Social Welfare Policy Analysis and Choices

by Hobart A Burch

Overview

Social Welfare Policy Analysis and Choices gives you a thorough introduction to social welfare policy analysis. The knowledge you’ll gain from its pages will enable you to understand and evaluate individual policy issues and choices by exploring the possible choices, the effects and implications of each alternative choice, and the factors that influence each choice.

Social Welfare Policy Analysis and Choices provides frameworks for making basic social policy choices and applying them to specific instances. You’ll find its depth of insight into the larger framework in which social policy decisions are made—beliefs, values, and interests—and its historical perspective on current “new” issues unique and invaluable. The book’s approach is to develop a framework for looking at the underlying issues, ideologies, social and economic forces, culture, and institutionalized inequalities that are constant within this changing mass. Specifically, Social Welfare Policy Analysis and Choices provides frameworks for looking at beliefs about:

• human nature
• the nature of society
• ways of thinking
• values and the moral and ethical implications of those values
• roots of those values in religion, culture, historical traditions, myths, and rationalized self-interests

The insight offered in Social Welfare Policy Analysis and Choices will allow you to determine your own positioning; understand for strategic purposes what direction opponents, potential allies, and others are coming from; and develop a priorities perspective to guide compromises when the optimum policy is not attainable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780789006028
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/13/1998
Series:	Haworth Social Work Practice Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	398
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Hobart A Burch

Table of Contents

Contents I. Policy Choice and Intervention

• Social Welfare Policy: When and Where?
• What is Social Policy?
• Three Policy Sectors
• De Jure, De Facto, and Default Policy
• Types of Benefits: Material, Therapeutic, or Opportunity
• Forms of Delivery: In-Kind, Cash, or Voucher
• The Scope of Social Policy
• Making Choices
• Policy Analysis
• Making Policy Choices
• Intents
• Effects
• Policy Interventions
• No Hiding Place
• Where to Intervene
• When to Intervene
• Degrees of Intervention
• Changing the System
• Radical Change
• Reform
• Rules of the Game
• Changing Agent Behavior
• Supplementing the Hosts
• Social Policy and the Courts
• II. Foundations for Choice
• What’s True: Facts and Beliefs
• Being Logical
• Scientific and Nonscientific Reasoning
• Three Sources of “Facts”
• Biases and Hermeneutics
• What’s Right: Values and Interests
• Values
• Interests
• Values and Interests Entwined
• Ethics: Ends and Means
• Ethics: Gray Areas
• The Human Condition: Jewels, Jackals, or Junk?
• What is a Person Worth?
• Noble or Base?
• Free Will or Determinism?
• Human Nature and the Causes of Poverty
• III. Fundamental Value Choices
• Fairness: Equality, Equity, or Adequacy?
• Distributive Justice: What is Fair?
• Equality
• Equity
• Adequacy
• Multiple Tiers: Adequacy Plus Equity
• Nonfairness Doctrines
• Inequality and Redistribution
• Negative Freedom and Individualism
• Four Kinds of “Liberal”
• Negative Freedom
• Limiting Freedom
• Classical Individualism
• Individualism and Trusteeship
• Positive Freedom and Fraternité
• Positive Freedom
• Procedural Justice
• Affirmative Action
• Fraternité
• Mixed Reality
• Economic Animals?
• Economic Reductionism
• Cost-Benefit Analysis
• Alternatives: Cost Utility and Cost Effectiveness
• Putting a Price on Intangibles
• Welfare Economics
• The Protestant Work Ethic
• Part of the Package
• IV. Economic and Social Market Choices
• The Economic Market
• A Market Economy
• Pros and Cons of the “Free” Economic Market
• Traditional Economies
• Command Economies
• Mixed Economies
• The Social State
• Introduction
• Enhancement
• Fiscal Interventions
• Monetary Interventions
• Supply-Side Economics
• Limitations of All Supply-and-Demand Strategies
• Regulation
• Levels of Intervention
• The Social Market
• Economic and Social Markets
• Diswelfares and the Economic Market
• Private Social Market Supplement: Charity
• Public Social Market Supplement: The Welfare State
• How Much Socail Market Can We Afford?
• Ideology and the Welfare State
• V. Huma Service Delivery Choices
• Benefits: Broad or Begrudged?
• A Social Responsibility Hierarchy
• Backward of Forward-Looking?
• Institutional or Residual
• Universal or Selective
• Selective Criteria
• Mixing the Models
• Rights or Alms?
• Rights
• Full Entitlement
• Private Entitlement
• Conditioanl Entitlement
• Administrative Appeals
• Court Adjudication
• Public, Voluntary, or Commercial?
• Legal Distinctions
• Traditional Views of Each
• Ideologies
• Blurring of Distinctions
• Church and State
• Public Funding of Sectarian Services in the United States
• What Sector When?
• Paying for It?
• Restricted and Unrestricted Subsidies
• Federal Subsidies: Grants
• Federal Subsidies: Tax Expenditures
• Third-Party Purchase of Service
• Setting the Price
• Cost Controls
• Prepaid Managed Care
• Centralized or Decentralized?
• Direct National Administration
• Federalism: Public Decentralization
• Nonprofit Privatization
• Commercial Privatization
• Parapublic Institutions
• In Conclusion
• Appendix