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The Welfare Trait
Meanwhile:
The ‘choosiness’ of the unemployed: evidence on voluntary unemployment in the UK
Very good and succinct demonstration from Paul Bivand, Learning and Work Institute, as to why Mr Dunn’s assertion that “I am in full agreement with them on the main question of my book – that voluntary unemployment is a serious, widespread problem in the UK” might be described as slightly hysterical to say the least.
But people still move off JSA fast - only 1 in 12 stay 12 months
Author of the book finally did his LSE talk couple of weeks back but it’s certainly not calmed down the storm surrounding his credibility.
Dr Perkins told the LSE audience on 29 June that his theories were “not just pub talk” and there was a huge amount of literature to support the idea that the “welfare state could increase worklessness”.
But responding to Dr Perkins’ lecture, Kitty Stewart, associate professor in social policy at the LSE, attacked not just the King’s scholar’s ideas but the “very low” quality of analysis used in The Welfare Trait.
“This book fails to meet basic standards of social research,” said Dr Stewart. “It repeatedly cherry-picks evidence, presenting one or two studies, ignoring contradictory evidence,” she added.
Dr Perkins’ book also “frequently misrepresented” literature, with “details given out of context, selectively, or exaggerated to make a point”, and one small qualitative study was “relied on heavily”, Dr Stewart said.
That study – a 1969 study of 33 troubled families in Sheffield identified by social services – did not provide a useful insight into the welfare state, on which half the UK population have relied on at some point in the past 18 years, said Dr Stewart.
From Times Education Supplement - Welfare state critic savaged at LSE talk
is having children to get money a new scheme from the underpants gnomes of south park?
It only gets worse for Perkins….
From Times Higher Education Supplement Welfare critic under fire after correcting ‘shockingly bad’ errors
An academic who argues that the welfare state will stimulate the growth of an “employment-resistant personality profile” by increasing the number of children born into unemployed households has published corrections to one of his papers, prompting one critic to label his work “junk science”.
However, Adam Perkins, author of the 2016 book The Welfare Trait: How State Benefits Affect Personality, said that despite the errors in the paper – which meant that some results were overstated by a factor of 10 at one point – the findings “remain statistically significant, hence the substance of the paper is unaffected”.
Andy Fugard, senior lecturer in social science research methods at Birkbeck, University of London, was the first to highlight the errors. He said that it was “shockingly bad” that they had made it into a peer-reviewed journal.
“The relationships between the variables that he [Dr Perkins] looks at are just tiny,” Dr Fugard added. “Because the data that he used had such a big sample size, then basically pretty much everything will be statistically significant.”
Dr Fugard said that Dr Perkins “leans a lot” on the findings of this paper for the arguments in The Welfare Trait.
Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at King’s, said that the paper’s conclusions were drawn “on the basis of the most astonishingly flimsy, indirect and, it turns out, flatly erroneous evidence”.
From the New Statesman:
How the “welfare trap” research championed by Toby Young crumbled under scrutiny