As the 'baby boom', whose taxes have funded support for the elderly, is succeeded by the 'baby bust', the welfare state is being thrown into crisis. Thomson's work at Massey University initiated a major reorganisation of welfare provision in New Zealand, and this important and timely book extends the scope of his iconoclastic analysis to the current situation in Britain, Europe and the USA.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Peter Laslett
Introduction
The Welfare Gamble
A Welfare State for the Young
Youth-State Becomes Elder-State
Economic Management and Generation Fortunes
A New Poor
Generation Fortunes in the Longer Run
The Problem of the Common
A Future for the Welfare State?
BACKCOVER
'David Thomson's views are the most controversial of all those which are current in the wide field of the contemporary discussion of the Welfare State in Western countries, and especially of the provision of support for pensioners.' (Peter Laslett)
'Can the welfare state survive the effects of population aging and the conflicting demands for "intergenerational justice"?... David Thomson raises some serious doubts.' (Vern L. Bengtson)
EXCERPT
Foreword by Peter Laslett
Nothing is so obvious in the political and social discourse of the 1990s as the enormous difficulty people have in thinking over time, as they are more and more required to do. It is so for individuals, who find for example that it is almost impossible to allow for the fact that by the time they are in their forties they will spend much longer in retirement than they will spend at work. It is so for institutions, societies, firms, universities and the rest. After their first few halcyon years they are perpetually tinkering with the brave to-be-permanent principles and practices with which they began, just in order to stay in existence.
The economists of course have their compensatory concepts, the chief of which, discounting the future in relation to the present, is now widely condemned as immoral, even where it has claims to be realistic. But it is in the realm of politics and especially of legislation that this incapacity for properly processional thinking is most conspicuous and debilitating. It is particularly debilitating because the State is the outstanding example of an institution which persists over generations and has to be relied upon by all of us to secure equitable relationships between persons removed in birth date from each other.
In the wideranging, hard-hitting, impressive text which follows, David Thomson demonstrates that the welfare provisions now current in the Western world have become inequitable for precisely the reasons we have gone over. They were planned originally and have since been maintained and amended with blatantly insufficient conceptual grasp of what might happen when the Welfare System moved over time. I think it very important to insist that it is these circumstances and not the differential greediness of succeeding cohorts of individuals which gives rise to the title Selfish Generations? The question mark is of the utmost significance.
He is not maintaining, therefore, that a peculiarly wicked set of age-mates (they happen to be my age-mates) deliberately wrested the workings of the Welfare State to their own ends and have reframed it so as to defraud their successors. Both groups of cohorts have been victims of insufficiency in the framing and amendment of welfare legislation over time.
Nevertheless, as Thomson makes plain in his last chapter, me and my age-mates should have a bad conscience over what has happened and should be ready to make such amends as we can. The outcome, he believes, has been that the Welfare State lies in ruins about us, either to be abandoned as a collective venture beyond the capacity of our political system, or to be reformulated on genuinely equitable principles of processional justice where the difficulties of thinking over time have finally been transcended.
It is difficult to think of a more important topic or of a weightier argument around it. Criticised, even resented, the book may be, indeed has already been, though the superficiality of some of the reactions which he cites make woeful reading. I believe that the transfer of this work from New Zealand to a wider world will come to be recognised as an event of great intellectual, political and social significance.
Peter Laslett
Trinity College, Cambridge
REVIEW
a first-rate think-piece Ageing and Society
David Thomson has taught at Massey University since 1985, with courses in general social history, family history, population history, and the development of social policy. Born in New Zealand's rural south, he gained an MA in History from Canterbury University in 1976, and held a United Kingdom Commonwealth Scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1977 to 1980. His thesis, on the elderly in nineteenth century England, was prepared at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, where he remains a regular visitor and collaborator in several Group projects. Author of numerous papers on New Zealand, British and wider comparative history, he relaxes by part-time farming, raising horses and donkeys, establishing forestry plantations and reviving native bush lots.
Readership: Politics: Economics: Social History: General
Bibliographical: Published May 1996, 233mm x 155mm, 240pp. ISBN 1-874267-07-5 (HB) £35.00
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