, care for elderly, medicine supply, or passenger transport—and it is exactly in these areas that the market solution does not seem to work as intended2. All of a sudden there are too many schools, and their quality is repeatedly criticized. The rail traffic, which in Sweden followed the fashionable pattern of privatizing the profits and socializing the costs, moves from one catastrophe to another (Riksrevisionen 2013). The crowding of pharmacies in places where there was already one can hardly be seen as positive. Competition seems to provoke a wasteful over-establishment or overflows (more on overflows in Czarniawska and Löfgren 2012, 2014, 2019). The actual experiments with organizational and governance forms suggested by NPM frequently end with disappointing results. Instead of demonstrating their efficiency, the results reveal their inefficiency—which the enthusiasts of market solutions often explain away as faulty experiments. The enthusiasts may be right in that the essential characteristics of the market model are missing, at least in Sweden where there is no tradition of organizing welfare on market principles. Yet Gabriel Tarde (1903/1962) made it clear long ago that successful change must be built on traditions. The tax-funded welfare sector in Sweden had been built around a form of central planning, not on the assumption of the superiority of market forces. Neither welfare “clients” nor the state or municipality government are incentive-driven, and the clients are not particularly well informed (Kastberg 2010; Norén and Ranerup 2019). The prices of welfare services are neither desirable nor do they function as regulators, as pointed out in a report from the Swedish National Audit Office (Riksrevisionen 2013). The present organization of welfare in Sweden can be seen as a dysfunctional market or, to put it kindlier, a quasi-market (Solli 2014). Anna Hager Glenngård (2013) convincingly argued that a well-­ functioning quasi-market must be based on comprehensive regulations. Inputs and outputs, price structure, minimum quality and safety standards, and guaranteed access—all these must be organized and regulated. Perhaps most important is the requirement that the customers/students/ patients/users must pay a fixed price. Competition thus takes place in 2  Recently, a “failed” public tender caused a stop of 481 surgeries at several Swedish hospitals, see e.g. https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/patienter-kan-ha-dott-inte-forsta-gangen-apotekstjanst-far-kritik, accessed 2019-11-01.

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other ways than with the help of price, the linchpin of a market economy. Glenngård showed in her study that patient choices in a quasi-market can be extremely complicated and her analysis agrees with the results of studies in most areas in which quasi-markets have been constructed. Thus, NPM is a controversial control mechanism. Its critics point out that the ideas (and ideologies) behind it have been confused with the application of specific management techniques, whose effects cannot be anticipated from the ideas only. The common criticisms of NPM concern a number of aspects, such as the conflicting roles of public and private actors in the public sector, the fact that dominant beliefs about the market and competition that are not based on evidence, and the complications of the public procurement laws (see e.g. Almqvist 2006; Hood and Margetts 2007; Montin and Granberg 2013; Czarniawska and Solli 2014a, b; Hood and Dixon 2015.) In cases when welfare organizing has been transferred to private agents, the resulting competition has led to expansion of welfare services, but the publicly-run organizations have also expanded their services, at least in Sweden. Some major organizational changes took place in Australia and New Zealand (see e.g. Solli et al. 2005) and in the former Soviet Bloc (see e.g. Roney 2000). Obviously, what Czarniawska and Joerges (1996) called “master ideas”—dominant in a given time and place—have an impact on how the welfare sector it actually organized and managed in that time and place. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 produced many sarcastic commentaries about “market lovers “turning to the State for help (see e.g. Schottenius 2020). In theory, there are many ways of managing the organization of welfare, ranging from market models to central planning, with the use of performance indicators in-between. Many questions remain: Who should control what? Who should measure what? How should management across organizational boundaries be done? How can a kind of governance be instilled that will encourage innovation? And how does an overdose of governance prevent the achievement of desired goals? In the present study, instead of asking politicians or scholars, we decided to ask citizens. As mentioned in the previous section, we interviewed people in Canada, Australia, and Sweden—three welfare countries, but different in tradition, geographic location, climate, and politics. Sweden was an obvious choice because of its longstanding welfare state characteristics; Australia was interesting as, allegedly, the NPM has had a particularly large impact there

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(Solli and Demediuk 2007). The choice of Canada was prompted by recent developments, which suggest that future changes in the elements and organizing of welfare may be imminent, as indicated by the Canadian debate about basic income programs and the other welfare innovations that point in the same direction. Our aim was not to find representative data, but interesting representations—about the possible future of the welfare. In our open interviews, we asked citizens three questions: 1. If you could decide, how would the welfare be organized 20 years from now? Who should do it, how should it be done, and who should pay for it? 2. How do you think it will actually be organized? 3. If I asked you the same questions 10 years ago, would you give me the same answers? If not, what has changed? We interviewed one man and one woman born in 10-year intervals, thus representing ages from 20 to 80 (we conducted additional interviews in Sweden, as some of the potential respondents gave us very short answers, assuming that the solutions are obvious). As this was not a survey, but an attempt to collect reflections that can be analyzed on the basis of their contents, and not their numbers, we attempted to include a variety of respondents in our respondent selection, following the grounded theory criteria (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Charmaz 2006). We ensured that the next interviewed person represented a different job or occupation than the previous one. In each country, we also interviewed two public sector officers, and two politicians representing the major political orientations in the country. We also deliberately chose respondents who lived in different locations: city vs. countryside inhabitants, located in different regions within the country.

References Abel-Smith, Brian (1992) The Beveridge report: Its origins and outcomes. International Social Security Review, 45(1–2): 5–16. Agrell, Beata (2014) Efter folkhemmet: välfärd, ofärd och samtalens estetik i svensk prosalitteratur under “rekordåren” på 1960-talet. Edda, 1: 3–16. Almqvist, Roland (2006) New public management—om konkurrensutsättning, kontrakt och kontroll. Malmö: Liber.

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Charmaz, Kathy (2006/2014) Constructing grounded theory. London: SAGE. Czarniawska-Joerges, Barbara (1993) A modern project, a post-modern implementation. In: Hickson, David J. (ed.) Management in Western Europe. Society, culture and organization in twelve nations. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 229–248. Czarniawska, Barbara (2002) A tale of three cities, or the glocalization of city management. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Czarniawska, Barbara (2009) Emerging institutions: Pyramids or anthills? Organization Studies, 30(4): 423–441. Czarniawska, Barbara and Joerges, Bernward (1996) Travels of ideas. In: Czarniawska, Barbara and Sevón, Guje (eds) Translating organizational change. Berlin: de Gruyter, 13–48. Czarniawska, Barbara and Löfgren, Orvar (eds) (2012) Managing overflows. New York, NYC: Routledge. Czarniawska, Barbara and Löfgren, Orvar (eds) (2014) Coping with excess—how organizations, communities and individuals manage overflows. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Czarniawska, Barbara and Löfgren, Orvar (eds) (2019) Overwhelmed by overflows? How people and organization create and manage excess. Lund: Lund University Press, Open Access. Czarniawska, Barbara and Solli, Rolf (2014a) NPM, granskningsamhälle och sedan? Om kommunala megatrender. Gothenburg: Kommunforskning i Väst, report 130. Czarniawska, Barbara and Solli, Rolf (2014b) Hur går det för New Public Management i svenska kommuner? Organisation och Samhälle, 2: 26–30. Dahrendorf, Ralf (1995) LSE.  A history of the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1895–1995. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Furusten, Staffan (2014) Upphandling som nerköp. In: Björkman, Jenny, Fjaestad, Björn and Alexius, Susanna (eds) Alla dessa marknader. Gothenburg: Makadam, 23–36. Glaser, Barney G. and Strauss, Anselm (1967) The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago, IL: Aldine. Glenngård, Anna Häger (2013) Objectives, actors and accountability in quasi-­ markets: Studies of Swedish primary care. Lund: Media Tryck. Hood, Christopher C. (1991) A public management for all seasons? Public Administration, 69: 3–19. Hood, Christopher C. and Dixon, Roth. (2015) A government that worked better and cost less—evaluating three decades of reform and change in UK central government. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hood, Christopher C. and Margetts, Helen Z. (2007) The tools of government in the digital age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kastberg, Gustaf (2010) Vad vet vi om kundval—En forskningsöversikt. Stockholm: Sveriges Kommuner och Landsting.

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Lindberg, Kajsa and Blomgren, Maria (2009) Mellan offentligt och privat: om styrning, praktik och intressen i hälso—och sjukvården. Liber: Malmö. Moscovitch, Allan (2015) Welfare state. The Canadian Encyclopedia, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/welfare-state, accessed 2019-07-15. Montin, Stig and Granberg, Mikael (2013) Moderna kommuner. Stockholm: Liber. Nilsson, Viveka (ed.) (2014) Stabila över tid—rapport från tio års ekonomichefsenkäter. Gothenburg: Kommunforskning i Västsverige, ROS-rapport nr 10. Norén, Lars and Ranerup, Agneta (2019) Guides and an overflow of choices. In: Czarniawska, Barbara and Löfgren, Orvar (eds) Overwhelmed by overflows? How people and organizations create and manage excess. Lund: Lund University Press, 151–169. Pedersen, Susan (2018) One-man ministry. London Review of Books, 8 February. Riksrevisionen (2013) Tågförseningar—orsaker, ansvar och åtgärder. Stockholm: Riksrevisionen, RiR 2013:18. Roney, Jennifer Lynn (2000) Webs of resistance in a newly privatized Polish firm. New York: Garland. Schottenius, Maria (2020) Tilliten är för värdefull för att kastas bort pga brister hos vårdföretag och kommuner. Dagens Nyheter, 1 June. Solli, Rolf (2014) Kvasimarknader—en praktik med stora variationer. In: Blennberger, Erik and Brytting, Tomas (eds) Äldreomsorgen—praktiken, debatten och framtiden. Stockholm: Carlssons Bokförlag, 19–36. Solli, Rolf and Demediuk, Peter (2007) Tradition som förändringsförklaring. Gothenburg: Kommunforskning i väst, Rapport nr 91. Solli, Rolf; Demediuk, Peter and Sims, Rob (2005) The namesake: On Best Value and other reform marks. In: Czarniawska, Barbara and Sevón, Guje (eds) Global ideas. Malmö/Copenhagen: Liber/CBS Press, 30–47. Tarde, Gabriel (1903/1962) Laws of imitation. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith. Watts, Rob (1980) The origins of the Australian welfare state. Australian Historical Studies, 19(75): 175–198.

CHAPTER 2

Welfare in Canada: Now and in 20 Years

Abstract  This chapter contains the results of the interviews we conducted in Canada about the future of the welfare state. After a brief sketch of the political situation in Canada, we present the elements of welfare as they are understood by our Canadian respondents. We present respondents’ answers in order of diminishing frequency of mention. Healthcare was the element most often mentioned, followed by education and general corrections of the system toward equality. Basic income was also mentioned by several Canadian respondents. Keywords  Canada • healthcare • education • equality • care for elderly • basic income • environment care • housing • daycare

In the face of the upheavals guaranteed by automation, cybernetics, and thermo-nuclear energy, liberal democracy will not for much longer be able to meet the growing demands for justice and freedom, and will have to evolve towards the forms of social democracy. (Pierre Trudeau 1958)1

1  Greenfield, Nathan M. (2016) Oh, Canada. Pierre Trudeau: the last North American politician of whom an intellectual biography can be written. Time Literary Supplement, 5934, December 23 & 30.

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The Canadian study was the first in this three-country, transdisciplinary research program. We collected information from a small set of Canadian citizens on how Canada’s welfare state should look and actually will look 20 years from now, and we probed whether or not their answers would have been different ten years earlier. A total of 16 extensive interviews were conducted in Canada in August 2016, just a few months prior to the election of Donald Trump in neighboring USA—a timing that appeared to influence, in part, the contents of responses given. The interviewees were one woman and one man from the following age groups: 20–30, 30–40, 40–50, 50–60, 60–70, and 70–80. An attempt was made to interview persons living in different provinces of Canada. Additionally, two municipal administrators and two municipal politicians representing opposite parties were interviewed.2 Their names are fictitious, and their age is indicated only by the decade. We did not interview provincial or federal politicians based on the assumption that the interview content would be identical with their public declarations (an assumption formulated during many decades of research in the public sector). Instead, we traced public presentations of two of Manitoba’s provincial politicians, representing the Progressive Conservative Party, which in April 2016 had defeated their provincial New Democratic Party (NDP) opponents. In addition, we analyzed the ongoing presentations, policies, and programs of Justin Trudeau (Liberals), who in October 2015 became Canada’s Prime Minister after winning a majority in Canada’s national federal election, defeating Steven Harper’s federal Progressive Conservative government. The questions asked in the interviews were as presented in the first chapter, but are repeated here, with some additional explanations: 1. If you could decide, how would the welfare state in Canada be organized 20 years from now? Please understand the term welfare literally: what should be done so that all or most Canadian citizens fared well?3 What should be done, who should do it, and who should pay for it? 2. I asked you how the welfare state should look 20 years from now. My next question is: How do you think the welfare state will actually look 20 years from now? 2 3

 All 16 interviews were conducted by Barbara Czarniawska.  This added explanation was necessary as “welfare” in Canada is a synonym for “dole”.

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3. Had I asked you the same questions ten years ago, would you have given me the same answers?4 Each interview lasted 40–60 minutes and was subsequently transcribed by the interviewer. Now, we attempt to paint a qualitative image of Canada’s evolving welfare model.

A Brief Sketch of the Political Situation in Canada The welfare state in Canada is a multi-billion-dollar system of government programs…that transfer money and services to Canadians to deal with an array of [societal needs]. (Moscovitch 2015)

Canada has three major levels of government: national, provincial, and municipal. There are no party differences at the municipal government level: Groups of people campaign and are elected or not. Parties begin to count at the level of provinces, but even there it is sometime difficult for an outsider to guess their stance5: One of them is called a “Progressive Conservative Party”; an oxymoron if ever there was one. At the federal level, there is a Conservative Party, which resulted from amalgamation of the Reform Party (truly to the right; Canadians seem to love oxymorons) and the Progressive Conservative Party. Also, the left-of-center New Democratic Party (NPD) allegedly made the biggest ever provincial cuts in taxes. Provincial Conservatives (PC) are perceived as being to the left of the USA Democrats, whereas the Liberals, ruling now at the federal level, cooperate with both. Indeed, the differences seem to be minimal. Here is an election speech of a PC candidate who won a seat in the Manitoba provincial election in 2017: Hello my name is Alan Lagimodiere, your Progressive Conservative candidate for Selkirk, which represents the realm of St. Clements [municipality] and the city of Selkirk. I’m a devoted family man: together with my wife Judy we have four children and one granddaughter, which I’m very proud of. I’m a veterinarian by trade and through the years I’ve been known for my 4  In case of the first age group (20–30), the question had to be modified by adding “if you thought about such things at the time”. 5  Canada is not unique in this sense: the Swedish Social Democrats could as well be called Conservative, as they attempt to conserve the welfare state that they created many years ago; the extreme left may agree with the extreme right on some points, and so on.

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compassion, integrity, and honesty—all traits that I want to bring to the government of Manitoba. I want to work with business groups; I want to work with first Nations; I want to work for the local producers and small business; to make a change for the better in our community. I will bring all of my traits to that for you. April 19 the change for the better is coming!6

The general impression of an outsider, confirmed by many of the interviewees, was that the parties are very close and the major difference is between “good guys” and “bad guys”, no matter what party. It seemed indisputable to the interviewees that Canada’s previous Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, was a truly bad guy. This could have been a misleading impression, however. This is what Brad Wall, the Premier of Saskatchewan, leader of the Saskatchewan Party, nine years in the office, wrote on Facebook on August 26, 2016: I want to offer Saskatchewan’s gratitude to Stephen Harper for his faithful service to Canada. His legacy includes low taxes, new free trade agreements and principled foreign policy. Under former Prime Minister Harper, western Canada was always respected and treated fairly. Together we successfully worked on a number of important projects including the south bridge and north commuter projects in Saskatoon, the Regina Bypass, twinning projects on Highways 7 and 11, and Boundary Dam 3 carbon capture project. We coordinated efforts on key trade issues, assisting exports in agriculture, mining, and processing. No other Prime Minister in Canadian history did more to open up markets for Saskatchewan uranium for civilian use than Mr. Harper, first in China and then in India. For all of this and more we say thank you.

There were 11 comments following this statement, all praising Harper and many of them criticizing Trudeau. Nevertheless, the same Brad Wall on the 31 of August issued the following text: Thank you, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the federal government for helping on behalf of Saskatchewan canola growers. The pause to the unfair trade action from China is a step in the right direction, but a long-term science-based solution is still needed.

