Size of the Welfare State

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What Is the Welfare State? A Cross-National Comparison

2 calificaciones

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Columbia University

What Is the Welfare State? A Cross-National Comparison

2 calificaciones

Curso 1 de 5 en SpecializationSocial Policy for Social Services & Health Practitioners

In all nations, social policy is a very large public investment. Course 1 will explore the size, structure, and outcomes of U.S. social policy and compare this policy to those of similar developed countries. The course will also probe the values this policy represents and the values debate regarding about how big our welfare state should be— in other words, how much of our education, housing, health, income support, and social services the government should supply and how much individuals should supply for themselves. This course addresses issues of power, oppression, and white supremacy. The course is part of a sequence in social policy that has an HONORS TRACK. This track will prepare the learner for masters-level work in policy, which involves reading the literature, writing concise summaries and probing critiques. Over the sequence the learner will develop a policy analysis that will create a foundation for professional policy analyst assignments.

De la lección

Does the Welfare State Enrich Us of Impoverish Us?

In this module, we will explain the size, structure and outcomes of US social policy when compared with comparable developed nations and to differentiate the conservative approaches to social welfare

Politics and Policy3:30

Size of the Welfare State5:34

The Structure of the Welfare State9:20

Floors and Platforms3:50

Fragile Families by Professor Garfinkel6:42

Wealth & the Welfare State by Professor Garfinkel6:50

Economic Conservatives5:10

Social Conservatives4:53

Conoce a los instructores

John Robertson
Policy Lecturer
School of Social Work, Columbia University in New York City

To think about welfare states and social welfare policy,

it's useful to have a context to frame the choices that any nation,

particularly our nation, is making.

So, we do this by comparing across like nations.

As we've discussed earlier, in that case,

we're talking about nations that have the wealth and

the capacity to do what we can do in the United States.

So, we're thinking about how do we compare

these and then we bring a set of values to the comparison.

So, in this unit,

we're going to talk about the beginning of that set of values,

and we're going to,

over the rest of this module,

continue to develop the conversation about

the particular values that we bring when we think about a comparable welfare state.

So, we bring these values

and there some things that we have almost complete universal support for.

One is that we need a public health system,

that we need clean water,

we need sanitation, we need to manage infectious diseases.

All of these things are in the interests of all of us.

So, there's very little debate about whether we should be doing this.

We may have very specific debates about how we do pieces of this,

but not the whether.

Everyone believes that we need to provide some kind of health care for the poor.

We can debate, again,

about the structure of this,

but no one really is making the case that we should

just leave people suffering on the side of the road.

We've made a deep commitment in the United States for

publicly paid primary and secondary education, high school education.

We have made a commitment to social security and workers compensation.

So, support for elders as they age,

for disabled people, and for people are heard on their jobs.

We have some kind of

a long-term commitment that we'll talk about when we do the history in

the next course of care for the aged,

for the disabled, and for children.

So, those are pieces around which we largely agree.

We have some social welfare purpose.

Now, the questions of how we will spend much of the rest of the course talking about.

But there isn't a lot of debate about the whether of them.

So, when we're comparing welfare states all of which have this same internal agreement,

we think about, what are the sizes of the welfare state across rich nations?

How is it structured and what are the outcomes?

So, in this particular video lecture,

we're going to think about the size, the comparative size.

So, this is a graph that comes from a study by Professor Garfinkel.

Those of you who are reading in the honors course will

read an article on where this is quoted.

They're talking about the relative size of the US welfare state.

So, this is expressed in terms of US dollars per person.

So, every other currency is switched to US dollar,

and how much does the nation's spend per person.

Then, it has publicly

provided benefits and then benefits that are provided by your employer.

So, if we come down here to the United States,

these are publicly provided benefits,

and these are benefits that include

both publicly provided benefits and benefits that are provided by the employer.

You'll see, from any people, quite surprisingly,

that the only nation that comes close to

the US's commitment to social welfare are Sweden,

and then Norway, the very oil rich small population nation on

the edge of Europe actually has

a stronger welfare state than the United States, you'll see here.

But the Swedish welfare state is actually

slightly smaller than the American welfare state.

Then, when we add employer provided benefits,

employer pensions, employer health care, employer disability,

employer provided childcare, the US level jumps

substantially above every other nations level of expenditure,

except again for Norway.

Norway is this outlier that has a

particularly wealthy setting to be able to build its welfare state.

So, the surprise here is that compared to Canada, compared to France,

compared to the Netherlands, compared to Finland,

the United States spends significantly more on welfare state activities.

Even compared to Sweden,

we spend more public dollars.

When we include the employer provided benefits,

we spend substantially more.

So, let's start with our comparison about the US welfare state by

noting the fact that the United States has one

of the largest welfare states in the developed world.

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