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The Welfare Trait
You may have become aware of a storm in a teacup that’s been brewing about a recent publication entitled The Welfare Trait. The book’s basic premise is that the welfare system encourages recipients to breed ever-increasing numbers of work-shy children and that thus, we need to stop people in receipt of benefits from having children for the good of the nation. That’s my take on the central thesis anyway, not having had the pleasure of actually reading the thing.
Anyhoo, Dawn Foster has written an article based on an interview with its author, Adam Perkins PhD, which I thought was worth a read:
One particularly vocal critic has been Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social research. He says Perkins’s data don’t add up. “Dr Perkins claims to have shown that ‘the higher the proportion of unemployed adults in a household, the greater the number of children – on average – it contains’. However, as Perkins belatedly admitted, this is true if, and only if, you exclude households that do not have any children. This is, I am afraid, not how you calculate an average.
Read the whole thing here Adam Perkins: ‘Welfare dependency can be bred out’
Fwiw, I have a more fundamental problem with his position, which is he seems to assume a steady state situation, whereby people are either benefit claimants or hard-working families. My lived experience suggests that this kind of start point is, quite frankly, yarbles.
[ Edited: 9 Mar 2016 at 01:04 pm by Paul_Treloar_AgeUK ]This from the Equality Trust:
Coincidentally, Dr Perkins’ thesis is also essentially the premise of the 2006 Luke Wilson comedy Idiocracy. Make of that what you will.
Like anything by ‘academics’ it is best ignored.
Coincidentally, Dr Perkins’ thesis is also essentially the premise of the 2006 Luke Wilson comedy Idiocracy. Make of that what you will.
Yes but Murica! - At war with poverty since 1964 and losing.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424009/americas-anti-poverty-spending-dwarfs-europes
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/12/federal-spending-by-the-numbers-2014
Dr Perkins recently authored a piece in that well-known bastion of free speech and independent reportage, the Telegraph, in which he claimed to have been ‘no-platformed’ for his views, which is an odd way to report the fact that it was the LSE who cancelled the event, following some activists wanting to stage a peaceful protest and exchange views with him.
I do wonder, putting aside any objections to what might be seen by some as a rather crude way to characterise what had or hadn’t happened in relation to his ability to speak at the event, whether this particular section might come back to bite him on the posterior (my emphasis added):
Anyhow, there wasn’t much public reaction to my book until the run-up to my lecture at the London School of Economics on Tuesday 9th February. As has been publicised, some threats of disruption caused the organisers to postpone my lecture. I understood their decision but am still perplexed by the attitude of the no-platforming activists, not only because they ended up providing extra publicity for my book but also because there are no downsides to discussing scientific research. If it is good science then the discussion will benefit society by helping it get adopted quicker and if it is bad science then the discussion will benefit society help it get debunked quicker.
I was no-platformed by student ‘radicals’ for telling the truth about welfare
[University students who disagree with my views are] “a bunch of baggy-jumpered trustafarian nitwits who ten years from now will be driving a Porsche and working for Daddy’s ship-broking firm.”
-Dr Adam Perkins, Lecturer in the Neurobiology of Personality
Sorry but I can’t think of any way to respond to this other than with snark.
[ Edited: 9 Mar 2016 at 07:16 pm by Elliot Kent ]This is worth reading from the ‘debate bad science’ perspective, as well as his earlier linked post imvho.
The ONS footnote to its data is clear - that workless households for these purposes are those households in which no one was in employment in the quarter. As I pointed out in my previous comments, not in employment is not at all the same thing as being unemployed. Now I don’t suppose that Dr Perkins has deliberately mis-stated the ONS data nor deliberately failed to include the footnotes. So in writing in p.72 of his book that workless households are those where all 16–64 year olds are unemployed he must have either overlooked the clear definition given by the ONS in its footnote, or been simply unaware of what it meant.
Either way, for this reason if for no other, these data do not (and cannot) demonstrate that the higher the proportion of unemployed adults in a household, the greater the number of children … it contains.
See Peering for full post and link to his earlier post Flawed which followed the Telegraph article.
The right-leaning think tank The Adam Smith Institute, which wrote a rather glowing review of this publication a couple of months back, appears now to be blanching slightly in the face of the criticism that has surfaced around the fast and loose use of data in the book.
Note: When writing this review, I was unaware of a number of surprisingly basic errors in some of the data analyses underpinning parts of The Welfare Trait. For further information, see the points made by Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Suffice it to say that had I been aware of these issues at the time of writing, the review below would probably have had a somewhat different tone.
Feel like I’m talking to myself here but, via Declan Gaffney, came across this (in Declan’s words) “Calm, measured, withering response to Adam Perkins’ use of Brewer et al research” by Mike Brewer of the IFS who are amongst the sources for Mr Perkins “findings”.
This section in particular made me chuckle
Although our results clearly show that the reforms to benefits and tax credits for families with children in the late 1990s and early 2000s did lead to more births, we don’t agree with the back-of-the-envelope calculation presented by Perkins.
For the whole piece, see A comment on the use of results from “Does welfare reform affect fertility? Evidence from the UK”, Journal of Population Economics, in Adam Perkins’ book, The Welfare Trait.
Anyone who knows anything about science knows that the science is highly flawed and simply a rehashing of the ideas that informed the eugenics movement of the 1920’s. Don’t no platform him, destroy his arguments
The truly scary thing to my mind is that we suddenly have a society where such views are both acceptable and mainstream.
“Perkins has also been criticised for relying heavily on studies of mice to prove his theories on “employment-resistant personalities”. He argues that “the neural pathways are almost identical”, “
The humble mouse holds a particular unfortunate place in the Animal Kingdom
He is so “similar” to humans, it is always argued he is useful for us to study for so called “scientific” purposes.
He is so “dissimilar” it is always argued we can safely disregard his suffering in these so called scientific trials or experiments.
Another from the Torygraph:
Mice and men are genetically far further apart than was previously thought, calling into question the important role the rodents play in medical research.
A new study has found that while mice and humans share many protein-coding genes, the way their genes are regulated is often very different.
US scientists were surprised to find that gene activity diverged wildly between the two species in some key biological pathways.
The finding may help explain why more than 90% of new medicines that pass animal tests then fail in human trials.
Why tests on mice may be of little use
And that’s without even getting into any of the ethical questions posed….
Meanwhile:
The ‘choosiness’ of the unemployed: evidence on voluntary unemployment in the UK
Well, THAT was interesting!
No analysis of why such a choice might be made, which seems a rather critical omission and… well one could go on and on really.