6  https://www.gov.mb.ca/legislature/members/info/lagimodiere.html, 2017-05-16.

accessed

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Indeed, Progressive Conservatives and Liberals appear to collaborate in Canada. This image of cooperation and common values among parties probably reflects the core elements of Canada’s current welfare state. During federal and provincial elections campaigning, however, various political parties attempt to gain votes by laying out platforms that promise to add new and/or significantly enhance existing welfare system elements. Although it can only be a guess, our guess is that the answers to the interview questions, especially the second one (How do you think the welfare state will actually look 20 years from now?), would be different— more pessimistic—after the USA elections. Most interviewees, and by extension people in Canada, seemed to be frightened by the developments at their neighbors to the south. It is also well to remember that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms—“life, liberty and security of the person”—was entrenched in Canada’s 1982 Constitution Act.

Elements of Welfare What is welfare? In Sweden, what counts as “the classical triangle” (a media expression) is healthcare, education, and social care. After those, come military defense, police, and infrastructure. Here is the official list from Canada: The major welfare state programs in Canada include Social Assistance [many consider this to be “the dole], the Canada Child Tax Benefit, Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, Employment Insurance, the Canada and Quebec Pension Plan, Workers’ Compensation, public education, Medicare, social housing and social services. Programs are funded and delivered by the federal, provincial and municipal governments. (Moscovitch 2015)

Are these the elements of welfare in the opinion of Canadian citizens interviewed for this study? We organize our presentation in order of frequency of mention among our 16 interviewees, from the most often to the least often mentioned element of welfare.

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Healthcare (13 Persons) Most interviewees mentioned healthcare. Although it is considered to function relatively well, the commonly mentioned problem was the shortage of doctors, especially in rural areas. For me, it means that Canada DOES NOT HAVE an equal health service for everybody. If you live in an urban area, you have an ambulance that takes you there. If you live in a rural area, hopefully people who live around you can get you into a vehicle, and get you to a hospital that actually has a doctor. For me, this is the most important thing about welfare. If you don’t have health, and you don’t have the care, so how can you have welfare? (Laura, 40+)

The suggested solutions varied. Many of them concerned education: More doctors should be educated in Canada, rather than imported from other countries. The present limitations of university medical education are too strict: more students should be taken in. Also, at present the doctors themselves are preventing structural changes that would improve the situation. It is recommendable that during their education they were to be trained in all duties and activities related to medical care, so that they would understand better the whole of its need. … the biggest problem with Medicare is that doctors put a big kibosh on the kind of changes that could make Medicare better organized and less wasteful. It seems that the doctors disagree with any restructuring, probably because they want their work scheduled and certain things done their way. So, I’ve always thought that … Med School should include the bottom through the top. If you are going to be a doctor, you also have to be a nurse, even an orderly in the hospital. And if everybody all the way along was obliged to do all the jobs, they would have a lot more understanding. Also [I think] that this elitist nature of the doctors could be somehow broken down if they had to do all the jobs as a part of their training. (Kristin, 50+)

More doctors would mean higher costs. Several solutions were suggested. One, existing already, is the two-tier system; well-off people should pay for their care, alleviating the burden of the care for the rest of the population, or at least they should pay more. A half-joking suggestion was that the situation will improve when the baby-boomers die out; a more serious prediction was that e-health would become much more common:

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Health care will be handled extensively through the Internet. This will help many people get specialized and timely service. There are already many health apps and there will be more with much greater capabilities. We will walk into a doctor’s office much less frequently, with a report in hand, if we decide to print it, which has already been sent to him/her. (Gary, 60+)

Another suggestion concerned the need for more emphasis to be put on prevention than on treatment (at present, the doctors’ earnings are related to the latter): … the way we pay for healthcare is … people are paying a high amount of money to help people whose health has failed, or is failing, as opposed to perhaps paying fewer dollars to continue to help people who are staying well to stay well? I know that there are some countries, (…) in which a doctor is given a patient case load, perhaps 500, and is paid a fee to take care of those 500, so the less time those people are sick, the less work there is for the doctor, but his compensation does not suffer. In Canada, if people aren’t coming to see you all the time, your compensation suffers. So, we may have to change our attitude that way. Keep people healthy, instead of treating them as if they were ill, and getting paid for that, a turnstile kind of operation. (Shane, 60+)

A demand for a universal free dental and optical care has also been formulated. Education (12 Persons) Almost as many people discussed education as they did healthcare. Two different directions concerning university education could be discerned among the suggestions. One group thought that university education should be free; the most radical was the suggestion that banks should carry the cost of secondary education. … our banks should pay for our secondary education. The profits that the banks are making right now are obscene. I think that they either should be regulated, or they should be obliged at least to contribute somewhat to the public education. It would make a huge difference in ten or twenty years if people could afford to go to the university. It’s not that the state is not con-

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tributing to the secondary education, but its prices are prohibitive for certain members of the population at this point. (Kristin, 50+)7

The other group considered university education unnecessary; it is preparation for trades that should be considered more important, and free: … just having a higher education does not qualify you anymore for a higher level of income. We have lots of people in their 20s or 30s that have a university degree or two, but they are not quite prepared to enter a workplace, because a workplace is not accepting them as creditable, to provide value for the salary that they would ask for. And we are seeing a rise here that you probably saw 30 years ago in Europe, of the trades people, of people who can actually produce something for the economy, being compensated according to their value, whereas the kind of minor academic people are not. (Shane, 60+)

There was also one opinion that contemporary universities too often serve as the sources of leftist propaganda. Several interviewees suggested that young people living in rural areas have higher costs that need to be subsidized: I have to pay for the room and board for my kids studying in Edmonton and Winnipeg, and tuition fees. My son is living in an apartment close to the university, and it gets extremely expensive. People who live in the city don’t have that extra expense, and I would like to see that expense shared by everybody. Just because you have a flat in the city, your education shouldn’t be that much cheaper than those of the people in the rural areas (David, 60+)

It has also been pointed out that the education of young people living in Aboriginal Reserves is not given enough attention: … what we probably should do is invest in things like reservations, an education on reserves for the native population… the differences between what they spend on an average student in Winnipeg [a high amount] and an average student on the reserve [a low amount] is just ridiculous. I think it would 7  This interviewee would likely be pleased to read that nine months later the federal government agreed to support the creation of an Indigenous school board and fund it directly on a per-student amount equivalent to the funding intensity of non-Indigenous school boards (http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/manitoba/indigenous-education-manitoba-1.3899241, accessed 2017-05-16).

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make a big difference because we have a really growing Aboriginal population. (Kristin, 50+)

Some suggestions concerned the organization of the educational system: at present, there are too many school boards, differentiated by language and religion. There were also suggestions as to the curriculum: Young people, beginning with the daycare, need to be taught how to live and eat healthily. They should learn more about moral dilemmas and political activities, rather than focusing on adaptation to the demands of the job market: I have some optimism that with the middle-line government we can improve and sustain government programs. On the other hand, I do not know if the youth have the integrity to carry that through in 20 years, when they will be making money, this group of people who are in the early years of education right now, not yet in the workforce. Are they going to care about people like you and me, or will they just hammer up their doors and say, “Let them die” or will they help?8 I have a sort of guarded optimism if educators put into place programs where everything isn’t computer based, when you can have people in education programs talking about responsibility to others; we need to encourage volunteerism and thinking about helping the elderly, and thinking about charity, tolerance and acceptance. (David, 60+)

In general, young people need to learn more about Canada’s “racist past” (15). General Corrections of the System Toward Equality (10 Persons) These suggestions concerned mostly changes in the law, but also some serious structural changes. Making an equalizing change of the tax system would mean taxing corporations more or levying a progressive income tax system and consumption taxes. High-income earners should not be receiving the old age pension from the system. In general, provinces should be treated more equally (“Canada is like 12 separate countries, or territories, and there are too many differences between the provinces, and I don’t really like that…, Kathy, 60+), and too many differences such as between rich and poor, young and old, poor 8  Margaret Atwood in her story “Torching the Dusties,” (in Stone Mattress, 2014) was much less optimistic about the future.

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immigrants, and rich immigrants. In particular, though, it was the Indigenous communities (sometimes more generally called “remote communities”) that were seen as unequally treated, beginning with The Indian Act from 1876. Decision-making should be decentralized to local communities, where the people who live longest should have the most voice. I think that every city should have a website; I am talking about things like Open Data, Open Government. You shouldn’t have to wait for the public consultation process to be able to give input. You should be able, if you are a night owl and up at 4:00 in the morning, or if you are a morning person and you wake up at 6.00 and start your day, you should be equally able to give your input that could be tied to the system of public consultation on specific issues that need a timely resolution. (…) So, the Internet alone is definitely not a solution, but it would be a fantastic tool, since the majority of the world now carries the Internet with them at most times. It can then serve as a catalyst to develop community spaces that are actually physical spaces for gathering that should be walkable or accessible from your place of residence or your place of work, so that the fact that you don’t have [access to] an Internet will be not a barrier for participation. (Oscar, 30+)

It needs to be added that another respondent, less optimistic about the public consultation process, claimed that the “night owls” are actually grumpy retired men, who cannot sleep and at night unload their bitterness through the web. Unfortunately, according to that person, politicians pay too much attention to such complaints. But Oscar believed in open access and digital solutions: It would be an independent platform that could take in all those concepts that we were discussing earlier, the Open Government, go through the budget, do a Citizen Budget and revise it a thousand times, because it is open and editable at any moment, allowing people to rewrite those plans. Same about development plans, development agreements, making those available to city users. Let people work on them, start the community development group, talk about how you are going to change the city, and write your policy there. Let people continue evolving the work in progress, that people can contribute to in myriad different ways and then politicians can run and take a place on the platform, on the citizens’ platform. It makes perfect sense to my mind and I don’t think that it is technologically unfeasible.

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A new electoral system would be of help: “now whoever gets the most votes governs, so it could happen that a party who got 30 percent of votes is governing, but they represent only this 30 percent of population, and there must be some way of introducing changes that will permit the electorate to be represented in its majority” (Clay, 70+). Care for Elderly (9 Persons) Opinions on the future need varied. Some people thought it will diminish (as the baby-boomers will die out); others thought that it will increase (as all baby-boomers will need it, and they will live very long). Again, a two-­ tier system was suggested as one type of solution: The rich should pay more for assisted living and nursing homes. A distinction was also made between home care, assisted living, and nursing home care. It was pointed out that private nursing homes were very expensive and public ones very few. Several respondents suggested that more assisted living homes were needed and the immigrant workers could help to provide them with personnel. Some other interviewees opted for increased and better home care, which is cheaper, and—done properly—would alleviate pressure on hospitals, which at present often have to take care of the elderly. A new solution would be to have more mixed housing, for example, student residences together with elderly accommodation. I think probably the best idea would be to help people sort of establish living conditions that are of their own choosing. … Going to an old age home can be really horrifying. They just sit in chairs and stare out in the space, and it is not really… it’s kind of user’s abuse factor to aging, so if you actually have to do something, to get your own meal or to go down to the toilet, all those things that push you to move instead of staying in one place, to be active, then you will probably have a healthier elderly population. Or have things like they might be doing in Quebec, [elder care] residences that would be integrated with, say, universities, so that university students may live in the same building as the elderly and be sort of integrated in their care, and that will subsidize their living there. So, mixing up populations of different ages, maybe even daycare, so that people have more of a family setting. Young people will speak to old people and vice versa. University students are often very segregated as well in their youth groups and don’t talk to other people… (Kristin, 50+)

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There were also voices for more common introduction of assisted dying— most interviewees agreed that the elderly should be able to make this choice themselves. Basic Income (Social Care) (8 Persons) Half of the interviewees mentioned the need of what is now called “basic income”, although the names used varied; some interviewees mentioned Mincome—a three-year experimental guaranteed annual income project held in Manitoba in the 1970s.9 The project was funded by the Manitoba provincial government and the Canadian federal government under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. It was actually launched on February 22, 1974, under the NDP provincial government, and was closed down in 1979 under the Conservative provincial government and the federal Progressive Conservative government. The interviewees were not sure about the results of the experiment—apparently, no final Mincome report was ever issued, but a federal grant established the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Manitoba and several scholars offered their interpretations. The main difficulty in solid interpretation was the temporary, three-year character of the experiment, which was known to its participants. Some of the interviewees suggested that in case it would not be possible to afford a universal basic income, (UBI) a reduced version, a “safety net” for single mothers should be introduced. … that would certainly apply nicely to a single mother who cannot work. Especially if she is getting a minimum wage as much as she needs to work to support the family, because it is a choice between a rock and a hard place, and she will need some guaranteed income supplement. (Elliot, 50+)

In late 2016, members of the Prince Edward Island (PEI—population 146,000) legislature voted unanimously to support a motion to work with the federal government in Ottawa to create a basic income pilot program for PEI.  Surprisingly, even the PEI’s Progressive Conservatives agreed, saying that a basic income fits with conservative values because it would reduce government bureaucracy (Tencer 2016).

9

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome, accessed 2019-07-15.

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In 2017, the government of Ontario10 (population 13.6 million) launched a basic income pilot project. Some comments online suggested that the rising wave of automation has motivated recent interest in basic income plans. In press coverage on the Ontario basic income pilot project, it was noted that: [The pilot is] intended to study the effects of guaranteeing a basic income to about 4000 households in three places in the province… basic income is an idea targeted at ending chronic poverty by replacing the complex maze of social assistance programs with a guaranteed minimum income with no strings attached. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/5-questions-on-basic-income-as-ontario-launches-its-experiment-1.4084967, accessed 2017-05-16)

We return to the results of those experiments in the final chapter. Environment Care (5 Persons) One of the most common aspects of environment care mentioned by interviewees was “green transportation”—limiting car use. As a contrast, the Californian example was used: “they are all very careful about what they put into their bodies, eating only organic food, buying only things that are environment-friendly, and then they are driving their SUVs that are completely destroying their environment” (Kristin, 50+). An obvious solution is an increase in public transportation, for example trains connecting distant communities (in the specific case, the railway already exists, but is used for goods transport only). A more radical solution is the increase of population density: moving people in distant communities closer to cities (with a special attention paid to Indigenous Reserves): …in most of Canada, (…) you have these rural communities where you cannot survive without a car. So, you should create such communities where you can. But the way the present system works, nobody wants more neighbors, nobody wants density, so what is needed is a strong shift toward density. Like Europe is dense, it is not sprawling, and I think that’s healthy, and all the urban planners think this is the way North America should go as well. But how to turn back from all these mistakes made in the 1940s and 1950s

 See Segal (2016) Finding a better way: A basic income pilot project for Ontario.

