I am four years old and sitting on the steps outside a school and crying to be let in. My brother, older than me, is inside the two-room school in the village to which we were evacuated in the Second World War as the bombs began to fall on Manchester. I don't know it yet, but I want many different kinds of knowledge. I want to know about the letters and words on the bright posters around the schoolroom walls. I want to be able to paint and crayon and sing with the other children. I want to run around the small playground and play new games. In short, I want the “cultural, mental and physical development” that the national curriculum of 1988 announced would provide me with a broad and balanced education, along with spiritual and moral development. As it was a Church of England school, I would have got those anyway once the church and state had been reconciled in the 1944 Education Act, and later on in the Catholic convent school I was sent to, where we had a lesson on “manners and morals” every Friday.

But I would also be introduced to various kinds of ignorance. I wouldn't learn until much later that letters and words could be in other languages. I wouldn't realize that some of the “truths” I learned about Britain, its history and geography, even stories and poetry, would be lies or misinformation. I wouldn't learn that there were other religions or ethnicities until my teenage years. I didn't know I was being introduced to the acceptance of a social class hierarchy when we sang a hymn, “All things bright and beautiful”, which included the verse, “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate”. I was yet to learn that being a girl would limit my future. I didn't know that my excited need to know about the world around me would soon be narrowed into joyless rote learning and practising for something called tests, and a thing we learned to dread called the 11-plus examination.

The fishing village of Helmsdale was constructed in 1814 to accommodate people displaced in highland clearances and enclosures. Above the town, there stands a memorial featuring flags of Britain’s settler colonies. This memorial reminds us that those who suffered the violence of land dispossession at home could, in principle, find benefit in enacting the same processes abroad.

Famous imperialist Cecil Rhodes proposed a solution to the “bread and butter question” by agitating for the acquisition of “new lands for settling the surplus population” of Britain. Indeed, even as the moral crisis of squalor grew across the nineteenth century, Britain was in part able to manage and mitigate the consequences of its unequal development via imperial expansion. In the eight decades after 1850, just under 17 million people emigrated from the British Isles, about 41 per cent of the 1900 population. Yet increasingly, politicians and policymakers sought to undertake social reforms at home. Why the turn around?

David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, led a series of Liberal reforms from 1908 to 1916, which attempted to copy social insurance policies that underpinned Germany’s industrial rise to power. Inter-imperial competition gave way to world war and that war cleared the stage for the Russian Revolution. In 1919, Lloyd George, now prime minister, justified an expanded social insurance system by reference to the threat of Bolshevism thus: “Even if this were to cost hundreds of millions of pounds, what is that to the stability of the state?” (cited in Jones & Murie 2006).

Faced with such a threat to the capitalist system itself, some began to judge the piecemeal voluntaristic character of philanthropic organization as unfit for purpose. Helen Bosanquet and Octavia Hill’s Charity Organisation Society was neither sufficiently organized nor nationalized. Thus, early-twentieth-century leaders of industry, politicians and reformers increasingly entertained the prospect that the state might have to be used as a lever for domestic reform. Lloyd George is exemplary of this shift. But even Beveridge considered social reform less in moral terms and more and more through the impersonal metrics of national coordination and planning.

The Covid-19 pandemic has challenged governments and institutions and uncovered structural problems in all countries of the world. It is clear that its impact and consequences will be long-lasting, and more so in those countries, like Mexico, that were especially reckless in their response and who were slow to modify their initial policies despite the evidence. The effects will be felt for many years to come since the crisis has impacted life trajectories for millions of households. Thus, a consideration of the future of the economy needs first to address those public policies implemented to meet the Covid crisis.

In Mexico, the pandemic has been a human, social and economic tragedy. Like in the rest of the world, the crisis forced extreme actions and policies on many fronts. In Mexico, unfortunately, the government’s reaction was slow, insufficient and ineffective. The government’s first response to the Covid-19 pandemic was to downplay it, which meant a lack of preparation on behalf of the population and of the health institutions, in spite of the fact that the first case arrived in Mexico at the end of February 2020. Not surprisingly, the first victims were healthcare workers, who did not have either the appropriate personal protection equipment, or the medical preparation to treat the incoming patients. Mexico’s death rate of healthcare personnel became one of the highest of the world. By June 2020 their reported death rate was 2.6 per cent out of the total deaths in Mexico, more than double than Brazil, triple than Peru and five times more than China or the UK at that time (IGHS 2021).

In spite of much rhetoric, the government did not employ its full institutional capabilities to confront the crisis. The Sanitary National Commission, the body legally responsible, was sidelined and the government’s efforts were determined by the undersecretary Hugo Lopez-Gatell (Chertorivsky et al. 2020). As a result, many of the health measures were improvised and poorly designed owing to the lack of budgetary support, or the necessary policies for effective coordination between federal government entities and those of state governments.

