Academic literature on the topic 'Gerontology|Economics, General|Sociology, Public and Social Welfare'

Abstract Animal welfare is often claimed to be a 'public good', i.e. requiring government intervention and legislation to ensure that animal welfare is respected. In other words, markets, on their own, cannot be relied on to deliver socially acceptable animal welfare. In fact, the issues surrounding animal welfare are more complex and subtle than this. This chapter first explains the general features of public goods, as defined and recognized in economics (Section 2). It then turns to the specific case of animal welfare (Section 3) and explains that outlawing cruelty to animals is clearly a genuine public good, but improving animal welfare can only be achieved by reflecting consumers' willingness to pay for better animal welfare production. However, there is a clear disconnect between citizens' apparent concerns about animal welfare and their exhibited willingness to pay for better animal welfare. Does this imply a clear market failure? This apparent failure is examined with the aid of a thought experiment, and identifies the nature of the problem - a combination of information and communication deficiencies with peoples' limited availability of time, resources and motivation to attend to all social issues with each and every purchase decision. The underlying problem is one of consumption externality - other peoples' consumption decisions affect my/your assessment of our own welfare - since farmed animal welfare depends on peoples' consumption decisions.

This chapter examines economic accommodation in the age of contentment. For some centuries, reputable mainstream economics has given grace and acceptability to convenient belief—to what the socially and economically favored most wish or need to have believed. This economics permeates and even dominates professional discussion and writing, the textbooks and classroom instruction, as can be seen in the area of monetary policy. The chapter first considers three basic requirements to serve contentment: the need to defend the general limitation on government as regards the economy; to find social justification for the unbridled pursuit and possession of wealth; and to justify a reduced sense of public responsibility for the poor. It then explores Adam Smith's case against unwanted government action, or more specifically that part which is not in the service of contentment. It also discusses economic accommodation in relation to the welfare state, supply-side economics, and tax reductions.

This chapter describes and analyses the progressive spread of economic "expertise" in the sphere of public policy. It sketches the historical process of the expansion of economic expertise in France, and discusses the way it involves a reshaping of the relations between the State, markets, universities, and other relevant institutional entities (e.g., political parties, unions, etc.), as well as society in general. Considered from this socio-historical viewpoint, economic expertise seems to have contributed to the opening of State-centered regulation to more pluralistic and market-driven public policies in a number of sectors. The analysis draws more specifically on the case of health care, which has been engaged in a clear transformation from a traditional (welfare) State-centered regulation to more open and economically-driven policy. Various components of economic expertise and its concrete uses are under scrutiny, such as classic macroeconomic/econometric forecasting and conjunctural analysis; sectorial expertise; think tanks and organization-related expertise or counter-expertise; academic knowledge in the sphere of policy advice and decision-making; and the production and diffusion of economic discourse through newspapers, magazines, books, etc.

In Chapters 6 and 7 we discussed how to compute overlapping generations models and how to use them for policy analysis. The models developed there are completely deterministic in that they exclude both income and investment risk. While this ensured analytical tractability of the household problem and greatly facilitated computation, it certainly limit the scope of policy analysis. Consequently these chapters centred around clarifying the impact of public policy on the labour-supply and savings decisions of households and around evaluating its consequences for intergenerational redistribution. In practice, however, households face all kinds of risks that cannot be insured perfectly by the market. This opens up an additional channel through which the government could increase households’ welfare, namely by providing public insurance. In Chapter 10, we studied individual behaviour in an uncertain world, where individuals face idiosyncratic labour income and mortality risk as well as aggregate capital-market risk. The models therein are partial equilibrium models, meaning that prices are fixed and there is no need for the government to operate a balanced budget. In this chapter, we embed a household’s decision model with idiosyncratic labour-productivity risk and endogenous labour-supply decisions into a general equilibrium framework, which leads us to the stochastic OLG model. In this setup, factor prices respond to changes in individual behaviour and the government will be an explicit entity that collects revenue from taxes to finance its expenditure. Such a setup allows us to analyse both the distortionary and the risk-sharing effects of public policies. This chapter is organized in three main sections. The first two closely follow the setup of Chapter 6. We first explain the general structure of the stochastic OLG model with all its actors and conduct some steady-state policy analysis. We then discuss how to extend the model to include a transition path between steady states and to compute aggregate efficiency effects. In the last section, Section 11.3, we provide some policy applications where we analyse optimal tax schedules and the optimal size of the social-security system in more detail. In the following, we extend the life-cycle model with variable labour supply from Section 10.1.2 to a full general equilibrium setup with overlapping generations.

Anthropology's chief contribution to psychiatry is to emphasize the importance of the social world in diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, and to provide concepts and methods that psychiatrists can apply (the appropriate cross-disciplinary translation first being made, however). But that is not the only contribution that anthropology offers. Ethnographers are aware that knowledge is positioned, facts and values are inseparable, and experience is simply too complex and robust to be easily boxed into tight analytical categories. Hence a sense of the fallibility of understanding, the limitation of practice, and irony and paradox in human conditions is the consequence of ethnography as a method of knowledge production. Anthropology also complements the idea of psychosomatic relationships with evidence and theorizing about sociosomatic relationships. Here moral processes—namely what is at stake in local worlds—are shown to be closely linked with emotional processes, which are frequently about experiences of loss, fear, vexation, and betrayal of what is collectively and individually at stake in interpersonal relationships. Change in the former can change the latter, and this can at times work in reverse as well. Examples include the way symptoms intensify or even arise in response to fear and vexation concerning threats perceived as serious dangers to what is most at stake. The relationship of poverty to morbidity and mortality is a different example of sociosomatic processes. Poverty correlates with increased morbidity and mortality. Psychiatrists have often had trouble getting the point that public health and infectious disease experts have long understood. But it is not just diarrhoeal disease, tuberculosis, AIDS, heart disease, and cancer that demonstrate this powerful social epidemiological correlation—so do psychiatric conditions. Depression, substance abuse, violence, and their traumatic consequences not only occur at higher rates in the poorest local worlds, but also cluster together (much as do infectious diseases), and those vicious clusters define a local place, usually a disintegrating inner-city community. Hence the findings of the National Co-Morbidity Study in the United States of America that most psychiatric conditions occur as comorbidity is a step toward this ethnographic knowledge—that in the most vulnerable, dangerous, and broken local worlds, psychiatric diseases are not encountered as separate problems but as part of these sociosomatic clusters. Finally, anthropology is also salient for policy and programme development in psychiatry. Against an overly narrow neurobiological framing of psychiatric conditions as brain disorders, anthropology in psychiatry draws on cross-national, cross-ethnic, and disintegrating community data to emphasize the relationship of increasing rates of mental health problems, especially among underserved, impoverished populations worldwide, and increasing problems in the organization and delivery of mental health services to fundamental transformations in political economy, institutions, and culture that are remaking our epoch. In so doing, anthropology projects a vision of psychiatry as a discipline central to social welfare and health policy. It argues as well against the profession's ethnocentrism and for the field as a larger component of international health. Anthropology (together with economics, sociology, and political science) also provides the tools for psychiatry to develop policies and programmes that address the close ties between social conditions and mental health conditions, and social policies and mental health policies. In this sense, anthropology urges psychiatry in a global direction, one in which psychiatric knowledge and practice, once altered to fit in more culturally salient ways in local worlds around the globe, have a more important place at the policy table.