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with all those suburbs, interstate roads, and this commuting that happens all the time… (Elliot, 50+)

Other issues mentioned were waste management, fighting pollution, and water poisoning, as well as preventing logging and fracking on Indigenous Reserve lands. … a lot of times the pipelines go through their [Indigenous people’s] land too, like the one proposed from Alberta to Eastern Canada. And what ­happens if it breaks? Then they are in a non-negotiable position. I was at a panel in Montreal and there were many Indigenous activists, talking about their opposition to that pipeline, and also to fracking, which is incredibly environmentally detrimental. Some of those native communities are maternally organized, so that women do the talking, they have the political power in communities. They were talking about the protests in Eastern Canada, and they were very tense and confrontational, and not afraid of the confrontations with the provincial police. (…) It is a big eye opener when you hear that, how desperate they can get. Because all this logging and fracking is ruining the natural environment around you, which has survived for centuries, and you really have nothing else but that. So, the level of desperation is pretty intense. (Urban, 20+)

One environment activist summed it up, pointing out that environmental issues are in fact social issues (Oscar, 30+). “Localization” (4 Persons) Four interviewees suggested that Canada needs to concentrate more on its own resources, rather than counting on the import of both labor and goods. Although nobody suggested limiting immigration or setting limits to international trade, it has been pointed out that the country should put more effort into training the professionals needed (doctors was a typical example), rather then importing them from other countries. The recent warm admission of Syrian refugees to Canada has been appreciated, but also contrasted with the still unsatisfactory fate of Indigenous Canadians. We are now welcoming Syrian refugees; great, honestly it was the right thing to do, but you also have to think about it in the context of that, you have people in your country that cannot get the clean water, or that are living in some places in the north which is pretty bad, there is a super-high teenage

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suicide rate. When you have people living in semi-primitive conditions, in your own country, and then you are accepting all these other people (…) those weird Canadians, who want to be multicultural, charitable, want to think about themselves as polite and nice people, who have an interest in social programs and social welfare, in giving people a certain standard of living, but then this other segment of the population is completely ignored. It is a bit of a strange mentality, if you think about it (Urban, 20+)

Paying attention to their needs should also have a political effect: after all, those who lived there longest should make decisions about specific local issues. I think that the best decisions are the ones that people make with the most thought, and the most thought means that you have been there for a longer time. That part is quite important. I don’t think you can make good decisions if you are transient in a community. For the long-term benefit of the community, I think you will be ignorant of it, no matter how much knowledge you have, if you do not know the place, and don’t know the ecology, and you don’t know the culture, so you just don’t know… So, you can roll the dice and hope for the best, but the best solutions will always be the products of the people who have been there for a long time. (Oscar, 30+)

Also, more attention should be paid to local agriculture—a trend already happening, as shown by the increasing number of local markets. Housing (Social Care) (4 Persons) Safe and affordable housing should be every citizen’s right, and there ought to be a national housing strategy. … there has to be a national housing strategy. We used to have it in Canada, in the 1960s, when there were huge incentives given to people to build buildings that were just for rent; not condominiums, not the few buildings for people who can pay a high rent, and the million dollar condominiums as they build now… you had to build an apartment block and rent it out. There were hundreds and hundreds of those blocks all across Canada in the 1960s, they all look the same, but they are very affordable, and now they are all, or almost all, converted into condominiums…. That is probably one of the most important things that I can identify for you in terms of welfare, is to create a national housing strategy where people have good rental options again. Especially as people are getting old, the bulge of the baby boomers

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will need places to rent, so it is critical that it happens very soon, that they start focusing on that. (Kathy, 60+)

This demand was often formulated in relation to the needy—homeless drug addicts, ex-mental hospital patients, etc. It was soon obvious that many of those are in fact Indigenous Canadians who left their reserve. Yet public housing still raises protests of the type “never in my yard”. Right now, we give the residents a lot of say when we have a proposal to densify a community. If somebody chose to buy those lots back just right behind us here, and put a four-story building with 16 units in it, this home here would get a letter from the municipality saying that this is what we are planning, and several other homes as well. They all come to a [municipal] council’s meeting and the council adjudicates the situation. So what council would do is to listen to the proponent of that project, who would say, we want to build this project, it is a good project, it offers diversity in housing choices, it offers affordable housing, and offers a good access to services, it is environmentally friendly. And then all these people, and I mean all, will come out, and say it has really very bad impact on the quality of life, we moved out here for the open spaces, we cannot see the sights anymore because the building is four-stories high, and the adjudicator in the municipality, one of the municipal councilors, will almost always side with the neighbors. They would say: “If I lived here, I wouldn’t want a four-story house either”. (Elliot, 50+)

The solution would be to follow the national strategy with a long-term local planning, of which the citizens will be informed. Daycare (3 Persons) In those interviewees’ opinion, daycare should be universal and affordable. I believe very strongly that we need a universal, affordable daycare [program] because I am a feminist and I believe that women have to have the opportunity to have children early in life if they want and not have it set back [their] career or completely eliminate hope of ever having a career (Kathy, 60+)

The fact that it was not universal and affordable was explained by the Conservative government’s opinion that daycare is a way of

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“institutionalizing children” and that the family is the only right place for children to grow up. Other One person mentioned culture and recreation as the ways of holding a community together; another, on a direct question from the interviewer, was of the opinion that it should not be under public administration, though the same interviewee admitted that leaving it in the hands of private sponsors means that it can be skewed to fit their interests. Only one person mentioned infrastructure as the important element of welfare. According to that person, it should include the construction and maintenance of highways, streets, water, sewage, and public buildings, such as hospitals and schools. One interviewee mentioned the military and police (the person in question is professionally related to this segment of the public sector). At present, the police have three tiers: there is the federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the provinces and municipalities can either hire the RCMP or build a police force of their own.

Now and Then Predictions for the Future As to the state of the world, and the Canadian welfare in 2036—twenty years from the time interviews were conducted—half of the interviewees were optimistic (again, this was before the election of Trump, a prospect few believed would happen). I think that we continually move forward as a society. Certainly, since World War II, which was the dark point. I think that since then we definitely reduced poverty, reduced child mortality, increased health, improved education. We have set a lot of good social foundations that will never be reversed. And I think we will keep doing that. The revenue side, the taxation side of that, needs to mature and catch up. (Elliot, 50+)

The reasons for the optimism varied. Some persons believed that “things typically get worse before they get better”, or, in a variation of the same sentiment, that only truly traumatic events, noticed by the media, can

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speed up the improvements, which otherwise happen very slowly. Some interviewees put their hope in the present government, others in the Millennials, though still others were suspicious of the “Facebook-­ obsessed youth”. I am impressed … by the Millennials… I think they are an amazing generation, they are really activists, and they are very concerned about the world’s well being. If the Boomers, and all of us, can avoid destroying the world, and if these people [youths] can come into their own, they actually will do a very good job. I am optimistic about their ability to change things. … this picture of them being lost in their video games, their social networks, watching TV, or getting lot of money for their phones—I just don’t think that’s necessarily the case. It is a kind of fogeyism that everybody indulges in at a certain age, insisting that young people are somehow less adequate, less intelligent then they were back in the day, but I really don’t find it at all, and especially not for the 20-year old. (Kristin, 50+)

The pessimists did not exclude the possibility of a US presidential victory by Trump, and they predicted that the gap between the rich and the poor will widen, that the baby-boomers’ housing bubble will crash, or that the growing urban sprawl will ruin the environment and will cause small places to die out. Four interviewees declared themselves to be realists, which meant a mixture of positive and negative developments. According to them, there will be new and more problems that must be solved by consolidating and centralizing the welfare measures, which has its negative sides as well. Budget deficits must be decreased, but will politicians agree to take adequate measures? Hopefully, there will be more local initiatives, but those will be opposed by global corporations. Memories of the Past Five persons claimed that they would have given the same answers ten years earlier, but three of them added that those answers would be different twenty years earlier, digital technology being the main difference. At present, and this was already in place ten years ago, people do not fix broken things, but buy new ones. Also, added one interviewee, at present students spend too much time organizing political protests.

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Ten people answered that their responses would have been different, either because they were different: I care more about the others now. It is more important for me now to think about people who do not have that much. I don’t mind giving to others, whereas when I was young, I was probably more thinking about myself… (Harold, 40+),

or because the world was different: It is not my opinions that changed, but what I know. We have never experienced a housing bubble in Canada before, except a minor one in Toronto once. We never had all this pain, as much homelessness, the mental institutions shut down and all those homeless people, increasing income inequality; I never thought it could become as bad as quickly. (Kathy, 60+)

Two persons were more pessimistic ten years ago, because of the then Canadian government. Eight people were more optimistic: “I haven’t seen quite so many people suffering…”; the climate change was not so visible; the world was more optimistic; they did not know as much as now; children were more respectful, and more volunteers wanted to help others; there were not as many “grumpy retired males”. In contrast to our expectations, there were no significant patterns of differences related to gender, age, or political orientation. Yes, it was women who took up the issue of daycare, but there were optimists and pessimists of all ages and the preferred solutions of certain problems— public, private, or volunteer—seemed to be dictated mostly by considerations of their effectiveness. It seems that most issues revolved around the fate of rural communities. It is a problem of green transportation, accessible healthcare, and costs of education; all those become especially visible in relation to distant communities of Indigenous Reserves. The following quote summarizes it well: We have Indigenous people, who are more impoverished than a general population, so you need a system that would treat both properly, get both to an equal level of welfare where the level of health, education, and well-­ being are taken care of. And a part of the problem in Canada is that a couple

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of years ago11 it was decided to give Indigenous people communities that are remote from the rest of civilization. And we still have a lot of communities that are remote, and communities that have the most difficulties are those that are remote. And I think that if you put any part of a population in a remote community in Canada, or perhaps in any other country, without an ability to have a sustainable income, you have a huge problem, and we have that problem, and yet we are not changing our philosophy. We are trying to take the services to those remote communities, but because of the Internet, because of global communication, the remote communities do not necessarily want to remain remote. They want to be part of the global world, and this is an extremely difficult situation. Just adding dollars isn’t enough, even if you decide on a minimum income for all people in Canada, which would be a good idea, so that you could feed your children, so that you could take care of yourselves, I don’t think that would be enough for remote communities, though, because you will still be needing a sense of well being, a sense of a purpose, and that comes by contributing… All people like to contribute, and it is difficult to feel you are contributing in a very remote, isolated situation. (Shane, 60+)

The questions are: How to reverse policies that are more than a century old, but still producing consequences? Should small, remote communities die out? Should people be forced to move toward urban centers? In the meantime, the media glorify “the Canadian experiment” as a first post-national country (Foran 2017). Will it succeed? If it does, others may follow suit. There appears to be growing evidence that, nationally and provincially, Canada is experimenting with initiatives designed to achieve the goal of ensuring that all Canadians fare well—in communities small and large, remote and urban. Overall, our interviewees would most likely be pleased with these developments, but they would probably be quick to note that Canada still has a long way to go in evolving its own brand of welfare state. If, however, one were to judge by the promises, or, one may call it, political posturing that competing federal parties engaged in to win votes during the 2019 federal election, (all of them promising to enhance existing and introduce new welfare elements), the accelerated progress in Canada’s welfare system may yet happen.

11  It was obviously a rhetorical exaggeration, because the continuation of the quote shows clearly that the interviewee knew very well how old (late 1800s) were those policies to put Indigenous people on, typically, remote reserves.

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References Foran, Charles (2017) The Canada experiment: is this the world’s first “postnational” country? The Guardian, January 4. Moscovitch, Allan (2015) Welfare state. The Canadian Encyclopedia, https:// www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/welfare-state, accessed 2019-07-15. Segal, Hugh D. (2016) Finding a better way: A basic income pilot project for Ontario, https://files.ontario.ca/discussionpaper_nov3_english_final.pdf, accessed 2017-05-16. Tencer, Daniel (2016) Basic income coming to P.E.I.? Legislature passes motion unanimously. The Huffington Post Canada, 12 July.

CHAPTER 3

Welfare in the South: In 20 Years and Now

Abstract  This chapter contains the results of the interviews we conducted in Australia about the future of welfare state. We briefly describe the Australian welfare system and present, in descending order of frequency, the elements of welfare mentioned by the Australian respondents. Again, healthcare was mentioned most often, followed by income support and aged care (as care for elderly is called in Australia). The chapter ends by comparing Australian and Canadian responses: While the main issues mentioned were similar, less attention was paid to education, and almost none to basic income. Keywords  Australia • activation-for-work • National Disability Insurance Scheme • healthcare • income support • aged care • housing • education • social problems

The Australian welfare state stands firmly in our consciousness as a symbol of common-sense benevolence, practical economics and consensus politics. (Watts 1980: 175)

Has it remained so 40 years later?

© The Author(s) 2021 R. Solli et al., Searching for New Welfare Models, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58228-9_3

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The Australian study was the second in this three-country, trans disciplinary research program. As in the Canadian study, the purpose was to collect information from a small set of Australian citizens on how Australia’s welfare state should look and actually will look 20 years from now, and to probe whether or not their answers would have been different ten years earlier. A total of 16 extensive interviews were conducted in Australia in November–December 2017. The interviewees were one woman and one man from the age groups: 20–30, 30–40, 40–50, 50–60, 60–70, and 70–80. Additionally, two municipal administrators and two municipal politicians representing opposite parties were interviewed.1 The questions asked in the interviews followed the pattern of those asked in the Canadian study: 1. If you could decide, how would the welfare state in Australia be organized 20 years from now? Please understand the term welfare literally: what should be done so that all or most Australian citizens fared well? What should be done, who should do it, and who should pay for it?2 2. I/We asked you how the welfare state should look 20 years from now. My/our next question is: How do you think the welfare state will actually look 20 years from now? 3. Had I/we asked you the same questions ten years ago, would you have given me/us the same answers?3 Each interview lasted 20–40 minutes and was subsequently transcribed. The names of the interviewees used in this text are fictitious and are inspired by popular baby names in Australia in 2017. Not all the interviewees wished to give their correct age, other than within the decade, and we accommodated their wish,4 and presented the interviewees in Canada and Sweden in the same way.

 The interviews were conducted by Rolf Solli, Peter Demediuk, and Brodie Lamont.  Also, in Australia, “welfare” is often understood as “dole”. 3  Again, in the case of the first age group (20–30), the question had to be modified by adding “if you thought about such things at the time”. 4  Here is one possible explanation, given in a context of an interview: “I think it is a bit unfortunate that people have to tell you how old they are (…) because there [are] a lot of people who are discriminating without meaning to” (Amelia, 50+). 1 2

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The Australian Welfare System in Brief Australia’s welfare system is a complex mix of services, payments, and government and non-government providers. The system is a lot like the Force in the Star Wars franchise; as suggested in the McLure Review of Social Welfare (DSS 2015), it is pervasive and powerful, and has a light side and a dark side. Government spending in Australia as a proportion of the GDP is relatively low; at 36 percent it rates 27th out of the advanced OECD countries. Social expenditure is the biggest among these expenses, however, as it comprises just under 20 percent of the GDP. Australia has kept the cost of its social support system below the costs of some other advanced OECD countries through robust, needs-based assessments of welfare recipients and a means-tested approach that makes exclusion for wealth attached to assets outside the family home (DSS 2015). With a population of around 24.6 million (compared to Canada’s 36.6 million), Australia has seen welfare spending increase by an average of 2.6 percent a year in recent times to over 137 billion AUD (84.4 billion EUR), with 68 percent going to cash payments such as age and disability pensions, 26 percent to welfare services, and 6 percent to unemployment benefits (AIHW 2015). In 2017, the 5.1 percent unemployment rate in Australia was below the OECD average of 8.1 percent, yet youth unemployment remained nearly three times higher than that for people over 25. Although Australia has the fourth highest median income in the OECD, poverty rates at 13 percent are slightly higher than the OECD average of 11 percent. However, welfare benefits are relatively effective at lifting people above the poverty line (OECD 2016). Government in Australia consists of three levels: federal, state or territory, and local. The Federal Government is the main revenue raiser through taxation and is the direct funder and administrator of major welfare tranches. These are aged pensions, unemployment benefits, disability support (such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme, NDIS), and the Medicare universal healthcare payment system, which offers free public hospital care and subsidized or no-cost local doctor care to all. The Federal Government largely funds the hospital, aged care, public housing, and education systems, but passes responsibility for the design and running of these to the state (or territory) governments. Unlike in Sweden, local governments in Australia have a relatively restricted role often

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referred to as “roads, rates, & rubbish”. The fact that individual state governments act as a postbox for federal welfare-related money and have significant autonomy in deciding how this money is applied, means that the way welfare is produced can depend on where one lives. For example, on the health front: Safe (supervised) injecting rooms for drug users are only available in two of the seven states and territories, assisted dying (euthanasia) is legal and is supported in only one state (Victoria), and abortion is essentially illegal in the largest state (New South Wales). Similarly, the supply of public housing and the criteria to qualify for access to same varies markedly across Australia. The McLure Review (DSS 2015) cautions that substantial demands for increases in social expenditure can be expected in the future as the population ages and lives longer—particularly in relation to the provision of health services, age-related income support payments, and aged care. Indeed, the aging of the population is a main trend in the context of Australia’s welfare, with 3.5 million (or 15 percent of the population) aged over 65 in 2014, compared to an estimated 8.4 million (or 21 percent of the population) in 2054. Although the proportion of people with a disability has held steady, it is very significant at around one in five, or 20 percent of the population (AIHW 2015). The ability of governments to fund such demands faces obstacles because of an uncertain world economic outlook and fluctuating tax revenues flowing from the highly volatile commodity sector, where prices are at the mercy of many factors, including trade tensions with China and Brexit uncertainties. These cost and revenue challenges mean there are huge long-term pressures that require continual action to ensure that the social welfare system is well targeted, fiscally sustainable, and provides value for money. One view put forward in the McLure Review (DSS 2015), and echoed in the Federal Budget of 2017 (DSS 2017), is that there is an urgent need for reform to social welfare as changes to the system over time have led to unintended complexities, inconsistencies, and incoherencies. Certain changes have made the system more wasteful and costly to administer than it ought to be, and have created disincentives for some people to work. Complexity abounds, as there are currently around 75 income support and supplementary payment types, resulting in a system that is difficult for recipients to understand and navigate—especially for those with mental health or other debilitating conditions—and difficult for public officials to administer. Existing financial-means testing arrangements, based on income or assets, add to this complexity and result in a system that is