The essence of what it means to be “in want” is remarkably stable across history and geography. When Beveridge named Want as one of the giants that the nation should slay, he did not mean that citizens should have everything they wanted. He meant that people should be able to meet their essential needs. He spoke ambitiously about abolishing poverty.

So, what are the essentials for a life in which we are not trapped “in want”? For most people, in most places, a decent life means: a secure home; steady work; being able to cover the bills and buy essentials; giving our children a good start in life; good mental and physical health and access to healthcare; respect and a sense of personal dignity; feeling part of society.

What these things look like and how you get them varies according to time and place. The role of the state and the responsibilities of employers, business, civil society, individuals and families are fiercely debated. Beveridge's vision was for the state to play a greater role than ever before: as an instrument by which we discharge our collective responsibilities to one another. The power of his vision was that we can take care of one another not only through family and community but also through collective institutions. When times are tough we do not need to depend on the unreliable kindness of strangers.

Hang on, isn't this supposed to be a “golden age” for old age? Aren't the young getting a raw deal while older generations enjoy the fruits of gold-plated pensions, a house price boom and generous state support? Yes, but not all pensioners are sitting pretty and enjoying a healthier and wealthier retirement than could have been imagined by previous generations, or than is likely to be on offer for their grandchildren. There are hundreds of thousands who are suffering and see no way out.

A 2013 report for the DWP (Kotecha 2013) included descriptions of the experiences of older people living on low incomes. Despite the dispassionate language, they show the dire situations some found themselves trapped in:

Research by the charity Independent Age (Seaman 2020) highlights how disempowered and trapped many older people feel, especially those on low incomes.

In 1978, Stuart Hall and a set of co-writers published Policing the Crisis, in which they examined the media frenzy over Black “muggings” in the early 1970s. Hall argued that this phenomenon was a manufactured “moral panic”. In fact, “mugging” was not a term recognized in British law, but was rather slang imported from the United States, which referenced violent and opportunist robbery, especially of elderly (usually white) women. Hall (1978) was concerned to understand how fear of “black crime” was being mobilized in a political turn towards a “law and order” agenda. Such concerns were to eventuate in specialist police operations, including Operation Trident, run by the Metropolitan Police, which focused in particular on Black violence.

As the Butskellism compromise – such as it was – started to unravel in the 1960s, the prospect of naked class struggle became ever more worrisome to the establishment. Enoch Powell’s interventions had built a platform on which to bring the white working class into alliance with business and political leaders in opposition to Black and Asian immigrants who took resources away from “indigenous” working men and, of course, the “traitorous” white elites that defended these newcomer’s equal rights. Hall connected such populist developments to the problem of working-class solidarity in times of economic crises.

Hall argued that Black workers were a “sub-proletariat” that lived their class experience through the modality of race. In this respect, a united front of workers could only coalesce if racism was considered by mainstream working-class organizations to be a legitimate injustice for the labour movement. Racism was not just an issue of industrial relations but of class struggle in and of itself. Alternatively, Powell had cast anti-racism as a project that undermined the legitimacy and worthiness of British subjects (worker and elite) at the hands of illegitimate non-white workers and their white elite defenders. By this logic, the moral panic over mugging channelled Powellite politics in times of crises; it was the wedge with which working-class struggle would be blocked.

Of course, mugging was mostly reported to happen in areas that bred “black crime”. As we saw in the previous chapter, by the end of the 1960s, slum clearances had become driven by cost concerns rather than by the Bevanite principle of general needs and universal social uplift.

The second half of the nineteenth century occupies a particular place in the national imagination. And whilst more contemporary invocations of “Victorian values” seek to return a fractured and transformed polity to a more cohesive and traditional collective past, in truth the Victorian era was also one of fracture and transformation. By the latter half of the century, imperial expansion and industrial urbanization provoked appeals to religion and morality at the same time as they themselves were implicated in the secularization of knowledge – for instance, the new sciences of eugenics and political economy.

Commercial shifts in land use and social hierarchies set the scene for the turbulent Victorian era. Chartering was an eighteenth-century process of establishing corporate ownership through privatizing public land. Enclosure was the process of establishing private property on what had once been communal lands for peasant farmers. By the end of the eighteenth-century, chartering and enclosure had robbed common land from the people, forcing them to dwell more and more in industrial cities in search of work. The landed elites and the mercantile classes who had amassed wealth through industrialism and empire held to a philosophy that their own freedom was bound to their property. They feared the anarchy of the urban poor living in abominable conditions, “masterless men” who had no social standard or economic investment to bind their energies to. The right to vote was for the propertied only, the tyranny of the masses had to be prevented and order imposed upon them.

