The Welfare Trait Read online

  The Welfare Trait

  The Welfare Trait

  How State Benefits Affect Personality

  Adam Perkins

  Lecturer in the Neurobiology of Personality, King’s College London, UK

  © Adam Perkins 2016

  All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

  No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

  Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published 2016 by

  PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

  Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

  Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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  ISBN 978–1–137–55527–4 hardback

  ISBN 978–1–137–55528–1 paperback

  This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Perkins, Adam, 1972– author.

  The welfare trait : how state benefits affect personality / Adam Perkins.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978–1–137–55527–4 (hardback)—

  ISBN 978–1–137–55528–1 (paperback)

  1. Personality and occupation. 2. Public welfare—Psychological aspects. 3. Welfare recipients—Psycology. 4. Welfare recipients—Attitudes. 5. Personality change. I. Title.

  BF698.9.O3P46 2015

  155.9′2—dc23

  2015020341

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  1 What Is Personality and Why Does the Welfare State Matter?

  2 The Employment-Resistant Personality Profile

  3 The Lifelong Impact of Personality

  4 The Influence of Benefits on Claimant Reproduction

  5 Childhood Disadvantage and Employment-Resistance

  6 Genetic Influences on Personality

  7 Personality as a Product of Nature and Nurture

  8 A Model of How the Welfare State Leads to Personality Mis-Development

  9 Further Evidence for Welfare-Induced Personality Mis-Development

  10 What Next?

  References

  Index

  Illustrations

  Figures

  2.1 The personality-filtering process triggered by the implementation of the welfare state

  2.2 Employability as a function of the combined scores on conscientiousness and agreeableness in 2,532 UK adults

  4.1 Distribution of antisocial personality traits in a sample of 514 US residents

  4.2 Distribution of antisocial personality traits in a sample of 638 UK residents

  4.3 Childhood self-control and reproduction in a British cohort born in 1958

  4.4 Childhood self-control and reproduction in a British cohort born in 1970

  5.1 The rate of return of childhood versus adult interventions

  5.2 Children’s quarrelling with parents by satisfaction with life overall, 2011–2012

  5.3 Children’s talk with parents by satisfaction with life overall, 2011–2012

  8.1 Percentage of Perry Preschool participants who were unemployed at the age of 40 versus the average rate of unemployment for African Americans in 2004

  8.2 Percentage of Perry Preschool participants who had served a prison sentence by the age of 40 versus the average rate of incarceration for African Americans in 2001

  8.3 The distribution of questionnaire scores on conscientiousness in 2,532 participants from one of my own studies (dashed lines indicate one standard deviation)

  9.1 Bar chart showing the average number of children under the age of 16 in working, mixed and workless households, April–June 2013, UK

  9.2 Bar chart showing the average number of children under the age of 16 in working, mixed, workless and troubled households, April–June 2013, UK

  9.3 Targeted annual expenditure on troubled families

  9.4 Reactive annual expenditure on troubled families

  9.5 Homicides in England and Wales between 1901 and 2011

  9.6 The relationship in the USA from 2000 to 2009 between per-capita consumption of cheese and deaths due to tangled bed sheets

  10.1 Bar chart showing the average number of children under the age of 16 in working, mixed and workless households, April–June 2013, UK

  Tables

  4.1 Average number of children under the age of 16 in working, mixed and workless households in England and Wales during April–June 2013