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confusing for income support recipients. This complexity leaves recipients unsure about the potential rewards from work and, as such, demotivates them and undermines community confidence in the fairness and utility of the social welfare system. The Australian welfare system is a product of changing political priorities and ad hoc policy responses, and as a result has become a patchwork of policies and procedures that lacks coherence and is inequitable. To quote an example of this hotchpotch: Those seeking work may fall into one of three income support schemes, each of which is governed by different payment amounts, and differing indexation or qualification measures. As a consequence, people with similar basic living costs and similar capacities to work may receive very different levels of financial support and have different participation requirements. As of 2017, when the interviews were conducted, the government’s view was that the system is out of step with community expectations and labor market realities, and that long-term income support dependence ought to be reduced through intervention strategies that support and transition people who are able bodied to work and become self-reliant. It has been argued that a new and less complex social support system is needed to improve employment and social outcomes, and a variety of mechanisms are being introduced that range from raising the retirement age, to introducing a new, more coherent (but controversial) set of mutual obligation requirements for job seekers (such as cumulative demerit-­ point-­based penalties for not applying for jobs or failing random drug tests), and for parents who receive working age income support. Also, a cashless debit card has been introduced for payments to welfare recipients deemed to be vulnerable or at risk, which limits what items they can purchase to “desirable” things such as rent, food, health and the like. While the government has moderated its explicit rhetoric of supporting “lifters” (those purportedly adding value to society) but discouraging “leaners” (those purportedly being propped up by society), it has continued to pursue a number of arguably draconian or stigmatizing proposals for welfare recipients—despite past “failures to launch” caused by a lack of political capital. Such proposals included raising the age at which one can receive unemployment benefits, creating a waiting period before unemployed young people can receive benefits, and widening the categories subjected to mandatory drug testing and payment via restricted debit cards. In Australia, there is a significant preoccupation with the concept of “activation for work” in social welfare policy and its instruments (Whiteford

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2016). The objective of an activation policy is to increase the work-search efforts of working-age people who are receiving social security payments. The rationale is based on the idea that unemployment is primarily an issue of deficient labor supply, rather than insufficient demand, thus, the greater a person’s efforts in actually seeking work, the greater the likelihood of finding employment. Specific tactics of activation via the social welfare system include strict requirements for people on unemployment payments to look for work actively (as measured by job applications submitted per fortnight), penalties for failing to satisfy the “work test”, and a “work-for-­ the-dole scheme” according to which some people receiving unemployment payments are required to work 15 hours a week to remain eligible for benefits. An emblematic innovation in the welfare system was the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which represents the new way of providing support for Australians with disability, for their families, and for others hired or volunteering to provide care. The NDIS is expected to provide about 460,000 Australians, who are under the age of 65 and have a permanent and significant disability, with the reasonable and necessary support they need to live an ordinary life. The NDIS takes a lifetime approach, investing early in people with disability to improve their outcomes later in life, and is designed to give people peace of mind that if their child or loved one is born with or acquires a permanent and significant disability, they will get the support they need—including programs to build skills and capability so the disabled can participate in the community and employment. The NDIS has been designed to help people with disabilities gain access to mainstream services and supports (like physicians or teachers), through the health and education systems, as well as to access public housing and the justice and aged-care systems. It should also facilitate access to community services and supports, such as sports clubs, community groups, libraries, or charities. The NDIS has been also charged with facilitating the maintenance of informal support arrangements, like help people get from their family and friends. This is the type of support that people don’t pay for, but which is usually part of most people’s lives. The NDIS is designed so that people with disabilities receive reasonable funded supports that are related to their disability and are necessary for them to live an ordinary life and achieve their goals. Unlike other welfare supports, assistance from the NDIS is not subject to financial-means testing, based on income or assets, and has no impact

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on income supports, such as the Disability Support Pension and Carer Allowance. The ideal is that people with disabilities can choose the supports that suit them. The NDIS is being rolled out progressively, and interest groups, such as Every Australian Counts, have been established to pressure politicians and administrators to make sure the initiative is fully funded, delivered as promised, and is the best it can be. In 2017, the government proposed to fund the program—which the Productivity Commission has concluded would cover over 400,000 Australians at an annual cost of about 22 billion AUD—via an additional tax on income earners (Sloan 2017). People volunteering their time and expertise can help alleviate social welfare issues and government dependencies. Australians have a tradition of volunteering in many areas of community life such as education, sport, safety and emergency services, and welfare services—as exemplified by in excess of six million people doing some voluntary work for the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare each year (AIHW 2015). In addition, informal carers of people with disabilities or the aged could reduce the load on government welfare payments and services. In 2012, about 2.7 million Australians were informal carers, providing help, support or supervision to family members, friends, or neighbors with a range of physical and mental health conditions and disabilities. Informal care can include personal care (such as showering and support with eating), in-home supervision, transport, and help with shopping and medical needs. Most carers (71 percent) lived with the person receiving care. The person responsible for the majority of informal caring is called the primary carer, and nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of primary carers found it hard to meet everyday living costs because of their caring role (AIHW 2015). “Teething problems” are to be expected in the roll-out of any major welfare reform (Palmer 2017), but early experiences of recipients indicate that as benefits are tied to the acceptance by the government of an approved plan submitted for each individual,5 it is the ability of the client or their agents to shape and drive that plan that determines welfare outcomes. Additionally, the plan hinges on things like varying levels of comprehension, education, articulateness, and insistence and persistence of recipients and their supporters.

5  A plan detailing needs such as carer or cleaner hiring, mobility devices, or installation of infrastructure to keep one at home.

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Especially reliant on government payments is Australia’s Indigenous population. For 50 percent of this segment of the population aged 18–64, government payments are the main source of income, versus 16 percent for non-Indigenous Australians (AIHW 2015). Indigenous Australians are the least well-off sub-population in terms of health status and life expectancy. Although some statistics continue to improve slowly, there is wide acknowledgment that the rate of improvement must accelerate—but the political rhetoric has typically and historically not been matched by action and outcomes (Russell 2016). For example, in the introduction to the Prime Minister’s 2016 report on Closing the Gap on Indigenous disadvantage, the then incoming Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull stated “[b]ut it is not until Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have the same opportunities for health, education, and employment that we can truly say we are a country of equal opportunity”.6 Yet, in contrast to such grand words, the following federal budget did not list Indigenous disadvantage as a priority issue (Russell 2016). Indeed, the 2017 Closing the Gap Report acknowledged that improvements have not met the majority of the outcomes set by the Council of Australian Governments.7 For both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, a lack of affordable housing—either through rental or ownership—is an ever-increasing impediment to social welfare. This problem is exacerbated by high levels of migration, purchases of property by foreign absentee landlords, and limited expenditure on public housing by state governments. Two surveys of affordability and housing (Troy and Martin 2017), give a dire picture for low-income households wanting to rent a house in capital cities and in many regional areas. When low-income households have to over-spend on housing, they are under “housing stress”, whereby they start to go without or reduce other necessities that are good for the body and soul—such as meals, health care, and outings. Housing stress is increasingly impacting on moderate income earners as well. Low-income families priced out of capital cities and major regional centers may find more affordable housing in more isolated areas where homes might be affordable, but that is not where the jobs and better education, health, and other support services are located. 6  https://www.niaa.gov.au/sites/default/files/reports/closing-the-gap-2016/introduction.html, accessed 2019-11-05. 7  https://www.niaa.gov.au/sites/default/files/reports/closing-the-gap-2017/index. html, accessed 2019-11-05.

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In Star Wars Yoda opined “Do or do not”, indicating that if one is not fully committed one will fail. While a good number of previous Prime Ministers and Treasurers have been rather explicit in stating their view that too many people have been “bouncing on the welfare safety net for too long”, perhaps one reason that governments in Australia have had a patchy record in efficiently and effectively refreshing the welfare system is that many of the official reviews undertaken have been vague and are not strategically formulated. As a consequence, there have only been a few occasions where reviews have been followed by comprehensive welfare reforms. Most of the changes to welfare programs have occurred on an incremental and ad-hoc basis, a situation that has magnified complexity and inconsistencies in the system (Regan 2014). Yoda would not be pleased.

Elements of Welfare What was understood as welfare by the Australian interviewees? In what follows, we present them in order of frequency of mention—from the most often to the least often mentioned element of welfare. Healthcare (10 Persons) Most interviewees mentioned healthcare, and some even opted for free medical care and free dental care in the future. Five persons mentioned Medicare, one of them suggesting that its growing costs should be covered by higher taxes for the rich (a solution mentioned many a time in various contexts). We know that Australia is one of the best supporters of the public health system in the world, and yet there’s such an issue these days with the private health insurances. It seems to me that if you are completely reliant on the public purse, in many ways you are better off than someone that is subsidizing on their own the healthcare. (Ava, 40+)

Six persons were convinced that what is truly important is prevention, rather than building new big hospitals: It is easy to measure buildings, but you cannot measure how many people are not going to go into the buildings, because you are giving them the tools to be able to not go into those buildings. And we all know that

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­ reventative measures are better… you know, “a stich in time saves nine”. p (Chloe, 50+)

This means teaching people how to live a healthy life, and addressing communities rather than individuals, for example, teaching health literacy to immigrants (Lucas, 40+). Ella (70+) emphasized the need of teaching young people how to live healthy lives. According to Chloe (50+), there is a need for local educational programs “outside the square, like the Healthy Together Council program has been”. That requires long-term thinking from the politicians (Isla, 30+). Another problem that needs tackling is mental health and disabilities, especially of Indigenous people. Now the costs are much too high. Two issues that were mentioned equally often were income support and aged care. Income Support (8 Persons) Mia (60+) counted “food on the table and clean clothes to wear” as one of the three basic needs. Federal government should stand for it, but donations and volunteers can help. Amelia (50+) thought that the unemployed should commit to “re-learning stuff if they need to”, or doing volunteer work, or “whatever it takes to get them into the workforce”. In contrast, mothers with young children (in spite of the equality demands) should have a better opportunity to stay at home or work part-time for longer periods. Three persons thought that more systemic solutions are needed. “Safety net for those people who fall between the cracks”, as the majority is well-­ off (Jack, 50+). A fair and equitable tax system would help: “If people see that there’s a fair and equitable tax system, they may well want to pay more” (Jack, 50+). Ella (70+) was of the same opinion and explained it further: …the question that crops up from time to time now is the unfairness of multinationals not paying tax in Australia where they make their money, and then they repatriate it to another country (…) to the Virgin Islands or wherever else, and they pay zero tax in the country where they are resident.

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Henry (60+) pointed out the importance of fair wages, but it was only Olivier (20+) who thought that, in the face of aging population and automation, a universal minimum income will be needed. “Persons who fall between the cracks” and “multinationals not paying tax in Australia” were topics that returned. Aged Care (8 Persons) When William (40+) said that “Aged care is one of the biggest growing industries here in Australia”, he probably meant it both literally and metaphorically. Aging and automation, in his view, makes it cheaper to keep people at home, and provide them with services, which will also create more employment. At present, aged care facilities are too expensive— ”right now, half a million dollars for one parent”. The issues mentioned were at least several: adequate pensions, aged care facilities, and services at home. As Jack (50+) pointed out, “aged care” must be understood both financially and medically. At present, though, only New Zealand can afford a “blanket pension”. In Australia, the government pension should be “a safety net for the minority of people, not for the majority”. In fact, the Australian government “is slowly trying to educate those within the workforce to provide for their own retirement”. This is the superannuation system,8 recommended also by Isla (30+). The government should see to it that people retire with “dignity, providing a level of support that gives old people dignity, and subsistence, or something better than subsistence” (Noah, 50+). To be able to realize it, the government should save, and encourage people to save as well. But the politicians act in a very short-term way, and these are very long-term, but easily predictable problems. One must get rid of old and ridiculous solutions like “family trust”9 and “negative gearing”10 that favor wealthier citizens. What is needed is a fight against polarization of society, and an 8  Superannuation in Australia are the arrangements put in place by the government to encourage people to accumulate funds to provide them with an income when they retire. It is partly compulsory, and is further encouraged by tax benefits. 9  An entity established by a family member for the benefit of members of the family group where assets are held by the trust and income derived can be directed to particular individuals who are subject to the lowest tax rates—thus minimizing total tax payable. 10  A policy whereby losses from owning and renting out an investment property (usually driven by investment loan interest) can be deducted from other income to reduce tax payable.

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opposition to the capitalist model based on growth. All this requires a change in the political system to the one favoring long-term thinking. As to aged care facilities, or “geriatric communities” (Olivier, 20+), the nursing services and hospices should be better financed by higher corporate taxes. Special attention should be paid to the needs of Indigenous people (Zoe, 30+). The Home and Community Care Program assumes that people above 65 stay at home, and uses My Aged Care system to assess who would need special care. Then there is NDIS and so on, but, according to Chloe (50+), this should be done by a single agency situated at local council, “who can make sure that a person doesn’t fall through the cracks. Because [they] are at the coalface”: “So in twenty years’ time, there should be a service that has continued to be delivered by councils, funded, obviously, from the federal government”. At present, according to William (40+): …half a nation is pretty much looking [after] their parents. People take time off work, so there’s productivity loss there (…) A lot of people are taking enormous amount of time off just to look after their elderly parents, because they’re all living longer.

Chloe (50+) thought that community activities and robots at home might help. Affordable Housing (6 Persons) As to accommodation needs, or, as Mia (60+) who considered it one of the three basic needs, put it, “roof over their heads”, there are several dimensions. One is shelters for the homeless, as homelessness is a major cause of mental illnesses (Zoe, 30+). According to Ava (40+), homelessness has now spread among younger people and women—with even women and their young children living in cars. There are already food vans and mobile showers and laundries, but it needs to be more clearly and robustly established who requires support and how to connect them with it. That should be done by “a private enterprise that is audited by some sort of regulated authority”. Henry (60+) had a more drastic solution: higher taxes for the wealthy, all around the world:

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I think one country acting alone just shoots themselves in the foot, because the companies would just go. (…) and that’s really what’s already happening, the companies gravitating to where there’s favorable tax treatment at the moment.

And then there is the issue of affordable housing: …you have to be able to afford your basics like water and heating and so on. I think it was a stupid idea to change it so that the basic necessities like electricity and heat and gas and water became market systems, and even telephones, like, telephones are a basic necessity. (Ava, 40+)

The costs of housing changes depending on place. Henry (60+) noticed that, as housing is cheaper outside big cities, one should “make the regional places more attractive to the people and actually proactively engage in getting them to go, in the way they have with the refugees, which has been quite successful”. The previous public housing can be changed into incentives for private developers: You should be able to go to the government and say “I have land in prima [good location] area that would suit young families, perhaps people that aren’t going to be able to afford much. Can you agree to give me some sort of financial support so that I can build something appropriate to create equality?” (Ava 40+)

Isla (30+) was of an opinion that affordable housing was not a matter for charities, but for the federal government to better fund public housing. Education (5 Persons) Free access to education, especially for children, was one of the three basic needs Mia (60+) mentioned. Free schools for all, according to Amelia (50+). The contents of early education were important to James (70+) and Ella (70+), both of whom thought that children should be taught how to live a healthy life. According to Isla (30+), more schools are needed in certain regions, and there is need for a transparent quality model to decide funding.

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Social Problems (5 Persons) In addition, five interviewees (all women) mentioned social problems. Criminality and drug abuse should be dealt with through rehabilitation rather than enforcement (Charlotte, 20+). Isla (30+) emphasized the need to establish reasons for criminal behavior. Two pleaded for focus on domestic violence, establishing female-centered services, with special attention to women immigrants (Zoe, 30+) and child support (Ava, 40+). Better child protection and safety standards are needed, as well as closing the gap of literacy and numeracy in Aboriginal children (Charlotte, 20+). Other Two persons suggested that providing help for the young who are early in their careers would be good (Jack, 50+; Ella, 70+). The same two interviewees spoke of better work opportunities for the immigrants. Isla (30+) was the only person who mentioned public transport and an energy system built on renewables.

