The Common Weal

The word welfare arrived in English from the Old English wel faran—to fare well, to travel well, to be in a good condition of passage through the world. It named a state rather than a programme: the condition of the person who has what they need to live with dignity, safety, and sufficiency.

The word carried this expansive meaning for centuries, appearing in contexts as varied as the spiritual welfare of souls and the welfare of animals and the welfare of the commonwealth. It described a condition of human flourishing that the society had an interest in producing and maintaining, not because flourishing individuals were economically productive—though they often were—but because the condition of the people was understood to be the condition of the polity, and a polity composed of people who were not faring well was a polity that was itself not well.

The common weal—the common good, the shared welfare, the condition of the community taken as a whole—was the concept that organised the political life of most Western societies for centuries before the industrial organisation of labour and capital produced the conditions under which the concept was quietly retired. The common weal asked: what is the condition of the people, and what does the society owe to the maintenance of that condition? It was a question about collective responsibility for individual welfare, posed in terms that made the collective and the individual mutually constitutive rather than opposed.

The welfare state, when it emerged in the twentieth century from the catastrophes of depression and war, was in some respects the institutional form of the common weal—the state's assumption of responsibility for the basic conditions of its citizens' lives. In another sense it was a narrowing of the concept: the state would provide specific programmes for specific categories of people in specific conditions of need, and the provision would be means-tested, categorically defined, and administered through bureaucratic channels whose design reflected the institutional priorities of the moment rather than the expansive ideal of the condition of faring well.

 

The narrowing has continued since. The welfare programmes that operate in most wealthy democracies today are calibrated not to the condition of faring well but to a lower and more specifically bounded standard: the prevention of the most acute forms of deprivation, at the lowest cost the political environment will sustain. The payments are set at levels that reflect political judgements about what the non-working poor can be expected to manage on, and those judgements are made by people who have not been required to manage on the relevant amounts and who are therefore not drawing on direct knowledge of what the amounts actually buy.

What the amounts buy, in most wealthy countries, is not enough to fare well. The research on this is consistent and has been consistent for decades. Unemployment payments, disability payments, and poverty-threshold pension payments in most Western jurisdictions place their recipients below the level of income at which housing, nutrition, healthcare, transport, and the incidental costs of maintaining social participation can all be adequately met simultaneously. The recipient must choose which of these to sacrifice. The sacrifice of any of them produces consequences that make the others harder to maintain. The person who cannot afford adequate nutrition is less healthy and therefore faces higher healthcare costs. The person who cannot afford transport cannot reach the employment opportunities that would allow them to leave the payment. The person who cannot afford the clothing, the communication technology, and the social participation that employment requires cannot present themselves to employers as employable. The payment that was supposed to provide a platform for return to self-sufficiency has produced instead a condition in which self-sufficiency becomes progressively more difficult to reach.

 

This is the structure that welfare policy most consistently fails to acknowledge: that poverty is expensive. The poor pay more for credit, because they cannot access the lower rates available to the creditworthy. They pay more for food, because they cannot afford the upfront costs of bulk purchasing. They pay more for transport, because they cannot afford the capital cost of a vehicle that would make them less dependent on public systems that may not serve the areas and the hours they need. They pay more for healthcare deferred, because the conditions that adequate healthcare at an early stage would have prevented become more expensive conditions requiring more intensive intervention at a later stage. The payment that condemns its recipient to below-sufficiency condemns them to the expenses of insufficiency as well as to the insufficiency itself.

The employment barrier is the one that welfare policy most frequently addresses in its stated objectives and most consistently fails to address in its actual structure. The gap between the payment level and the level of income required to meet the costs of seeking and beginning employment—the professional clothing, the transport, the communication costs, the gap period during which the payment is being withdrawn faster than the employment income is replacing it—is a gap that the payment is not designed to bridge. The policy that says its purpose is to support people back into employment has been designed around the assumption that the barrier to employment is motivational—that the payment should be set at a level that makes employment preferable to the payment—rather than around the reality that the barrier is often structural and that the payment's level makes the structural barrier harder rather than easier to cross.