  9.1 Employment status of individuals convicted of homicide in England and Wales from 2007/2008 to 2012

  Acknowledgements

  Modern science is a matter of teamwork and this book reflects the influence of many people. First, I thank my parents Robert and Kathleen for endowing me – through the interaction of nature and nurture – with a thirst for knowledge, which is perhaps the most important asset of all for a scientist. They also gave me a belief that the status quo should be questioned as well as the benefit of a stable, supportive and loving childhood home, but without being a soft touch: my employment-resistant personality profile became apparent at an early age and my parents did their best to stamp it out. My sister Katie assisted with that process by setting an example of highly conscientious and agreeable behaviour, but I remain easily distracted and therefore must also thank my aunt and uncle, Barbara and Guy, who helped to save my sanity and this book by providing me with a quiet and internet-free place to write certain particularly difficult sections of the manuscript. The literary world is a complex and strange one to a scientific researcher and I was therefore lucky to benefit from the advice of Mike and Marian Shaw as well as their kind hospitality many years ago when I was a callow and near penniless warehouse worker, newly arrived in London. The bosses of that warehouse were decent enough to employ me for almost three years and at the same time taught me a lot about the world of work: thank you Paul and Anto. Once I entered the world of scientific publishing I was very lucky to benefit from the advice of the established scientific author Professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, who provided many wise suggestions as to how to proceed. I thank the diligent and gifted staff at Palgrave Macmillan who helped to make The Welfare Trait into a book rather than just a series of chapters. In particular, I thank Paul Stevens for spotting the potential of The Welfare Trait as a Palgrave Macmillan book and Nicola Jones for taking time out of her Christmas holiday to read the entire manuscript, a sacrifice that (I hope) was worthwhile, as she provided astute editorial analysis that did a lot to improve the book. Ele
anor Christie successfully saw the book through the labyrinth of anonymous peer review – I am most grateful to her for undertaking this arduous task, as well as to the three anonymous reviewers whose criticisms were sometimes harsh, sometimes gentle but always useful. As a result of all these efforts, I think this book represents a true meeting of minds between author and publisher and is much the better for it. Before the manuscript was known to the publisher, it had already gone through four drafts – drafts that were scrutinised by a doughty group of test readers, namely Alex Douglas, Simon Brunton, Rosalind Arden, Atalanta Arden-Miller and Jonathan O’Muircheartaigh. I also thank all those with whom I have had inspiring discussions over the five and a half years it took to write this book, especially Rob Davis, Andy Davis, Emma Wright, Sophie Inchley-Mort, Tim Bates and David Gasston. Last but not least, I salute Professors Philip Corr and James Heckman who have provided me with much of my scientific inspiration.

  Preface

  As a personality researcher employed at public expense, I feel I have a duty to use my scientific knowledge to try to help improve the prospects of our society. In this book, I explore a topic that is dear to my heart, namely how discoveries from personality research could be used to help improve the welfare state. This topic is especially important to me because for several years before I became established in my scientific career, I worked in a range of low-paid roles and, in between jobs, I claimed unemployment benefits. I am therefore more interested than most academics in seeking to use scientific findings to ensure that the welfare state is there to look after future generations, like it was there to look after me. This book was also motivated by my frustration at ill-informed personality-related stereotypes of welfare claimants. For example, we sometimes see welfare claimants stereotyped as genetically hardwired to be unconscientious and disagreeable, shunning work for a life of idleness courtesy of the public purse. Conversely, welfare claimants may be portrayed as the helpless victims of capitalism, mere leaves blown around by the powerful winds of the global economy. As I am both a personality researcher and a former welfare claimant, I have a stake in both aspects of this topic and I can therefore see from my own experiences how important the details are. For example, as the data summarised in this book show, welfare claimants on average do possess a personality profile that is less conscientious and agreeable than that of employed citizens, but genes don’t have much to do with this – the environment is much more important. The global economic situation of course forms part of our environment, but so does the welfare state and, as I hope to show, the latter factor has a crucial role to play in shaping the personality profile of the population.

  1

  What Is Personality and Why Does the Welfare State Matter?

  In October 1833, a young English biologist travelling in South America mused in his journal about the factors that influence the success of a nation, concluding ‘a republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour’. That biologist was Charles Darwin, and in his journal entry he touched upon a resource that is now recognised as exerting a significant influence on the prosperity of a nation, namely human capital. The notion of human capital is a broad one, encompassing a nation’s stock of skills and knowledge. But its end result is narrower, being the capacity to carry out labour that produces economic value.

  The welfare state has long been viewed as a threat to human capital, owing to concerns that providing unemployed citizens with a guaranteed income may discourage them from working for a living (Beveridge, 1942). Scandinavian economists have led the way in attempts to define these concerns. For example, almost 20 years ago, the eminent Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck warned that ‘the supply of benefits creates its own demand. Indeed, moral hazard and cheating are, in my judgement, the weak spot of the welfare state’ (Lindbeck, 1995, p. 2).

  Lindbeck’s fears have since been supported empirically by studies showing that generous welfare states do indeed erode the ethical standards of citizens, much as he predicted. For example, the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman summarised this literature as follows:

  Participation in generous welfare states leads to erosion of the work ethic and withdrawal from participation in the social compact. There is evidence of cohort drift in welfare participation. Those cohorts who have lived a greater fraction of their lives under the generosity of the welfare state come to accept its benefits and game the system at higher rates.