The Future and the Past The Actual Future As to the Australian welfare in 2037—twenty years from the time interviews were conducted—two of the interviewees were optimistic, six pessimistic, and six had mixed predictions. The optimists were young. According to Olivier (20+), young people have a “social consciousness”, and will soon have power. In Zoe’s (30+) view, things will be better or unchanged. Private initiative will not move in, because it won’t be needed. Charities will continue their work, though, even as the government will take the major part of financial responsibility. The pessimists see Australia “going the way of America, with (…) an increasing number of the working poor” (Henry, 60+). William (40+) agreed, claiming that there will also be an erosion of medical care, which is already happening. No political party is brave enough to raise taxes on the rich, so middle class, which was the heart of Australia, will be declining, while the poor and the very rich will be expanding (Henry, 60+). Jack (50+) thought that “a lack of maturity across the electorate” prevents

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introducing higher taxes for consumption. According to Mia (60+), everything will be worse—increasing polarization and automation. “People are married to their phones and therefore are very unobservant of what goes on around them”. Six interviewees considered both negative and positive developments. Noah (50+) predicted a much tougher world, much polarization, and climate refugees. “I wouldn’t say it in front of my children, but it’s too late”. But the Millenials “may well effect change”. The idea of a tipping point (Gladwell 2000) returned. According to Charlotte (20+), it will get worse before it gets better—something dramatic must happen to provoke a public outrage. The NDIS will continue, and there will be more private funding. I think the progress doesn’t go a linear way, and so I feel there’s got to be some kind of a tipping point, where action on climate changes take stock, and fundamentally transforms us. But I’m still waiting for it, and we might have lost a lot before that happens. (Isla, 30+)

Some interviewees conditioned their predictions on changes that may happen or not: Chloe (50+) predicted that community health issues will get worse if appropriate measures are not taken, and there will be an increase in domestic violence if gambling is still permitted (at present, the government is earning money from taxes on poker machines and Australia has the world’s highest per capita saturation of gambling machines and the highest per head losses that are especially concentrated in poorer areas). Amelia (50+) said that “[u]nless we find more opportunities for the people who need to work, then you are going to have people poorer and poorer—and then you are going to end up with more crimes, because people will be tempted to steal, and then it becomes a violent society, and then everybody is unhappy”. One solution would be to allow and facilitate older people to work, without forcing them to work (although by 2023 the government will increase the age at which one can apply for the publicly-funded aged pension from 65 to 67). Another answer combines changes for the better with changes for the worse. Something will be done about homelessness and domestic violence, but the aged care will get worse. The future retirees are deep in debt, and count on selling their houses, but “there is an affordability crisis” (Ava, 40+). According to her, a death tax will be introduced: “Because, let’s face it, death isn’t really going out of business”.

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If you have a more optimistic, positive outlook and you can see huge growth, then maybe there needs to be welfare linked to profitability of organizations. (…) So, if you get the Apples and the Amazons of the world paying the appropriate company rate that… gives the government the ability to have money to go with where that money needs to flow. (Ava, 40+)

Ella (70+) predicted that the common pool will diminish, because the young will not want to work as much as the previous generation (“they want to live their life now”). As the resources will become thin, the systems will change. What is good for a mother and a baby will be an economic decision made by an accountant. There will be many vulnerable people, as many medical services will be too expensive for them. The quality of life will diminish; it is “a slippery slope”. Yet: … the optimistic part of me thinks that, well, every generation has its problems, and every generation works out their workarounds, do they not? And we have never been better educated, smarter… access to technology is incredible, so everything can speed up. (…) young people today have a very highly developed social conscience. A very heightened sort of awareness of lack of privilege, and lack of access to things, so they get out and do stuff. (Ella, 70+)

The Past Three persons claimed that they would have given the same answers ten years ago, one with different priorities (“more about the aged care, as I work in the superannuation sector and get older myself”, Ava, 40+), another with same attitude, but more attention paid to the disabled insurance scheme (“there seems to be more disabled children being born now than there used to be,” Amelia, 50+). But then Amelia admitted that some of her attitudes did change: I did not use to think that families really ought to get paid for having kids. However, it does cost a lot, having kids. But it is well worth while, in my opinion.

All the others said that their answers would be different. Age was the main explanation—understood either as becoming more mature (the younger persons), or more in need (the older):

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Zero comprehension then. (Olivier, 20+) Less understanding, more belief in government’s responsibility. (Charlotte, 20+) More naive, as I didn’t have much exposure to people who have fallen through the cracks of the welfare system, especially the Indigenous ones. (Zoe, 30+) I’ve probably shifted from the further on the right on the political spectrum toward the left. (…) Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have had the awareness of how people in this country are often forced to live, by circumstance. (Thomas, 30+) I was more optimistic then. With age one is more vulnerable… (William, 40+) More pessimistic. (Noah, 50+) New things to pay attention to, as I near retirement. (Jack, 50+) Only now I understood the issue of prevention. (Chloe, 50+) I‘m probably more conscious of these issues today than I was ten years ago. I was busy, still earning my own income. Welfare was not a particular issue. It is more an issue in some ways today because of the health side of it. I am beginning to rely more heavily on health services. (James, 70+) I am more aware of problems than I would have been ten years ago. And it is probably because of personal experience. (Ella, 70+)

Some interviewees pointed also out that the world had changed. William (40+) stressed the issue of automation, and of raising costs of medical care. Thirty years ago, even education was free in Australia, and now there are fees (but state loans as well). Mia (60+) claimed that the needs were not that acute or visible ten years earlier. Now poverty has become much more visible. Also, there was less technology then, and people were paying more attention to one another.

Comparisons with Canada Anecdotally, Canadians and Australians seem similar in certain ways—they “gel”(get on well), with both having somewhat of a reputation for being open, vocal, kind, and somewhat unruly. But differences appear when comparing perceptions of Australian and Canadian interviewees about welfare. In Australia education has a lower priority, whereas the care for the elderly has a higher one, and these concerns were expressed in an intense and palpable manner. Australia has one of the highest home ownership rates in the western world with relatively low emphasis on the rental

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market or public housing—yet, like the Canadian interviewees, Australian respondents identified a need to make housing more affordable. In Australia there is a general opinion that people should work and save for the future; only one person mentioned the idea of basic income.11 The costs and burden of the welfare should be shared by the government, charities, and people themselves. “People who have fallen between the cracks” were mentioned often, sometimes with the emphasis on the Indigenous people in that group. The view of the future was somewhat more pessimistic than in the Canadian responses (even as the latter were afraid of the developments in the USA). Young persons were more optimistic than older persons, and only women talked about social problems. The shortsightedness of the politicians has been mentioned, which partly explains why Watts (1980) statement quoted at the beginning of this chapter does not describe the present situation too well. It is perhaps appropriate to recall the quote from Beveridge cited by Watts (p. 175): “Social security is neither socialist nor capitalist. It is simply commonsense”.

References AIHW (2015) Australia’s welfare 2015. Australia’s welfare no. 12. Cat. no. AUS 189. Canberra: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Arthur, Don (2016) Basic income: a radical idea enters the mainstream. Research paper series 2016–2017, Canberra: Parliament of Australia, Department of Parliamentary Services. DSS (2015) A new system for better employment and social outcomes. Canberra: Australian Government, Department of Social Services. DSS (2017) Welfare reform. Federal budget 2017—Fact sheet. Canberra: Australian Government, Department of Social Services. Gladwell, Malcolm (2000) The tipping point. How little things can make a big difference. New York, NYC: Little, Brown. OECD (2016) Society at glance 2016: OECD social indicators. Paris: OECD Publishing. Palmer, Damien (2017) Let’s be honest, there’s more wrong with the NDIS than just “teething problems”. The Conversation, 25 October.

11  Yet some researchers were of an opinion that basic income, radical as it may seem, has already entered the mainstream (Arthur 2016). COVID-19 changed many opinions (see Chap. 5).

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Regan, Sue (2014) Australia’s welfare system: a review of reviews 1941–2013. Canberra: Crawford School of Public Policy. Russell, Stephen T. (2016) Social justice, research, and adolescence. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 26(1): 4–15. Sloan, Judith (2017) Budget 2017: facts point to looming fiasco as NDIS is rolled out. The Australian, May 11. Troy, Laurence and Martin, Chris (2017) Rental vulnerability: a new methodology for measuring and mapping disadvantage in rental housing. Presented at State of Australian Cities Conference 2017, Adelaide, 28–30 November. Watts, Rob (1980) The origins of the Australian welfare state. Australian Historical Studies, 19(75): 175–198. Whiteford, Peter (2016) Ideas for Australia: Welfare reform needs to be about improving well-being, not punishing the poor. The Conversation, April 21.

CHAPTER 4

The Future Welfare in Sweden

Abstract  In this chapter, we analyze the results from interviews with Swedish citizens. We begin by presenting some characteristics of the Swedish welfare system and present the list of the welfare elements in the order of diminishing frequency of mention. The list begins with the care for the elderly, continues with healthcare and education. Several Swedish respondents have had suggestions as to how a global welfare system could look like. The chapter ends with comparisons of the answers given by respondents in all the three countries. Keywords  Sweden • “The people’s home” • care for the elderly • healthcare • education • transport • housing

Basically, I think the Swedes are quite fond of their welfare and would like to maintain it in any ways that would be needed. (William, 50+)

In this chapter, we analyze the results from interviews with Swedish citizens,1 and perhaps the quote at the start of this chapter explains the fact that many interviewees were speaking about the future of the welfare state 1

 The interviews were conducted by Nomie Eriksson, Rolf Solli, and Barbara Czarniawska.

© The Author(s) 2021 R. Solli et al., Searching for New Welfare Models, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58228-9_4

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in general terms rather than delving into particular solutions. The fact that so many aspects of the organization of the welfare system in Sweden seemed to be taken for granted, and that the answers were very short, was the reason that we conducted more interviews in Sweden than in Canada and Australia. As for other the other two countries, we gave the interviewees fictive names; our naming was taken from the list of the most popular first names in Sweden 2018. Taught by the previous experience, we also reveal only the decade to which the interviewees belong. Still, the two local politicians interviewed did not consider their age relevant at all.

Some Characteristics of the Swedish Welfare System What counts for the welfare sector in Sweden is extensive, at least in terms of what is being organized in the public sector. This usually includes health care, elderly care, schooling, and the general insurance system that regulates compensation when people are ill, get children, and retire. Welfare’s History in Sweden Perhaps the most helpful way of describing how the welfare sector in Sweden looks today is to start from its history. After all, welfare is nothing new in Sweden, as evidenced by Astrid Lindgren’s books for children, which describe the situation of the poor and the elderly as it was 150 years ago. Emil of Lönneberga imprisoned the evil woman who ruled the poorhouse in a wolf’s pit, and invited the poor to the Christmas table intended for the visiting relatives when his parents were away. Pippi Longstocking is even more famous than Emil, and she also was involved in welfare deeds. Miss Prysselius, called by Pippi “Prussiluskan”, could be seen as an early version of a misguided social worker that represents society’s wrong attempts at care. She tries to put Pippi in the orphanage, but Pippi, who is strong and rich, prevents this outcome. As an adult, Emil of Lönneberga became the chairman of the local council. Most likely it was about the same time that Alva and Jan Myrdal published their book Crisis in the Population Question (1934). The famous authors claimed that too few children were being born. They argued that, in order to raise the birth rate, a child support system was needed, together with better maternity care, housing policies, and many other related supports. Many of these improvements had been completed by the late 1930s, and were supported by all of Sweden’s political parties. A little earlier, Per

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Albin Hansson, the leader of the Social Democratic party, launched the concept of “the people’s home” (folkhemmet), which meant a home for all the people, characterized by consensus and equality. Care for children is a telling example of how the Swedish welfare system developed. In 1937, a needs-based child allowance system was introduced and, by 1948, it was made universal. In that year, the allowance was nearly SEK 5000 (in 2019 prices) annually per child; now it is SEK 15,000 (about 1500 EUR) annually per child. There is also a special supplement for families with two or more children. In 1931, a so-called maternity insurance was introduced, which from 1955 on was regarded as compensation for loss of income. Today, this insurance is called “parental benefit” and it means that parents have the right to receive an income-related contribution corresponding to a maximum of SEK 22,000 (about 2200 EUR) per month for 390 days. Furthermore, the parents have the right to another grant corresponding to SEK 180 (18 EUR) per day for 90 days. A parent also has the right to be at home with a sick child and receive compensation until the child reaches the age of 12. A supplement to parental benefit is daycare, which the municipalities are obliged to arrange from the day the child is 18 months old. The parents have to pay a fee to the daycare center corresponding to a maximum of SEK 1425 kronor (142.5 EUR) per child per month, a fee that is reduced by the number of children. Health care and dental care are free for children up to 24 years of age. Education is also free of charge—from six years of age when the school begins up to the doctoral degree. Children are guaranteed a place for education of any kind up to and including 18 years of age. For people in the age range of 18 years to retirement age (currently 68 years of age), welfare means subsidized healthcare and health insurance. Health insurance is a complex package that gives income-related compensation for up to one year to the person who is ill. Afterwards, the compensation is decreased. At present, Swedes can take their retirement pension at 62 and have the right to work until 68 (it will be 69 in 2023), but they can work longer if the employer agrees. They receive a public pension, and an occupational pension, both based on previous income. The rule of thumb, with many exceptions, is that the pension corresponds to 50 percent of the average wage or salary received in the last five years of work. In the cases where public pension is low, there is also a so-called housing allowance.

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The insurance system and the pension system were, in principle, always organized by the state. In contrast to Canada and Australia, in Sweden it is municipalities and county councils that organize most welfare components. The total costs of Swedish welfare reached SEK 1551.4 billion in 2016, which corresponds to about SEK 155,000 (15,500 EUR) per person. The public sector’s share of GDP has declined steadily since the 1990s: in 1995 it was 63.5 percent, whereas in 2019 it is 49.4 percent. Yet the share of GDP dedicated to welfare during this period remained constant at 33.9 percent.2 In this context, it is important to point out that almost 60 percent of the public sector’s income comes from direct or indirect taxes on wages and salaries. Therefore, the municipalities’ welfare is almost entirely financed via income tax in Sweden. Production and Consumption A significant part of the tax revenue collected by municipalities and county councils is used to hire staff. This is one of the reasons that the details of production and consumption are interesting in this context, as both are strongly linked to demographic developments. For example, it is expected that the population of Sweden will increase by almost 20 percent between 2019 and 2045, from just over 10 to about 12 million.3 As mentioned above, the consumption of welfare is strongly linked to age. Young people aged 0 to 19 are largest group that uses welfare services, followed by persons over 80 years of age. Statistics Sweden calculated that the young group will increase by about 10 percent between 2018 and 2045, whereas the 80+ will increase by 100 percent during this period—from about 500,000 to 1 million. In the same period, the group of professionals will increase by just over 15 percent.4 It is easy to imagine problems that lie ahead, and that changes in the structure of Swedish population will demand extra resources of various kinds. What is needed is more money, buildings and other facilities, and much more qualified staff.

2  https://www.ekonomifakta.se/fakta/offentlig-ekonomi/offentlig-sektor/offentligasektorns-utgifter/, accessed 2019-05-21. 3  Statistics Sweden, The future population of Sweden 2018–2070. Demographic reports 2018:1. 4  https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/artiklar/2016/Stora-insatser-kravs-for-att-klara-40talisternas-aldreomsorg/, accessed 2019-05-21.