Many of the chattering classes – those who wrote pamphlets and discoursed in parliamentary halls, tea houses and private clubs – saw in the urban poor the prospect of civilizational decline and a return to “primitive humanity”. The poor, they supposed, lacked a proper work ethic. Self-reliance would have to be their salvation. To civilize domestic indigents meant to build worthy habits by destroying corrupting influences, with particular attention to gin – the devil’s drink. With horror, the chattering classes realized that what was commonplace in the colonial periphery could now be gleaned in the heart of the metropole: encamped in the slums were a race “apart”.

The 1990s were my busiest years ever: career peaking with a job at Goldsmiths, London University as professor of education policy and dean of education, then promoted to pro-warden (a sort of vice-principal). Perks included dinner with the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths in the City. Other delights were three grandchildren and more juggling work and family. With funding from the Leverhulme Trust I organized seminars and a conference on the results to date of Conservative education policies. I also entered into Labour politics in a small way, beingon Jack Straw's Education Advisory Group from 1989 to 1992 and on a European Enquiry Team into technical and vocational education set up by Neil Kinnock. This included interviewing Lionel Jospin, later the French prime minister, and a school dinner of three courses with wine at a lycée (secondary school) in Paris. Then for two years I was an advisor to the shadow education secretary, Ann Taylor, when we wrote the last “old Labour” policy paper on education, and an associate at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), where a young David Miliband organized us into producing Labour education policies, which never happened.

HOW DID HE WEAR HIS UNDERPANTS?

Hindsight is always right. Looking back 30 years it is clear that under John Major's term as prime minister he did take Thatcher’s educational legacy of ignorance for the majority forward, and did not ensure access to a full all-round education for all young people. When he first got the job he was a bit of a figure of fun. After a suggestion that he tucked his shirt into his underpants, cartoonist Steve Bell depicted him as Superman who wore his underpants outside his trousers, and the Spitting Image television series during the 1990s portrayed him as a grey man slowly eating peas (Fluck et al. 1990). But he was clever enough during the struggle to succeed Thatcher to absent himself in hospital to have his wisdom teeth out.

Nicholas Timmins, biographer of the welfare state, reflected that it was not only Beveridge's proposals that were remarkable, but also their enduring resonance with the parameters of political and public debate on the welfare state today (Timmins 2017). The thorny issue of how best to manage housing benefits in a country of vast geographical inequalities in housing costs; the difficulties defining poverty; the fair and equal treatment of women; and the significant challenges reconciling a rights-based system with sufficient benefits to sustain a healthy standard of living without disincentivizing either work or saving. Have any of these challenges been satisfactorily addressed? An eye to the violence of a decade of austerity and the crisis of Covid-19 suggests not. Both eroded hard-won gains for equality, not just in gender but across many protected characteristics. Where the burden of care disproportionately falls on women, women will always be more vulnerable to cuts in welfare and social security. Women will also be more vulnerable to the consequences of a global health crisis where care needs increase both in the public and private realm. Finally, both fiscal austerity and Covid-19 showed with painful clarity the consequences of underinvestment and disinvestment in the health and social care workforce. Beveridge wanted to secure “improved labour standards, economic advancement, and social security” for all (1942: 171). And he did, to a point. But the emerging inequalities first evidenced in the Black Report, the political squabbling over what is fair and the continued refusal to face up to the consequences of uneven power for uneven life chances have made a renewal of Beveridge's survey of the five giants more critical than ever. But where should our attention now be focused?

The early deaths of our children, the causes and consequences of their increasing weight and the mental health epidemic are clear alarm bells. There is an obvious need to dismantle the structures that not only disadvantage people over their lifetime but make them less able to manage the consequences of a lifetime of disadvantage in increasing old age. We are living longer but often in poorer health. The problem of age(ism) has made that only too clear. But these are not the only challenges facing society, nor do they capture the extent of emerging crises that will threaten health and well-being for decades to come.

Poverty is fundamentally about power and powerlessness. The workers with the least power can't avoid jobs that trap them in poverty. The least valuable consumers can't get the best prices. Those without economic and social power are held back, ground down and exposed to public services that treat them at best as children or at worst as cogs in the machine. They don't have the economic power to avoid the social security system or buy better mental health treatment. They don't have the social power to assert their rights or persuade providers to behave with compassion. They don't have the political power to challenge stereotypes or change the direction of policy.

Prejudice and discrimination strip away another layer of power, leaving disabled people, some Black and minority ethnic groups and women with even fewer options and less leverage to change their situation.

When Beveridge proposed the industrial welfare state he did so in an age when the industrial working classes were claiming more power through organized labour. But he and his ilk were still the products of the age of deference and the structures and systems he designed reflect that. His five giants still stalk the UK, but to defeat their modern incarnations we need a new rebalancing of power for a new technological age.

