Social Welfare Policy Analysis and Choices

Hobart A Burch

Contents
I. Policy Choice and Intervention



Social Welfare Policy: When and Where?
What is Social Policy?
Three Policy Sectors
De Jure, De Facto, and Default Policy
Types of Benefits: Material, Therapeutic, or Opportunity
Forms of Delivery: In-Kind, Cash, or Voucher
The Scope of Social Policy
Making Choices
Policy Analysis
Making Policy Choices
Intents
Effects
Policy Interventions
No Hiding Place
Where to Intervene
When to Intervene
Degrees of Intervention
Changing the System
Radical Change
Reform
Rules of the Game
Changing Agent Behavior
Supplementing the Hosts
Social Policy and the Courts
II. Foundations for Choice
What’s True: Facts and Beliefs
Being Logical
Scientific and Nonscientific Reasoning
Three Sources of “Facts”
Biases and Hermeneutics
What’s Right: Values and Interests
Values
Interests
Values and Interests Entwined
Ethics: Ends and Means
Ethics: Gray Areas
The Human Condition: Jewels, Jackals, or Junk?
What is a Person Worth?
Noble or Base?
Free Will or Determinism?
Human Nature and the Causes of Poverty
III. Fundamental Value Choices
Fairness: Equality, Equity, or Adequacy?
Distributive Justice: What is Fair?
Equality
Equity
Adequacy
Multiple Tiers: Adequacy Plus Equity
Nonfairness Doctrines
Inequality and Redistribution
Negative Freedom and Individualism
Four Kinds of “Liberal”
Negative Freedom
Limiting Freedom
Classical Individualism
Individualism and Trusteeship
Positive Freedom and Fraternité
Positive Freedom
Procedural Justice
Affirmative Action
Fraternité
Mixed Reality
Economic Animals?
Economic Reductionism
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Alternatives: Cost Utility and Cost Effectiveness
Putting a Price on Intangibles
Welfare Economics
The Protestant Work Ethic
Part of the Package
IV. Economic and Social Market Choices
The Economic Market
A Market Economy
Pros and Cons of the “Free” Economic Market
Traditional Economies
Command Economies
Mixed Economies
The Social State
Introduction
Enhancement
Fiscal Interventions
Monetary Interventions
Supply-Side Economics
Limitations of All Supply-and-Demand Strategies
Regulation
Levels of Intervention
The Social Market
Economic and Social Markets
Diswelfares and the Economic Market
Private Social Market Supplement: Charity
Public Social Market Supplement: The Welfare State
How Much Socail Market Can We Afford?
Ideology and the Welfare State
V. Huma Service Delivery Choices
Benefits: Broad or Begrudged?
A Social Responsibility Hierarchy
Backward of Forward-Looking?
Institutional or Residual
Universal or Selective
Selective Criteria
Mixing the Models
Rights or Alms?
Rights
Full Entitlement
Private Entitlement
Conditioanl Entitlement
Administrative Appeals
Court Adjudication
Public, Voluntary, or Commercial?
Legal Distinctions
Traditional Views of Each
Ideologies
Blurring of Distinctions
Church and State
Public Funding of Sectarian Services in the United States
What Sector When?
Paying for It?
Restricted and Unrestricted Subsidies
Federal Subsidies: Grants
Federal Subsidies: Tax Expenditures
Third-Party Purchase of Service
Setting the Price
Cost Controls
Prepaid Managed Care
Centralized or Decentralized?
Direct National Administration
Federalism: Public Decentralization
Nonprofit Privatization
Commercial Privatization
Parapublic Institutions
In Conclusion
Appendix: A Framework for Analyzing a Pol