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Before 2025, more than 600 new preschools (as daycare centers are now called) and 300 new grade schools will be needed, according to the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR 2018a). It means that about 100 school-related buildings must be constructed per year—not impossible, but not easy. As for special housing for the elderly and people who need special support, they will need 32,000 places/apartments before 2026. Already in 2018, 116 of the country’s 290 municipalities stated that they had a place deficit. Four out of ten municipalities in the housing market survey conducted by the National Board of Housing, Building, and Planning (Boverket 2018), reported that they will not be able to meet the need for special housing places for the elderly within two to five years. In terms of finances, in 2010 SALAR conducted an analysis that concluded that municipal taxes will have to be increased by 13 tax crowns (i.e., 13 percentage points) on almost all private income (SALAR 2010). As it will likely be difficult to raise the taxes, many other options must be tried in order to increase resources. As for the need of personnel, SALAR (2018b) has done a thorough analysis of those needs projecting ahead to 2025. A Statistics Sweden forecast from 2016 predicted a deficit of 160, 000 health and elderly care-­ educated persons in 2035. Solli and Wolmesjö (2019) extended this analysis to 2045, fully aware that the predictions are based on a somewhat unrealistic assumption that welfare services remain as they are now, for example, that an average 87-year old person will “consume” as much welfare in 2045 as in 2016. Yet those calculations can be used to make a gross estimate of how much labor will be needed to drive the welfare services of the future. No personnel group is shown to decrease over time, neither until 2026 nor 2045. Most nursing staff categories in municipalities will have to increase by more than 70 percent. Also, a large increase will be needed in numbers of care assistants (69 percent) and personal assistants (70 percent). Lesser increases in daycare providers (16 percent) and engineers in municipalities (20 percent) will be needed. When Solli and Wolmesjö (2019) finally calculated the recruitment needs, two additional variables had to be included: the demographic change and the retirement age. The authors did not include the usual staff turnover due to the change of employer, because it evens out in a national perspective. The results show that, with the above assumptions, there will be a need to recruit between 40,000 and 50,000 persons annually. Is that too many

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or too few? One way to answer this question is to set this number in relation to a given age group. Assume that everyone who is going to work in welfare is recruited from the cohort of 20–21-year old: About 40 percent of them would be needed for production of welfare. But this calculus is not realistic, because it assumes that the demand for welfare remains constant. Let’s assume instead that the demand will be increasing by 0.5 percent every year; in such a case, the need for staff in 2045 increases from the previously calculated 1,585,000 to 2,223,000, and the annual recruitment increases to 72,000 persons, which corresponds to 60 percent of all people in Sweden who will be in their twenties. Historically, however, the demand was growing at 1.0 percent per year (SALAR 2010). Answering such a demand would require 2,861,000 employees engaged in producing welfare in 2045, which translates into 94,000 persons recruited each year and represents 78 percent of every 20-year-old cohort. And the number of managers would have to increase by 4700 every year! The above calculations must not be taken literally—they are meant to illustrate interesting effects of a linear development. The conclusion is that it is impossible to produce welfare in 2045 in the way the Swedes did it in 2016. Something must be done, and the question is, what? So, we asked our respondents… The first category of answers existed only here, so we present it separately. The rest of answers are presented in order of frequency of mention, as before.

Global Solutions (10 Persons) The picture that we have had, and which I still think is quite alive, with both young and old, that we have a welfare state, though we do not really know how it has arisen and what it means but that it is tax-financed and that it may mean we have to raise taxes … (Alice, 60+)

In the next section we present wishes for the future welfare system and predictions of the actual future, separately for each element of welfare. First, however, we present some general solutions, which were suggested to resolve not only all welfare issues in Sweden but also in Europe, or even for the entire world. Thus Oscar (70+) proposed that United Nations should take over the responsibility for welfare in all the countries of the world. Maja (50+) thought that welfare, such as care for the elderly, childcare, and even correctional treatment, should be secured across national

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borders, so that the Swedish retirees living in Spain could use Spanish welfare services. Lilly (20+) admitted she still believed in communism, and wished that the present individualist and egoistic perspective changed to “a more collectivist viewpoint”. She did not believe, however, that such a change could happen within 20 years—it will take a century, according to her prediction. Some respondents simply hoped that some effective system would be found or invented (e.g., Liam, 40+). Lucas (20+) was prepared for the fact that, in the future, there could be either more or less privatization of the welfare organizations, but in his opinion, the most important issue was to improve working conditions for those employed in the welfare services sector: Their salaries and their psychological wellbeing were the most important factors for the functioning of welfare. Lucas also emphasized the importance of long-horizon goals, which must prevail over political changes. William (50+) saw welfare comprised of education, healthcare, social care, the justice system, and infrastructure, and was of the opinion that a hybrid organization of welfare was inevitable, with public, private, and voluntary organizations involved. In such a situation, the most important element that could guarantee the functioning of the whole system was trust among all the participants. Such trust, however, could not be achieved by various performance measures and control systems, which only create unnecessary costs. Oliver (40+) wished to return to the1980s, when “people felt truly secure”, and wanted to eliminate all welfare activities that are run for profit. So did Alice (60+): When people are forced to think about it, and analyze the situation, she hoped they agree that taxes must be raised to save the welfare state. Alexander (70+) believed that money for welfare can—and should— come from a variety of sources: personal taxes, company taxes, and (why not) state debt, which at present is very low.

Welfare in 20 Years as Designed by the Respondents Care for the Elderly (20 Persons) In accordance with the official predictions, most respondents, when looking 20 years forward, mentioned demographic changes in the population,

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giving care for the elderly the highest priority. Some respondents agreed with the suggestion of the ex-prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, who claimed that people should work until 75—as this will diminish the number of people in need of help and will increase the number of helpers (Elias, 30+; Hugo, 60+). One of the most popular suggestions concerned collective living, or its weaker version, “secure housing” (where there is no collective, but where elderly persons live in the same building, which offers some joint activities, secures contact with healthcare agents, makes access easy, etc.). Those who opted for collective living saw it mostly as a countermeasure against loneliness (Ella, politician; Hugo, 60+) Maja (50+) wished for the emergence of “hybrid professions”, in which the same person would be competent enough to take care of the elderly, help a handicapped person, and act in an emergency situation (accidents, fires, etc.). It is important that the elderly can choose (Wilma, 70+). Those truly ill must naturally be in an extended care facility, but others should be able to choose between home care and collective living. Healthcare (18 Persons) An ideal scenario is a primary health center that knows you as a patient, and can take care of you (Hugo, 60+). Add to this well-functioning emergency centers—after all, it must not be the family members that take care of people who are ill, as it often is now. In general, people working in healthcare, for example nurses, must be paid properly for what they do (Alexander, 70+). Also, general medicine practitioners must be better paid and more appreciated (Wilma, 70+). Wilma pointed also out that, at present, persons in managerial positions are split in their responsibilities: Should they represent their units to politicians and journalists, or should they manage the activity? These two responsibilities must be separated. Healthcare is very important and must function well, but prioritizing is necessary: Should the taxpayers pay for an artificial vagina (“I do not think having children is a human right”)? Should tattoo removal be a part of welfare services? Ebba, 60+ suggested that the annual health checks should include checks of psychic health because psychological problems were becoming more common due to commonly experienced stress.

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Education (12 Persons) Olivia (20+) would like to see schools that have levelled social class and other background differences. Astrid (30+) wished to see many more teachers, who will be able to answer the variety of children’s needs, and she wanted smaller groups in pre-schools, and smaller classes at school. Alma (70+) opted for middle sized classes, competent teachers, and pupils mixed in terms of ethnicity and social class. Elsa (40+) recommended more challenges for talented children in schools (probably a reflection of the current discussion of the topic in the media). Education concerned not only children, but also others, for example, immigrants: Ella (politician) wished to see teaching of home languages at a distance (via Internet), which can raise the quality of teaching (it is unlikely that there are many competent teachers in the countryside). As for more general skills, the same respondent pointed out that immigrants are cheaper to teach than Swedish children, as they typically have a good educational background when they arrive in Sweden. Alexander (70+) would send immigrants to work as soon as possible, as it is at work where they learn language the quickest and the best. Infrastructure (Transport and Housing) (5 Persons) Housing construction, especially in the already existing cities, must include new, innovative solutions, not the least in terms of public transportation (Olivia, 20+). For that to occur, a much better planning process is needed, in which an expert group could participate, perhaps by offering and evaluating several scenarios (Noah, 50+). Future construction of houses must be done in a way that avoids and prevents ghettoization: Immigrants must live among Swedes (Alexander, 70+). In general, good physical planning can prevent segregation. Create workplaces in residential areas. Of course, this creates some complications—social workers may not want to meet their clients in the grocery shop. Nevertheless, something must be done to achieve better integration and mixing of people in the residential areas. (Wilma, 70+)

Also, Wilma added, public transportation must work properly.

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Among persons who mentioned infrastructure, Adam (60+) was focused on extreme technical solutions. His favorite was magnetic levitation (can be used e.g., in trains), but also “hi-tech toilets”, and his worry was that Sweden is behind in those new trends. To support his reasoning, he evoked Facit’s (a Swedish typewriter producer) failure to understand the importance of computers, and Hasselblad’s (a Swedish camera producer) problems with adapting to digital photography. In his opinion, the Swedish public sector has even more serious problems catching up with new technologies. The Swedes are living in a “retro society”. Other (Police, Emergency Services) (2 Persons) The police force is very important for security and must be manned properly (Alexander, 70+). Wilma (70+) believed that “It is better if people feel secure by themselves, rather than being guarded by the police”, but she wasn’t sure how to achieve that.

Predictions of the Future Optimists Technology (robots, but even technology that does not exist yet) will help to solve problems with elderly care, and will help to improve logistics in the healthcare system (Walter, politician). The same person introduced the term “basic welfare”, that will be financed by public resources. Several persons believed that improvements in healthcare and care for the elderly would occur due to robotization. Thanks to robots and e-health, elderly will be able to stay home as long as they wished (Astrid, 30+). Other persons thought that healthcare and care for the elderly will be better, because the public resources will not be enough for everybody, so that those who can afford it will use private sector services, freeing the resources for those who cannot (Elias, 30+). Many hoped that the third sector (voluntary organizations) would take over some of the responsibilities for society’s welfare, which could take various forms. Ella (politician) assumed that retired people would be helping one another more, as they are in better health than old people used to be. Such activities will counteract loneliness and save resources.

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Pessimists A shared pessimist conviction was that “there will be more and more private solutions” (Liam, 40+). This would inevitably mean more polarization and differences between “those who can buy the services and those who will have to rely on their families and relatives”. Such predictions frightened some of the respondents (Saga, 50+). At any rate, the state, the regions, and the municipalities will be forced to cut out some of their welfare services (Elsa, 40+). In Elsa’s opinion, this service reduction will occur as a result of the general “marketization” of public services. A truly negative prediction was that everything would become much worse: People will need extra insurance; they will become lonelier, more exposed to danger, and more ill. “Gated communities” will be built (Oliver. 40+). In the best of cases, claimed another pessimist (Hugo, 60+), healthcare and care for the elderly will function as badly as now; in the worst of cases, they will both collapse. Home care will certainly collapse, so the older people should start planning for their future housing. Robotization will deprive people of jobs, and employers will be unsuccessful in finding workers, as the Labor Office does not function well now, and will not function well in the future (Noah, 50+). Astrid (30+) believed that schools will be worse, as there is not enough investment in the teachers. Also, at present, there are too many conflicts between teachers and troublesome pupils, where the parents take the side of their children in disputes. This may mean that the future generation will not want to send their children to school at all… (Wilma, 70+) There can be war… (Alexander, 70+). Mixed Opinions Quite a few respondents claimed that it is difficult to foresee the actual developments. Lucas (20+) saw two opposite scenarios: many more private organizations delivering welfare versus entirely public delivery—the likely outcome is difficult to predict because of wavering politics in Sweden. Ella (politician) assumed that provision of healthcare would make unforeseeable jumps due to technology development, but this will also create new ethical dilemmas. At what stage of development should the prematurely born children be saved? How long should old and ill people live—until 130 years? Such valuations may be shocking even to consider, but sooner or later they will have to be done.

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According to Alice (60+), basic income and basic welfare for the citizens will need to exist, but people will be forced to buy private insurance, because the voters, who do not understand how the welfare state functions, will oppose tax increases. In the future, if nothing dramatic happens, everything should be developing. More housing will be constructed, not the least for the immigrants. All houses do not need to be handicap-friendly, but construction must be sensible (Alexander, 70+). Healthcare must improve. It cannot be like it is now, not in Sweden! Yes, if healthcare does not improve, it will collapse (Wilma, 70+). Politicians must allow experts to decide what are the best solutions. Considering their rapidly growing numbers, the elderly must learn how to organize themselves and how to provide and manage their own care. Public transport must become better, as the elderly should not drive. In general, however, if the economy will hold, many things can become better, including diminished segregation.

Ten Years Earlier Turning to interviewees’ reflections on how they would have answered our questions ten years ago, we found some similarities across countries. As in our interviews in Canada and Australia, the Swedish respondents could be divided into three groups: those whose answers would be the same, those whose answers would be different because times are different, and those whose answers would be different because the respondent thought differently (the latter two sometimes combined). Wilma (70+) thought she would have answered in the same way ten years ago because a decade ago marked the beginning of phenomena that have not become clear until the present. In general, it is as bad and as good as it was then. For example, there is more segregation, but those immigrants who came to Sweden ten years ago are very well integrated by now. Maja (50+) said she has become more interested in politics but that her values remained the same. Yet, technology has changed a lot. In contrast, Adam (60+) thought that ten years earlier Sweden was much more open toward technological innovations. The immigration problems were not that visible before, according to many respondents. As Walter (politician) put it, the immigration wave of 2015:

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made it obvious that that we must introduce some order in it. On the other hand, we have always known that we are in need of labor immigration, and of people from other countries who come here … it depends on our demographics…

Ten years ago, there was also immigration, but not on the same scale. Now, according to Alice (60+), there are quite new priority issues: “Should we accept boys from Syria or girls from Afghanistan?” Oliver (40+) was more positive in general ten years ago. Now he is worried about the future of his children, and he has negative experiences from his own workplace. Similarly, Noah (50+) said that he was less disappointed with the welfare system ten years ago. Quite a few respondents suggested that “it was better before”. According to Freja (70+), people have become more egoistic (in this opinion, she agreed with Lilly, 20+), and much more stressed and unhappy. Additionally, even if religious conflicts always existed, in Freja’s opinion it is only at present that they have led to violence and killing. There is an increase in gang wars, and a decrease in healthcare capacities—all due to the incompetent politicians, according to Alexander (70+). Ebba (60+) shared the opinion that people were less stressed, less egoistical, and less unhappy ten years ago. She added, however, that it was possible that it was not Sweden that has changed, but that her observation capacity has become better. This phenomenon was suggested by many other respondents, who said that, with age, they became more aware of general problems and of the situation in society as a whole. As Ella (politician) put it, “My knowledge of both demography and finances has become much broader”. Thus, it is not exactly that ten years ago everything was better, but that people believed that everything will continue to function as before: instead, society changes at an unprecedented speed. On the other hand, Lilly (20+) said she believed that welfare is something that will forever be in Sweden, and she could not imagine that something could go wrong. At present, she still believes that people will always need healthcare and education, but she knows that better solutions must be found. Aging, and therefore more need for welfare services—for oneself or for the aging parents—is also a reason for changing opinions (Olivia, 20+). Elias (30+) admitted that ten years ago he did not have any opinion whatsoever on the topic. Elsa (40+) explained that it was when her son began looking for a job that she started to pay attention to the state of welfare in

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Sweden: “It is when you start using welfare that you see the changes, for good and for bad”. Selma (30+) admitted that ten years earlier she believed that privatization was a solution, a belief that she had to correct in the light of growing class differences.

Local Problems, Global Solutions? Comparing the answers among the three countries, it is obvious that the weight given to various aspects of the welfare differ depending on what is perceived as local problems. For example, nobody in Sweden mentioned the need for daycare, or free university education, which many of the Canadians and Australians did, because in Sweden it is taken for granted— among Swedish respondents, there were only suggestions about how to improve education in general. The aspect of welfare that the Swedes paid most attention to was the growing need for the elderly care, due to the demographic changes in the population. Although the Canadians noticed it too, some assumed that there would be a natural solution to it (the baby boomers will die out), and others discussed the option of assisted dying. This possibility was only indirectly alluded to by the Swedish respondents (“should people live to 130 years of age”, and “should we re-introduce the ritual senicide?”, with a quick assertion that these questions were an attempt to make a joke). Australian respondents claimed that currently it is families that carry most of the responsibility for the elderly (the aged, as they are called in Australia), a situation that must be changed. In their eyes, the main problems were the skimpy resources that the retired people had at their disposal, thus solutions such as self-funded “superannuation” programs were suggested. Healthcare, the Canadian and Australian number one worry, was also ranked highly in Sweden and, although all three groups of respondents emphasized the need for competent personnel, only the Swedes mentioned robotization (which related to the care for the elderly, too, and it was mentioned by one Australian respondent in the same context). Considering that the interviews were conducted within a three-year period (2016–2018), it could be that the robotization of services is growing in importance with time. The problems of segregation in Sweden focused on the recent immigrants, whereas in Canada segregation mostly focused on the Indigenous people. Although both the Canadian and Australian respondents talked

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about “affordable housing”, the Swedish respondents spoke of housing mostly in relation to ways of diminishing segregation. Basic income was discussed much more by the Canadian respondents, as Canada has already experimented with it5; only two Swedish respondents mentioned it but globally, it seems to be a more and more frequently discussed solution. The Australian respondents spoke of “income support”; only one mentioned basic income.

