102 min listen
The Benefits System Perpetuates Misery
ratings:
Length:
65 minutes
Released:
Jun 11, 2016
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Beveridge would be turning in his grave. The benefits system that his 1942 report introduced has become a travesty. Right now there are some 4.5m people in the UK living in households where nobody has a job. Behind that figure lies a subsection of society mired in multi-generational unemployment. What was meant to be a safety net has become a poverty trap. Far from being the short-term stopgap that Beveridge envisaged, benefits have created a culture of long-term welfare dependency. And that leads to misery. A 2012 survey showed that the unemployed in Britain are 3.6 times more likely than those with jobs to say they are seriously unhappy. If you want to help the poor, don’t just throw money at them. Incentivise and help them into work, and reform the system in which many people are actually better off not working at all than taking a job. Such an environment of worklessness simply makes it harder for the next generation to break out of the cycle.
That’s the argument that was made by journalist James... For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy
That’s the argument that was made by journalist James... For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy
Released:
Jun 11, 2016
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Western Liberal Democracy Would be Wrong for China: People everywhere are better off living in liberal democracy: that has been the reigning assumption of the western world. But could it be we’ve got it wrong? If you were one of the world’s billions of poor peasants might you not be better off under a s... by Intelligence Squared