  (Heckman, 2008, p. 20)

  The biological literature also urges caution: in his seminal 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins described the welfare state as perhaps the greatest example of altruism in the animal kingdom but warned of its self-destructive potential. Viewed together with the economic studies conducted in Scandinavia, Dawkins’ warning therefore provides credible grounds for believing that we need to be vigilant as to the self-destructive tendencies of the welfare state. However, in order to protect the welfare state from itself, we must first understand the mechanisms that cause it to erode human capital so that we can implement amendments that preserve its good points but ameliorate its weaknesses.

  One potentially important discovery is that the welfare state can boost the number of children born into disadvantaged households. For example, research in the UK has shown that for every 3 per cent rise in the generosity of benefits, the number of children born to claimants rises by approximately 1 per cent (Brewer, Ratcliffe & Smith, 2011). Moreover, this association between benefit generosity and reproductive behaviour appears to be causal, because follow-up interviews found that claimants discontinued contraception in response to increased generosity of benefits.

  The importance of this discovery to the human capital debate is that childhood disadvantage has been shown in randomised controlled experiments – the gold standard of scientific proof – to promote the formation of an aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking personality profile that impairs occupational and social adjustment during adulthood (Heckman, Pinto & Savelyev, 2013). A welfare state that increases the number of children born into disadvantaged households therefore risks increasing the number of citizens who develop an aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking personality profile due to being exposed to disadvantage during childhood. Because this personality profile impairs occupational and social adjustment, its proliferation constitutes a potent and direct mechanism by which the welfare state can erode the human capital of the population from generation to generation.

  Children are the future of our society and so the possibility that the ostensibly altruistic institution of the welfare state can damage their personality development – and thus their human capital – is a worrying one. I am a personality researcher by profession, and in this book, I examine the scientific literature in an attempt to evaluate the capacity of the welfare state to damage personality development.

  First, in the chapter entitled ‘The Employment-Resistant Personality Profile’, we shall see evidence that the type of personality profile which tends to be developed by childhood disadvantage – an aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking predisposition – is the same personality profile that is associated with impaired occupational performance across most of the employment spectrum. In line with this finding, we shall also see evidence that people with this personality profile are over-represented amongst welfare claimants. For this reason, I have dubbed it the ‘employment-resistant’ personality profile and formalise it as consisting of significantly below average scores on the personality dimensions of conscientiousness and agreeableness. As we shall see, these dimensions are well established in the scientific literature and are used by modern personality researchers to measure individual differences in aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking tendencies.

  These data leave unanswered the question of whether the employment-resistant personality profile is the cause rather than the product of unsatisfactory occupational outcomes. For example, it might be the case that adverse occupational circumstances re
duce motivation to behave conscientiously and agreeably, which in turn worsens the individual’s chances of gaining and keeping employment. In Chapter 3 – ‘The Lifelong Impact of Personality’ – we address this issue by examining studies that record personality characteristics in childhood and then trace their effects on adult life, whilst controlling for the effect of other important variables such as intelligence and parental socio-economic status (SES). These studies suggest that the employment-resistant personality profile is indeed the cause rather than product of negative occupational outcomes because the less conscientious and agreeable a child’s personality profile, the worse they tend to do as adults in the world of work, despite their intelligence or social background.

  A key conclusion in Chapter 3 is that the employment-resistant personality profile doesn’t just impair workplace performance – it also increases the frequency of behaviour that is likely to impair the life chances of the next generation (for example, teenage parenthood). This is a crucial finding because it suggests that individuals with employment-resistant personality characteristics not only suffer impaired life outcomes, but also transmit that difficulty to their children and thus risk damaging the life chances of the next generation. But what role could the welfare state play in this undesirable life trajectory?

  In Chapter 4 – ‘The Influence of Benefits on Claimant Reproduction’ – we shall see that the number of children born to welfare claimants tracks the generosity of benefits, with increases in the generosity of welfare benefits being followed by deliberate increases in their rate of reproduction via altered contraception usage. Furthermore, we shall see evidence that this effect is likely to be driven primarily by claimants who possess the employment-resistant personality profile, since epidemiological studies show that this personality profile is, in general, associated with having more children. In this chapter, we shall also see evidence that the employment-resistant personality profile is associated with financial irresponsibility, since such parents do not tend to manage their welfare benefits conscientiously to improve the lot of their children, but instead tend to waste the money on unnecessary purchases.