References Boverket (2018) Bostadsmarknadsenkät 2018. Karlskrona: Boverket. Myrdal, Alva och Myrdal, Jan (1934) Kris i befolkningsfrågan (Crisis in the population question) Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag. SALAR (2010) Framtidens utmaning—Välfärdens långsiktiga finansiering. Stockholm: SKL. SALAR (2018a) Fokus på: Skolans rekryteringsutmaningar—Lokala strategier och exempel. Stockholm: SKL. SALAR (2018b) Sveriges viktigaste jobb finns i välfärden. Rekryteringsrapport 2018. Stockholm: SKL. Segal, Hugh D. (2016) Finding a better way: A basic income pilot project for Ontario, https://files.ontario.ca/discussionpaper_nov3_english_final.pdf, accessed 2017-05-16. Solli, Rolf & Wolmesjö, Maria (2019) Välfärden och framtiden—bekymmer och förhoppningsfulla lösningar. Borås: Högskolan i Borås, SOL rapport 1:2019.

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 See e.g., Segal (2016).

CHAPTER 5

The Welfare State: Will It Stay or Will It Go?

Abstract  In our final chapter, we summarize the results of our study, beginning with the two main foci in the interviewee responses we collected: reflections on (1) the material basis for financing the future welfare state, and (2) the new trends—e-health, robotization, and basic income— that may influence the future of the welfare state. We also include opinions of various writers and commentators on how the COVID-19 pandemic may stimulate and influence future welfare state developments, particularly basic income. Keywords  Finances • workforce • E-health • robotization • JobSeeker • JobKeeper • BI • UBI • UBS • COVID-19 There were two clearly visible foci in the material we collected. The first one concerned the material basis for the finances and workforce of the future welfare system. The other focus was on trends that may or may not dominate the future welfare models: e-health, robotization, and basic income. Although these trends did not take much place in the interviews—which is not surprising, considering that their status is still uncertain—they have been mentioned by respondents in all three countries. But before we present the two topics, a few words about the reasons we asked our interlocutors to imagine the future.

© The Author(s) 2021 R. Solli et al., Searching for New Welfare Models, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58228-9_5

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We chose to ask them what would happen in 20 years, but we could have asked about 30 years as well. The exact number of years is not that important—it is the fact that the questions concerned a distant future. It is therefore not surprising that the answers actually focused on what is now, with variations. People do not seem to be very good at predicting the future, claimed Tetlock and Gardner (2015) in their book Superforecasting: the art and science of prediction. The political scientist Philip E.  Tetlock (Gardner is a journalist) organized a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament, which included 2800 volunteers. Two percent of them turned out to be better forecasters than the others, and even better than the experts. But even the best forecasters couldn’t make adequate predictions extending for more than two years. But we were not checking the forecasting talents of our interlocutors. Rather, we wanted them to reflect on the present developments in the welfare states, and we chose questions about the future as a fruitful way of provoking such reflections. As Johan Asplund would have put it (1979), it was not important that their predictions were correct; it was important to evoke interesting reasoning—and we believe that we have succeeded.

The Basis of the Future Welfare The likelihood of encountering a lack of resources seemed to be the main worry in the images of the future welfare; it was practically taken for granted. The predicted scarcities concerned both the finances and the work force. The Finances In all the three countries, the financing of the welfare system comes mostly from the state. There are some differences: For example, in Sweden, 60 percent of the resources that finance the welfare system come from taxes on wages and salaries. According to the Swedish economist Mårten Blixt (2017), this may cause serious problems. The potential for further tax increases is limited—partly due to Sweden already having one of the highest tax rates in the world, and partly due to Sweden being a small, open economy, vulnerable to trade flows in the world outside, and therefore in need of a competitive tax system. In Blixt’s view, there is a simple solution to that problem: It is time for a tax reform that will stop requiring working people to face a steep, uphill slope. Such a reform is possible without

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lowering welfare aspirations as it would consist of increased revenues from other tax bases, for example, taxes on real estate, VAT, and stepped-up interest subsidies. Our respondents, too, had several suggestions concerning alternative ways of financing the welfare state. Increased fees for certain services and various kinds of insurance were mentioned, but there is no doubt that taxes will continue to constitute the main financial basis of the future welfare system. The question remains, taxes on what? This question will remain unanswered until the economic effects of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic become visible. The Workforce Providing care means, as we mentioned before, giving time to those who need it. In an aging society, the number of people who need time continuously grows, while, relatively, the number of those who can give time diminishes. An adequate workforce—both in terms of numbers and competencies—becomes the crucial resource. As the answers from our interlocutors indicate, the problem is perceived as less acute in countries where volunteers are permitted to provide care, as opposed to countries like Sweden, where professional caregiver competence is required. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, opened the doors to volunteers in all three countries. The workforce situation in all the three countries demands new solutions (in saying this, we assume that the entrance of immigrants into the delivery of welfare services is an old solution). What we describe below as new trends may become institutionalized—or they may turn out to be passing fashions. In addition, their future fate depends to a large extent on whether or not many of the present ways of performing welfare services are permitted to vanish.

The New Trends E-health Both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Commission (EC) are interested in this development. Here is the definition used by EC:

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Digital health and care refer to tools and services that use information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve prevention, diagnosis, treatment, monitoring and management of health and lifestyle. Digital health and care have the potential to innovate and improve access to care, quality of care, and to increase the overall efficiency of the health sector.1

The Swedish politicians seem to be convinced that e-health is the future. Here are fragments of the state investigation from 2016 (SOU 2016: 72): In recent years, digitalization has created a number of new opportunities for improved efficiency and increased flexibility in health and care. (…) At the same time, there are signs that rigid regulatory systems are an obstacle to introducing new technology and innovations in health and social care. (…) Further development and the dissemination of good examples are needed. (…) The ambition is that the new model should be introduced in 2017/2018. (p. 162)

In the beginning of 2014, a new governmental agency focusing on e-health was created. Not everybody is as enthusiastic about e-health system as the Swedish government. Jerome Groopman, one of the best-known advocates of narrative medicine, sees e-health as its enemy: …listening is no longer valued in today’s medicine. The patient’s “history” was once the centerpiece of his medical record, his story written in narrative form. With current electronic templates, information is fragmented into chunks designed to meet so-called quality metrics and maximize revenue from insurers. The patient’s story has been reduced to telegraphed key words that trigger prefigured algorithms, which generate pop-ups on the computer screen for further testing or generic therapies. (2017: 7)

Still, much is being done, and much remains to be done, in Sweden as well as in other countries.2 The enthusiasts were a little too optimistic; Erlingsdóttir and Sandberg (2019) rightly pointed out that in order for e-health to succeed, it is necessary to adapt laws and regulations, reduce digital divisions, create confidence, ensure equality and vulnerability, and change power distribution. It is also necessary to ensure that the patient’s  https://ec.europa.eu/health/ehealth/overview_en, accessed 2019-07-16.  For the developments in Australia, see Hambleton and Aloizos (2019).

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integrity and security are guaranteed, that the technology is safe, and that the working environment for healthcare staff does not deteriorate. Health communication issues following from an increased openness must be analyzed from the ethical perspective. Close to the e-health issues is the issue of robotization of healthcare. “Robots can provide care—even today”, was claimed in an appendix to Dagens Nyheter under the title “The Future of Welfare” (Wilhelmson 2016). “At the home for the elderly in Hälleborg, technology creates for people with dementia a freer, if better supervised, life.” Does it? Before we move to the topic of robotization of care, it must be pointed out that much depends on how one defines a “robot” (Czarniawska and Joerges 2020). Much of the healthcare is already automated—there are lots of diagnostic machines, and surgeries can be done at a distance. However, the medical staff, from nurses to surgeons, believe that the machines simply fulfil their orders. Can they become autonomous? Robotization While the major part of the discussion about robotization of work concerns potential unemployment problems, a considerable amount of attention, in media and in social sciences, is paid to the potential use of robots in healthcare and care for the elderly (Czarniawska and Joerges 2020). After all, countries other than the three we studied face an aging population that lives longer and longer, requiring more care. Additionally, there are increasingly sophisticated machines (not necessarily robots as such) that are being used in medicine. A Swedish researcher, Susanne Frennert (2016), observed elderly persons’ experimental domestic use of three kinds of robots: GiraffPlus (an e-health monitoring robot), HOBBIT (an assistive robot), and a vacuum cleaner. Her conclusions were that the designers follow a technological, deterministic approach, assuming that they know everything there is to know about the users, and that the robots can be constructed and then tested according to “fixed criteria and quantitative measurements at baseline, midway, and post-intervention”, (p. 95), which, among other things, includes a picture of elderly people as weak, ill, and home-bound. Interestingly, the older persons who were asked to use the robots were completely in agreement with that stereotypical picture of the elderly, although in their opinion it was not an image of themselves, but of people who are much older, truly weak, ill, and home bound—persons who

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would be the final users of the robots. For persons in the study, robots seemed to nourish the desires for freedom, control, and independence. Frennert’s final conclusion was that the designers of robots should adopt a practice-oriented approach, in the sense of actually trying out their prototypes rather than just asking for opinions about them; as another of her observations was that “there is a difference between what older people say and what they do”. She also tried to explain why Swedish and European people, in contrast to the Japanese, are against the idea of robots taking care of older people (she quoted a Swedish study from 1998 and a Eurobarometer from 2012; Frennert 2016: 45). Answering the survey, the respondents were positive about robots doing “dirty, dull, and dangerous” jobs—but not taking care of people. In contrast, Japan has been automating its industry sector since the late 1960s, which contributed to the country’s famous economic success (Sone 2017). Both robotization and economic success continued in Japan throughout the 1980s. In the new millennium, a new problem emerged: A labor shortage due to Japan’s rapidly ageing population. The government reacted quickly and strongly, sponsoring research and construction of new robot prototypes, which were to work in hospitals, offices, and homes. This development continues at present. In his analysis, the Australian-Japanese scientist Yuji Sone (2017) argued that many Japanese find the concept of an artificially created human intriguing rather than frightening, because they do not have the associations with Golems and Frankenstein’s monsters like the Westerners have. Also, the Western robots are made “from dumb matter” (p. 9), whereas the Japanese robots are seen as grandchildren of nature, because humans are children of nature. It is animism (spirit is incarnated in nature and in inanimate objects), Buddhism, and the tradition of manga/anime that contribute to a positive perception of humanoid robots. Therefore, the Humanoid Robotics Project (1998–2003), financed by the Japanese government, asked roboticists to develop robots that could contribute to the management of an ageing population: Care robots, pet robots, nurse assistant robots, and even dementia prevention robots. The engagement of dementia patients with therapeutic robots is seen positively by the proponents of those machines. Critics, on the other hand, look at the use of the social robot in aged care in terms of duplicity and control. (Sone 2017: 191)

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In defense, Sone described the uses of Paro, a baby seal, and Aibo, Sony’s robot dog. They have been used as “socially assistive robots” in USA, Australia, and Japan. Assistive robot refers to a robotic machine that “assists people with physical disabilities through physical interaction” for domestic and institutional use (…). The term “socially assistive robot” delineates a subcategory within assistive robots, which refers to robots that provide assistance to humans, through interaction with verbal and/or physical gesture but without physical contact (…) Socially assistive robots have been used as companions or guides for the elderly and children … (Sone 2017: 193)

Many hopes are connected to such socially assistive robots, but some problems remain unsolved: high cost and technical complexity of implementation, together with lack of agreement on how to measure their effectiveness. In Sone’s opinion, it is time for social scientists and humanists to join the roboticists in their work. At present, “[t]he wide-spread justification (…) for the use of socially assistive robots in aged care is often based on a commonly held view that the Japanese prefer robots over human helpers, especially foreign health workers” (p. 194) Sone also argued that robots are actually better than pets because animals carry germs, can bite and scratch, and they die, causing sorrow. Furthermore, Paro the seal is supposed to reduce people’s expectations (they know what to expect from cats and dogs and can be disappointed, but they don’t know what to expect from a baby seal). “Paro embodies cuddliness and cuteness” (p. 202). But the ethical problems remain: those enchanted with the dog Aibo (mostly children) could make their own decision to buy the machine; Paro was “forced upon” the elderly. Sone’s conclusions were as follows: [Japanese] traditions promote the idea that humans and non-humans are viewed intrinsically as connected. The robot’s radical difference is perceived through what might be termed a functional anthropomorphism; at the same time, by seeing them in such a way, human interactants can develop a certain affection for the non-human and, in this case, for robots. (pp. 204–207)

Perhaps such possibility is open even to people not sharing traditions of Buddhism and animism (see e.g., Baum 2018, on experiments in Australia). Also, the COVID-19 pandemic may change the attitude toward robots to a more positive view in general—after all, the robots are more “hygienic”

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than people, and do not spread viruses. Nevertheless, robotization is still seen both as a problem (depriving people of jobs) and as a solution. One kind of support comes from the idea of basic income. Basic Income Basic income is seen as supporting both robotization and its victims. Here is the opinion of one of the experts on robotization, Martin Ford: If we accept the idea that ever more investment in education and training is unlikely to solve our problems, while calls to somehow halt the rise of job automation are unrealistic, then we are ultimately forced to look beyond conventional policy prescriptions. In my view, the most effective solution is likely to be some form of basic income guarantee. (…) A basic income would be efficient and would have relatively low administrative costs. A bureaucratic expansion of the welfare state would be far more expensive on a per capita basis, and far more unequal in its impact. (2015: locations 4166, 4211)

As to how this solution will look in practice, Ford had two suggestions: An unconditional basic income paid to every adult citizen regardless of other income, or a guaranteed minimum income, paid only to people at the bottom of the income distribution and phased out when their situation changes. In the past five years in Canada, and more than four decades after the 1970 Manitoba Mincome (Minimum Income) pilot project (see Forget 2018), there has been a resurgence of interest in basic income pilot projects. In March 2016, the Liberal government in Ontario, Canada’s largest province, designed a Basic Income Pilot Project that started operating in April 2018. It consisted of a payment to eligible couples or individuals, ensuring a minimum income level, regardless of employment status. It was run as an experiment with a control group. Unfortunately, this experimental project had a short life as it was wound down in March 2019 by Ontario’s recently elected Conservative government, led by Premier Doug Ford.3 Reactions to this early cancellation included media headlines such

3  https://news.ontario.ca/mcys/en2018/08/ontarios-government-for-the-peopleannounces-compassionate-wind-down-of-basic.income-research-projec.html, accessed 2019-07-16.

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as: “Why 100 CEOs are asking Doug Ford to bring back basic income”.4 The main argument of critics pointed out that “axing” the project eliminated the chance to evaluate its results. In 2016, the legislative members of Canada’s smallest population province, Prince Edward Island (PEI), unanimously approved a motion to work toward launching a pilot income project (Tencer 2016). Officials of the PEI government asked the federal Liberal government in Ottawa for funding support for their pilot project, but they were unsuccessful. So, to date, PEI’s basic income experiment has not been launched. Advocates of the PEI basic income project, however, have not lost hope. They point to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) program, which was implemented by the federal government in early 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. CERB provides enhanced supports for individuals, businesses, and industry sectors. Notably, the CERB support includes a direct 2000 CAD payment made every four weeks for up to 16 weeks to eligible workers who have lost income or stopped working due to COVID-19.5 According to Jillian Kilfoil, a member of the PEI Working Group for a Livable Income: [CERB] is very close to what we would be advocating for (…) we feel like it’s [the pandemic is] not individual people’s fault (…) and we’re trying to say that happens to people all the time and the way we‘re [the federal government is] responding to this pandemic is how we need to respond to the needs of the most vulnerable all the time.6

In essence, the PEI advocates seem to take the position that a basic income should be available to citizens all the time, not just during times of crises. And the PEI voices are not alone. Spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, the calls for some permanent (universal or targeted) form of basic income program in Canada has grown into a cascade of voices, involving a number of the nation’s major media outlets and high-profile authors and journalists. A former Canadian Senator, Hugh Segal, was an early 4  https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.4868294/ why-100-ceos-are-asking-doug-ford-to-bring-back-basic-income-1.4868298, accessed 2019-07-16. 5  https://www.canada.ca/en/depar tment-finance/economic-response-plan. html#individuals, accessed 2020-06-10. 6  https://www.basicincomecanada.org/opportunity_in_pandemic_p_e_i_group_sees_ the_makings_of_basic_income, accessed 2020-06-10.