 

The global consistency of this pattern is more striking than any country-specific analysis can convey, because it suggests that the common feature is not the specific policy design of any particular jurisdiction but the political logic that produces the policy design across jurisdictions. That logic is the logic of the minimum politically sustainable provision, set against the competing claims of taxpayers who do not identify their interests with the provision, administered by bureaucratic systems whose incentives reward compliance measurement rather than outcome achievement, and evaluated against criteria that measure the system's activity rather than the welfare of the people the system is supposed to serve.

In the United States, disability payments through the Social Security Disability Insurance programme are set at levels that place most recipients below the federal poverty line, while the threshold for receiving them is high enough that many people with genuine disabilities do not qualify. In the United Kingdom, the combination of Universal Credit's five-week initial delay and its withdrawal rate as income increases has produced conditions in which moving into low-paid work can leave recipients temporarily worse off than remaining on the payment, which is the opposite of the policy's stated intent. In Australia, the JobSeeker payment has been maintained for decades at a level that successive government inquiries have found insufficient to meet basic costs, while the conditions attached to it—the reporting requirements, the mutual obligation activities, the appointment schedules—impose time and transport costs on people who have limited financial capacity to meet them. In most of continental Europe, where payments are more generous and conditionality is less punitive, the barrier is often access—the complexity of the systems, the language requirements, the documentation demands that work against the people most likely to need the support.

 

The ageing well question is where the gap between the common weal ideal and the institutional reality is most visible in human terms. The aged pension in most wealthy countries provides a income floor that is above the unemployment payment but below the level at which the full costs of ageing can be met—the healthcare costs that increase as the body ages, the housing costs that absorb a higher proportion of a fixed income than of a working income, the social participation costs that the preceding essays have described as consistently underestimated by the systems designed to address them.

The person who ages on a pension payment in a privately rented property in most major cities of the wealthy world is ageing in conditions of progressive financial compression. The rent absorbs more of the fixed income as rents increase. The healthcare costs absorb more as the body requires more care. The remaining income available for the nutrition, the social participation, and the maintenance of the daily life that the common weal concept would recognise as the condition of faring well decreases. The system was designed to provide a floor. The floor is not a platform. It does not support the building of anything above it. It is the lowest level at which the system considers its obligation discharged.

 

The common weal, as a concept, asked a different question from the one the welfare system asks. The welfare system asks: what is the minimum we must provide to avoid the most acute consequences of deprivation? The common weal asked: what are the conditions of human flourishing, and what does the society owe to their maintenance? The first question is defensible within a framework that treats welfare as a cost to be minimised. The second question is defensible within a framework that treats the welfare of the people as the purpose of the polity.

The two frameworks produce different systems. The minimum-provision framework produces the payment set at the level of political sustainability, the means-testing designed to exclude as many recipients as possible from eligibility, the compliance requirements designed to demonstrate that the payment is not being received without effort, and the evaluation criteria designed to measure the system's activity rather than the recipient's welfare. The common weal framework would produce something different—not necessarily more expensive in aggregate, though possibly so, but differently designed, oriented toward the question of whether the person is faring well rather than toward the question of whether the system is providing the minimum without exceeding the politically sustainable cost.

The concept has not disappeared. It surfaces, in different terms, in the periodic debates about universal basic income, about the adequacy of aged care funding, about the conditions of disability payments, about the housing crisis and the health system and the gap between what the system provides and what the person needs to actually fare well. The debates do not typically use the language of the common weal. They use the language of cost and fiscal sustainability and evidence-based policy and targeted provision.

The original language was about something simpler and more fundamental.

Whether the people were faring well.

Whether the condition of the community was a condition in which faring well was possible.

Whether the polity that could not answer yes to these questions could honestly claim to be functioning as a polity.

The question has been around for a long time.

The answer has been consistently deferred.