Mental health crisis may not be all it seems
We must ask whether generous benefits for conditions such as stress have made opting out of work too attractive
Parris then has to very delicately tiptoe through his explanation. Yes, of course some suffer dreadfully from problems, society rightly supports them, but is it vaguely, just possibly, just a bat’s squeak of a chance there, rumoured to be even the sniff of some not being quite so ill that they could not work? In fact, would not, if it were not that the benefits are large enough to make not working - or even claiming while working - worthwhile?
Even with all the qualifications Parris has to shovel in we fully expect there to be a massed chorus of shrieking about how terrible he is for even bringing up the point (J Portes was quick off the mark “faux concern combined with complete and wilful ignorance” - as we said).
At which point we can be a bit more blunt than is possible in a Times column. Of course some are blagging it. Humans respond to incentives, d’ye see?
No, really, humans do, to the point of deciding when they die:
In 1979, Australia abolished federal inheritance taxes. Using daily deaths data, we show that approximately 50 deaths were shifted from the week before the abolition to the week after (amounting to over half of those who would have been eligible to pay the tax). Our findings suggest that the scheduled abolition of the US inheritance tax may lead some deaths to be shifted from the last week of 2009 into the first week of 2010.
Incentives matter. No, really matter.
Some who perhaps should not be claiming illness or disability related payments will be - the government’s handing out free money so obviously some will.
There is also no absolute solution to this. We desire a system which picks up every single case of those who do require the help. That means that the rules are going to have to be relaxed enough that some who don’t will also be able to get it. We don’t want a system where the truly ill cannot gain help - we therefore have to put up with system leakage.
We can change how much leakage there is, sure, at the risk of blocking out some of the deserving. But that’s just the standard point that all of life involves trade offs.
Two of the grand lessons of economics in the one story then, incentives matter, there is no solution only trade offs.
Except that’s not the end of it. For we also have those looking at the working disability numbers and therefore insisting that there’s a problem with the NHS. Or with social services. Or that government’s not spending enough money on antiracism, community outreach or the rest. Which means that we do actually have a useful lesson at the end of this. Which is that the current working disability numbers are not a result of government spending too little, but of it spending too much. Perhaps rightly too much - taste can vary as to how much blagging we’ll accept in order to make sure no one deserving is missed. But government spending lots on a relaxed definition of disability is not an argument that government must be spending more on disability.