Mais uma do meu incontornável guia de leituras, Delanceyplace, ainda que de excertos. As amostras são, por vezes, melhor que o produto inteiro...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Today's encore selection -- from Art and Value by Dave Beech.
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Though we think of the "welfare state" as something created in the Great Depression and the aftermath of World War II, it was born in industrial powerhouse Germany in the late 1800s:
"The welfare state was conceived, planned and the major elements of it built in the aftermath of the Second World War, but, before the outbreak of the First World War, several European countries had already established some form of what would become the core of the welfare state. Germany led the way, through Bismarck's strategic outflanking of the socialists in the 1880s by guaranteeing national health insurance, a pension, a minimum wage and workplace regulation, vacation, and unemployment insurance. The Bismarckean prototype of the welfare state was followed by Denmark between 1891 and 1907, Sweden between 1891 and 1913 and Britain between 1908 and 1911. |
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| Otto von Bismarck |
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"[Arthur Cecil] Pigou's Wealth and Welfare, published in 1912, marks the official birth of welfare economics, but welfare economics would be reborn in the 1930s and was already sketched out in the nineteenth century. [Alfred] Marshall had considered the possibility of state intervention for cheap housing, free meals for children, stabilising employment, and old age pensions (supporting Charles Booth's pension scheme in 1892), as well as fresh air. In an article published in 1907 Marshall argued that the state should be active in 'providing green belts around cities ... by bringing 'the beauties of nature and art within the reach of ordinary citizens', and on providing assistance to make everyone ... truly educated'. Pigou examined the limitations of capitalism and various non-market methods for correcting it, focusing on the problems of 'market failure' and what have subsequently been called 'externalities'.
"Like Marshall before him, Pigou 'thought it necessary that "an authority of wider reach" should step in and "tackle the collective problems of beauty, of air and of light", just as had been done for public utilities such as gas and water". In the 1930s, the 'New Deal' introduced to American capitalism safeguards and public policies including welfare and jobs creation, which had existed in Europe for some time. The post-war expansion of social security begins in Great Britain during the war, through ambitious plans for reconstruction, leading to the 1942 publication of the Beveridge Report. Alongside recommendations for dealing with poverty, which Beveridge called 'Want', the report called for the integration of social security within a comprehensive universal minimum state provision to combat idleness (that is to say, unemployment), disease, ignorance and squalor. Consequently, 'the voice of [Friedrich] Hayek and other opponents to interventionism were largely muffled in the post-war period', while '[John Maynard] Keynes devised forms of intervention that led to his being portrayed as the father of the welfare state and deficit spending.' ...
"Richard Titmuss distinguishes two types of welfare state, one that is restricted (to correcting market failure and assisting deserving groups) and a second that is universalistic and comprehensive. Gøsta Esping-Andersen identifies three distinct but overlapping political economies of the welfare state: one offers only modest guarantees against the effects of the market; another confronts both democracy and the market through the setting up of an elite bureaucratic administration that promotes conservative and traditional social relations; and the third establishes widespread de-commodification through social democracy." |
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Art and Value: Art's Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics
Author: Dave Beech
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Copyright 2015 by Brill Academic Publishers
Pages: 128-132 |
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