We have to rebalance digital markets to empower consumers; rebalance labour markets so they offer better jobs and careers paths for workers; rebalance the housing market to create stable homes; rebalance our tax system to tap into wealth and revive fairness; and rebalance our public services to put users in the driving seat and relationships at their heart.

We can't defeat the giants of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness by shuffling a bit of money around or tweaking a few policies. We need to rethink what kind of society we want to live in, using the post-pandemic moment to remake those parts of our economy and our state that are no longer fit for purpose. This time around it won't be good enough for us to hand down solutions from on high and expect the grateful masses to queue up to buy them as they did in 1942. Nor can the changes that we need to make be done by stealth. They need to emerge from public deliberation and have the backing of democratic consent.

The South Korean economy has substantively been transformed into a neoliberal one since the early 1990s. Particularly after the 1997 economic crisis, the neoliberal reform packages introduced by the IMF and implemented by the Kim Dae-jung government, ironically in an old-fashioned developmental, top-down manner, significantly accelerated the neoliberal transformation, not only in the industrial and financial sectors but also in the entire society. This chapter will cover several “softer” indicators concerned with the well-being of the Korean society during and after the neoliberal transformation, particularly the impact of ageing, human capital, welfare, education, intergenerational issues and other national characteristics related to the South Korean economy, which often determines the fundamental source of economic competitiveness and challenges ahead. Before delineating the changes through numerous socio-economic indicators, including economic status, demographic composition, welfare expansion, educational spending, immigration statistics and inequality indices, the overall economic changes before and after the economic crisis will be presented.

RECOVERING FROM THE CRISIS

While the origins of the Asian financial crisis of 1997 are still debated, it is a general consensus that its outbreak is largely a function of a blend of international and domestic factors (Winters 1999: 79; see also Corsetti, Pesenti & Roubini 1999). The fundamental international factor (see Radelet & Sachs 1998) in Korea was the gradual and significant increase of unregulated capital mobility since the early 1990s due to financial liberalization (see Table 6.1). The large fraction of foreign debt was in the form of short-term, unhedged, foreign-currency-denominated liabilities. The sudden exodus of capital and denied renewals of matured loans (i.e. “investor panic”) triggered by the series of currency crises that started from Thai Baht and Indonesian Rupiah finally depreciated the Korean won substantially, resulting in the rapid depletion of asset reserves of the BOK down to just $2 billion in November 1997. It was like, as Sachs notes, “shouting ‘fire’ in a theater, […] a panicked withdrawal of short-term loans by nervous creditors can immediately lead to illiquidity of the debtors and then to bankruptcy, even if the debtor is fundamentally sound” (1998: 104–5).

Universal Credit transforms the way the state interacts with workers on a low income. Alongside more stringent requirements for out-of-work claimants to engage in job-seeking activity, it may – controversially – involve the introduction of “in-work conditionality” to claimants on a low income, placing responsibilities on individual workers to increase their earnings.

The traditional distinctions drawn by policymakers between strivers and skivers, workers or shirkers, are now blurred as both unemployed people and low-income workers come under the DWP's remit. But the big question is how will this change the way the state interacts with people in work? In this chapter, we focus on how the government might support this group. After briefly outlining this policy shift, we review recent developments in this new, experimental, policy area and consider whether or not we are on the right track not only to support people into, but also to progress in work.

IN-WORK BENEFITS: FROM TAX CREDITS TO UNIVERSAL CREDIT

Alongside conditionality for people who are out of work, many countries also seek to incentivize employment via in-work benefits. As with active labour market policies (ALMPs) for the unemployed, in-work benefits also vary in design. They are also typically combined with other “make work pay” measures including minimum wages, and have the twin aims of incentivizing employment and reducing in-work poverty (Clegg 2015). Particularly since the 1990s, and against a backdrop of “deindustrialization and labour market flexibilization”, in-work benefits saw considerable expansion across advanced welfare states – as the carrots to the sticks of conditionality (Clasen 2020: 2).

In-work benefits have made a significant difference to the incomes of low-income working households (Ray et al. 2014). They have also been historically popular across political divides. However, while they are “a response to … the growth of low-wage jobs and atypical types of employment”, they may also support it (Clasen 2020: 10). Policymakers express concerns about both the sustainability of growing in-work benefit expenditure, and the extent to which it subsidizes part-time and/or poor quality work (Clegg 2015).

The UK has been a keen innovator of policymaking in this area as it explores the possibility of extending behavioural conditionality to working social security claimants. The Social Security Advisory Committee (SSAC 2017) described this as a “ground-breaking” move with “no comparable precedents”, and marks a fundamental shift in the reach of conditionality to those in work.