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proponent of Ontario’s basic income experiment and he authored a report advocating for such plan.7 In 2020, Segal teamed up with Evelyn Forget, a noted health economist and author of a 2018 book on basic income in Canada, to write an article in Canada’s leading business-oriented national newspaper. Forget and Segal point out that national politicians appear to have set aside their usual partisan squabbles in agreeing to implement CERB in response to the COVID-19-generated crisis. Perhaps such unusual cooperation among politicians of various political stripes can be attributed to the COVID-19-induced stark realization that many components of Canada’s current income security framework are deficient. In stinging prose, Segal and Forget state: Employment insurance (EI) has been revealed as a creaky relic of a bygone economy (…) provincial welfare and disability supports are punitive, stigmatizing and offer less than half the income needed to stay above the poverty line. Adult supports are (…) a disorganized patchwork that condemns people to poverty.8

Although Canada’s CERB program was hastily launched and is still evolving, Forget and Segal see in it hope for filling some key gaps in Canada’s welfare system: “CERB offers Canada an opportunity to learn how to design better income supports for ordinary times.” The authors cite the surprisingly similar and positive results that middle-­ and low-income countries around the world have experienced with basic income experiments. They contend that the hastily designed and implemented CERB program has really been a large experiment in basic income, and they suggest that: COVID-19 could create a legacy: an income support system that is efficient, non-stigmatizing, encourages work, and is sufficient to provide better health outcomes and liquidity for people and communities.

In a recent (March 22, 2020) media interview, Forget elaborated on the COVID-19-related income challenges Canadians face, and she concluded: “I think that if we had a basic income in place, it would have been very 7  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-basic-income-hughsegal-1.5224452, accessed 2019-11-01. 8  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-cerb-is-an-unintended-experiment-in-basic-income/, accessed 2020-06-10.

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easy for the government to increase payments to Canadians and adapt to this particular [COVID-19]crisis.”9 It is evident that there is a large and growing chorus of other voices that have joined in calling for government action to fill gaps in Canada’s welfare system, deficiencies that were laid bare by the COVID-19 outbreak. Not surprisingly, gaps in income supports were frequently highlighted and several basic income schemes were suggested as solutions. In addition to paying for direct financial supports to individuals, Canada’s CERB initiative provides indirect support to individual workers; it pays eligible business employers 75% of an employee’s wages—up to 847 CAD per week for eligible workers. This can be viewed as a job-­ keeping strategy. In Australia, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic led to large and sudden increases in unemployment and underemployment due to government restrictions and consumer fears that curtailed demand and supply in many vital industries, including manufacturing, education, hospitality, and tourism. The Australian Government’s social welfare system was overwhelmed with applications for social benefits as industry shed jobs—a demand which saw the MyGov welfare information system unable to cope with phone calls going unanswered, and large queues of people outside the Centrelink offices (Baskin 2020). As a response to the pandemic’s economic upheaval, in March 2020 the conservative Australian Government—to the surprise of many commentators and the political opposition—shelved parts of its arguably adversarial and insufficiently funded approach to welfare recipients as previously described. The government initiated two new social welfare benefits: JobSeeker and JobKeeper. This initiative can be described as a temporary experiment (initially for six months) in a nascent form of Universal Basic Income (UBI). In a UBI, citizens are provided with a “liveable” income based on a “rightful” share in ownership of national wealth, so that their economic survival is not solely tied to waged labor (Ferguson 2015). A UBI enables us to reconsider how people’s contributions to society in multiple meaningful ways are recognized and rewarded (other than through regular paid employment). A UBI becomes more relevant where casual, contract or “gig” workers face challenges with income stability and

9  https://www.healthing.ca/diseases-and-conditions/coronavirus/its-time-to-stop-talking-about-basic-income-and-do-it, accessed 2020-06-10.

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sufficiency under the effects of new business models and automation (Décobert 2020). The JobSeeker payment is an unemployment benefit of 1100 AUD per fortnight for those who have lost their jobs or who have been looking for work. It replaces the previous ‘New Start’ unemployment benefit. And, in recognition of the latter’s controversially low compensation, complexity and barriers to entry, JobSeeker doubles the previous amount paid to the unemployed and reduces wealth-based restrictions on access (Parliament of Australia 2020). JobKeeper payments provide an income to people who would otherwise have had their employment terminated by employers who have suffered in the economic downturn. In effect the Australian Government subsidizes the wages of employees. The idea is for employees to remain connected with their employers, regardless of whether there is currently work to be done; it keeps employees ready to facilitate productivity in an eventual economic rebound. Employers can keep paying a staff member who was working when the scheme commenced (March 1, 2020) a wage of 1500 AUD a fortnight and be 100 per cent reimbursed by the government. In effect, if an employee was previously earning 1500 AUD, their labor has become effectively free to the company; someone previously earning less than 1500 AUD gets bonus money; and for someone who usually earns more than 1500 AUD, employers can choose to top up the salary if their labor is still actively utilized. Employees being paid under JobKeeper may be working their normal hours, or less hours, or effectively be in standby mode (Treasury 2020). There are limits to the universality of the new basic income payment system. It does not allow for payments to such cohorts as international students (a huge contributor to the Australian economy), even though many are marooned here and are desperate for funds, because their casual employment has largely dried up. Nor does it apply to other temporary visa holders (such as foreign farm workers), university staff who are casually employed, and employees of wholly overseas-owned companies. In instituting the JobSeeker and JobKeeper benefits, the Australian Government recognized a range of positive outcomes that a basic income can provide: boosting people’s economic ability to survive; supporting their confidence and emotional wellbeing; stimulating consumption that ‘knocks-on’ improved economic activity; simplifying welfare systems; and, reducing costly overheads through broadening categories of access and reducing requirements like means (wealth) testing. The government has

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not formally touted JobSeeker and JobKeeper packages as a UBI system, but it exhibits many of the hallmarks of one—such as attempting to cover basic needs with a standardized amount of money where a person remains either employed (JobKeeper) or not (JobSeeker). Sweden did not experiment with basic income but commented on such projects. In August 2017, the vice-chair of the students belonging to the Center Party wrote an appeal for basic income in a magazine published by a right-wing think tank; he claimed, “Basic income is effective and just”. And he quoted Fredrich Hayek to support his arguments. The present welfare system, in his opinion, is arbitrary and paternalistic (Rehbinder 2017). One of Sweden’s most popular public intellectuals, political scientist Bo Rothstein, was of the opposite opinion: Basic income cannot be paid without conditions, so that those who finance it—tax payers—could be certain that their money is sensibly spent (Rothstein 2017). The Swedish left-wing newspaper, ETC, published opinions on Ontario’s basic income program experiment. Reporting from Hamilton, Ontario, the reporter quoted the local newspaper as well as some politicians and social scientists—all were positive (Kjellberg 2018). Writing a year later, a Swedish researcher looked at basic income experiments in Finland and concluded that “it is unlikely that Sweden would introduce basic income, but it is worth looking at such projects” (Bergh 2019). He also quoted Rutger Bregmans’s Utopia for realists from 2017. Another positive-minded journalist reviewed Louise Haagh’s The case for universal basic income from 2019 (Spross 2019). Yet, to quote another Swedish Journalist (Schultz 2020), “Corona has resurrected the thoughts about citizen wage” (as basic income is called in Sweden). Although the Finnish experiment with UBI led to ambiguous results (happier people with no jobs), the researchers from IVL Swedish Environmental Research analyzed two possible scenarios for introducing UBI in Sweden, treated as an example of a post-growth economy (Malmaeus et al. 2020). The scenarios are called “Local self-sufficiency” and “Automation”, and the authors concluded that a full UBI is a more realistic option in the Automation scenario. Still another book on basic income that earned attention of many reviewers was Philippe Var Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght’s Basic income: A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy (Friedman 2017). The two Belgian scholars presented arguments that were not economic, but philosophical: Basic income will free people from the necessity of working. Although such an argument may seem shocking, not the least in

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the USA, two states have versions of basic income: California has started basic income projects, and both Mark Zuckenberg and Elon Musk are positive about the idea; and, since 1999, Alaska’s Permanent Fund has paid each person living in its state for at least one year and annual basic income of 1680 USD. As Anna Dent suggested in The Guardian (2019): “Free money wouldn’t make people lazy—but it could revolutionize work”. Opinions about basic income programs are mixed, not only in Sweden. Nathan Heller in The New Yorker (2018) concluded that Universal Basic Income (UBI), as it is now called, has enthusiasts on both the left and the right, for completely opposite reasons. His opinion, however, based on the speedy end of both Finnish and Canadian (Ontario) experiments, is that, “Thus far, U.B.I. lives entirely in people’s heads—untried at any major scale”. Perhaps several minor scale experiments would prove enough—though there is no doubt that quite a few issues must be solved. Anna Coote and Andrew Percy (2020), however, are of the view that UBI is enough. They plead for “Universal Basic Services”, which they define as: Services: collectively generated activities that serve the public interest. Basic: services that are essential and sufficient (rather than minimal) to enable people to meet their needs. Universal: everyone is entitled to services that are sufficient to meet their needs, regardless of ability to pay. (loc. 245)

Their plea extends the traditional definitions of welfare to areas mentioned by some of our respondents: not only healthcare and education, but also child care, adult social care, housing, transport, and information. And they claim that “[w]e need these radical changes now, not just because we want to help make people’s lives better (which we do) but because we are convinced that this is the only way for modern societies to survive and flourish” (loc. 261). Much as we agree with their plea, the future will show if their hopes will prevail, or if they will be diminished in practice, as our more realistic respondents predicted.

References Asplund, Johan (1979) Teorier om framtiden. Stockholm: Liber Baskin, Jeremy (2020) “Whatever it takes” should now include a universal basic income. The Conversation, March 27. https://theconversation.com/whatever-

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it-takes-should-now-include-a-universal-basic-income-134405, accessed 2020-06-06. Baum, Caroline (2018) A new approach to aged care: pseudo-suburbs, robotics and purposeful activity. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/sep/24/a-new-approach-to-aged-care-pseudo-suburbsrobotics-and-purposeful-activity?CMP=share_btn_link, accessed 2019-08-15. Bergh, Andreas (2019) Att reformera de sociala skyddsnäten behöver alls inte vara så dyrt. Dagens Nyheter, 2 April. Blix Mårten (2017) Digitalization, immigration and the welfare state. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Coote, Anna and Percy, Andrew (2020) The case for Universal Basic Services. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Czarniawska, Barbara and Joerges, Bernward (2020) Robotization of work? Answers from popular culture, media and social sciences. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Décobert, Anne (2020) Time for a Universal Basic Income. Pursuit. University of Melbourne. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/time-for-a-universalbasic-income, accessed 2020-05-28. Dent, Anna (2019) Free money wouldn’t make people lazy—but it could revolutionise work. The Guardian, 12 February. Erlingsdóttir, Gudbjörg and Sandberg, Helena (eds) (2019) På tal om e-hälsa. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Ferguson, James (2015) Give a man a fish: Reflections on the new politics of distribution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ford, Martin (2015) The rise of the robots. Technology and the threat of mass unemployment. London: Oneworld Publications. Forget, Evelyn (2018) Basic income for Canadians. The key to a healthier, happier, more secure life for all. Toronto: James Lorimer and Co. Frennert, Susanne (2016) Older people meet robots. Lund: Lund University Press. Friedman, Benjamin M. (2017) Born to be free. The New York Review of Books, 12 October. Groopman, Jerome (2017) Sick but not sick. The New York Review of Books, 64(2): 9 February. Hambleton, Steven and Aloizos, John (2019) Australia’s digital health journey. Medical Journal of Australia, 210(6): 5–6 Heller, Nathan (2018) Who really stands to win from universal basic income? The New Yorker, 3 September. Kjellberg, Erik (2018) Här är basinkomst inte bara en vänsterfråga. ETC, 10 April. Malmaeus, Michael; Alfredsson, Eva and Birnbaum, Simon (2020) Basic Income and social sustainability in post-growth economies. Basic Income Studies, in print (https://doi.org/10.1515/bis-2019-0029, accessed 2020-06-01). Parliament of Australia (2020) JobSeeker payment: a quick guide. Research Paper Series 2019–20. Parliamentary Library, Canberra, 13 March.

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Rehbinder, Caspian (2017) Medborgarlön är effektiv och rättvis. Smedjan, 7 August. Rothstein, Bo (2017) Basinkomst skulle skapa ett trashanksproletariat. Dagens Nyheter, 11 November. Schultz, Maria (2020) Corona väcker liv i tankarna om medborgarlön. AP7, 20 May. Sone, Yuji (2017) Japanese robot culture. Performance, imagination, and modernity. New York, NYC: Palgrave Macmillan. SOU 2016:72 (2016) Samhällsutmaningar måste mötas med entreprenörskap och innovation. Stockholm: Wolters Kluwers. Spross, Linn (2019) Alla vinner inte på basinkomst. ETC, 9 May. Tencer, Daniel (2016) Basic income coming to P.E.I.? Legislature passes motion unanimously. The Huffington Post Canada, 12 July. Tetlock, Philip E. & Gardner, Dan (2015) Superforecasting: the art and science of prediction. New York: Crown Publishing Group. Treasury, Australian Government (2020) JobKeeper payment—information for employees. Fact Sheet. Canberra, 20 April. Wilhelmson, Annika (2016) Så kan robotar ge omsorg—redan idag. Dagens Nyheter, 18 December.



Instead of an Epilogue…

… given the increasingly costly ways in which governments around the world have undermined the original intent of the Welfare State, it is now imperative to reassess government involvement in this area. … the cost of Welfare State services will continue to rise faster than the rate of inflation and thus governments providing these services will come under steadily increasing budgetary pressure. To ease this pressure by abandoning society’s responsibility to the poor, the infirm, and the disadvantageous is morally indefensible, economically inefficient, and politically short-sighted. On the contrary, … redirecting Welfare State services from the middle class to the poor may make everyone better off. Many of the most significant inefficiencies and inequities that remain … could be tackled by a combination of the appropriate loan guarantees and wage subsidies, with a safety net for those whose marginal product, net of household production, is very low. Perhaps this is the future of the Welfare State. Snower, Dennis J., 1993: 716–717

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Index1

A “Activation for work,” 37 Aged care, 35, 36, 38, 42–44, 47, 48, 74, 75 See also Care for elderly Australia, 3, 7, 34–37, 34n2, 40–43, 43n8, 46, 47, 49, 50, 54, 56, 64, 66, 72n2, 75, 79 B Baby boomers, 16, 21, 25, 28, 66 Basic income, 8, 22–23, 50, 50n11, 64, 67, 69, 76–82 Beveridge, William, 2, 50 C Canada, 3, 7, 8, 11–30, 34, 35, 49–50, 54, 56, 64, 66, 67, 76–79

Care for elderly, 6, 21–22, 49, 58–60, 62, 63, 66, 73 See also Aged care COVID-19, 5, 7, 50n11, 71, 75, 77–79 D Daycare, 19, 21, 26–27, 29, 55, 57, 66 E Education, 6, 15–19, 27, 29, 35, 38–40, 45, 49, 55, 59, 61, 65, 66, 76, 79, 82 E-health, 62, 69, 71–73 Environment, 23–24, 28, 73 Equality, 19–21, 42, 45, 55, 72

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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F Finances, 57, 65, 69–71, 81 G Global solutions, 58–59, 66–67 H Healthcare, 6, 15–17, 29, 35, 40–42, 54, 55, 59, 60, 62–66, 73, 82 Housing, 15, 21, 25–26, 28, 29, 35, 36, 38, 40, 44–45, 50, 54, 55, 57, 61–64, 67, 82 I Immigration, 24, 64, 65 Income support, 36, 37, 39, 42–43, 67, 78, 79 Indigenous people, 24, 29, 30, 30n11, 42, 44, 50, 66 Infrastructure, 15, 27, 39n5, 59, 61–62 J JobKeeper, 79–81 JobSeeker, 79–81 L “Localization,” 24–25 M Millennials, 28 N National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), 35, 38, 39, 44, 47 New Public Management (NPM), 3–7

P “The people’s home,” 55 Police, 15, 24, 27, 62 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), 27 Post-national country, 30 R Robotization, 62, 63, 66, 69, 73–76 S Social problems, 46, 50 Sweden, 3–8, 15, 34, 35, 53–67, 70–72, 81, 82 Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR), 5, 57, 58 T Tipping point, 47 Transport, 6, 23, 39, 46, 61–62, 64, 82 U Universal Basic Income (UBI), 22, 79, 81, 82 Universal Basic Services (UBS), 82 W Welfare state future, 8, 46–49, 53–67, 69–71, 85 history, 2–3, 54–56 past, 3, 46–49 Workforce, 19, 42, 43, 69, 71