Every day at the moment seems to bring another nagging question about exactly what sort recovery this is turning out to be. One day this week alone, my Guardian colleague Rowena Mason has news about government plans to force jobseekers to accept zero-hour contracts on pain of losing their benefit , while I report on how supposed “self-employment” is covering up for a loss of employed posts across much of the country.
There’s plenty more nit-picking about the sort of growth that is currently restarting in my new book, Hard Times, but before the media’s goldfish-like memory consigns the great slump that came before the new growth to the history books, it is important to ask what the biggest downturn in living memory did to the fabric of our society.
The first part of the answer was that there was, to an extent that surprised me, an unambiguous “social recession” in the face of the great storm of 2008/9. Volunteering, when broadly defined, dropped away by something like 20%, more than double the fall in GDP. This result was found in more than one survey at once, with broader and more narrow definitions of “volunteering”, and applied even after smoothing the data to guard against arbitrary ups and downs. The big recession was answered not by a big society, but by a community that fell away in poor British neighbourhoods in particular – and did so to a far greater extent in the UK than the US.
That transatlantic contrast is a reminder that there is more to life than money, because there is of course less of a safety net, more inequality and deeper poverty in the United States than the UK. America’s deep civic traditions may have played a role in protecting its communities from the storm, as indeed may the social role of its churches. But one should not leap from this, as those on the right may wish to do, to imagining that Britain could assume that it, too, could shelter the good life from economic vicissitudes with the sort of minimalist American-style welfare that we are slowly edging towards. Indeed, two other US/UK comparisons in the book send out very clear warnings that retrenching the social security offers none of the claimed cultural advantages, but instead very grave risks for what David Cameron used to call “general well-being”.
Iain Duncan Smith and his allies like to talk about (virtually mythical) families where no-one in generations has worked, because of the supposedly stifling indulgence of Britain’s sprawling benefit system. In fact, we discover, there is at least as much of an inherited ‘dependency culture’ in the US as there is in the UK, even though there has never been the same sort of comprehensive safety net there. At the same time, we discover, that when an American gets laid off and then finds a new job, they retain a significant “happiness scar”, something that scarcely happens at all in Britain, where historically benefits have provided much more of a breathing space to find a new job. That breathing space may be under threat now, but the chances of being made miserable and impoverished by a new job are still lower than in the US. The poor there more often have to choose between accepting the first available job and destitution, and with the federal minimum wage today no higher than it was in the Eisenhower era, there is an awfully long way to fall between different American jobs.
To sum up, the immediate “social recession” caused by an economic downturn does not appear to be preventable by safety nets alone, but the danger of lasting injury to well-being looks considerably worse when there is nothing to cushion the blow. Even before we come to the sheer financial hardship, this would seem like reason enough for anyone who cares about Cameronite General Well-Being to dig in against the Cameron benefit cuts.
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