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From the United Nations
UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre Report Card 9
Written by Peter Adamson – 2010
The Just Society: A Measure
“The statistics presented in the Report Card can also be read as a first attempt to measure nations by the standards of a ‘just society’ as defined by the American political philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002).
“Rawls proposed that the just society would be one in which the rules were drawn up for the benefit of society as a whole. To achieve this, he argued, the starting point should be ‘the original position’. By this he meant a kind of celestial ante-room in which all those waiting to be born would draw up the rules without knowing what position in society they themselves would occupy. From behind this ‘veil of ignorance’, the rule-makers would not know whether they would be born rich or poor, male or female, with above or below average talents, fit or disabled, part of an ethnic minority or part of a privileged elite.
“Because we would not know about our own status, he argued, we would not be able to press for rules that would benefit only ourselves. Rules drawn up on this basis, therefore, would reflect an equal concern for all classes and groups.
“The ‘veil of ignorance’ is therefore designed to tame the power of vested interests. And ‘the original position’ is the exact opposite of the interest group model that is so influential in today’s politics. In essence, it is similar to the method of sharing a cake fairly between two people by inviting one person to make the cut and the other to take first choice.
“Rawls has his critics among the hundreds who have written books in response to his ideas. Libertarians have objected that basic human rights such as property rights and the right to self-ownership leave no room for a Rawlsian concept of the ‘just society’. Ronald Dworkin has argued that hypothetical agreements about rules drawn up from ‘the original position’ are not real agreements and therefore could not find the necessary acceptance and authority. Amartya Sen finds the same weakness, adding that unanimity would be unlikely to be achieved even from ‘the original position’ and that lack of unanimity would bring the Rawlsian thesis crashing down. Uniing some of these criticisms, Michael Sandel has objected that decisions about the rules governing communities that have their own traditions and histories cannot be made by reasoning from a rootless and historically abstract position.
“But the idea that the rules of society should reflect the interests of all, and not just its dominant members, is widely accepted in theory, even if the methods by which it might be achieved remain controversial.
“If we assume that the end, if not the means, commands a measure of agreement, then one way of measuring progress towards the aim of a just society would be to measure the degree of disadvantage suffered by its most disadvantaged members. That is what this ‘Report Card´ attempts to do.
“Clearly, more comprehensive data would be required to measure degrees of disadvantage ‘in the round’, especially if, as Martya Sen suggests, disadvantage should be defined as “those who are least able to realise their potential and develop and exercise their capabilities.”
“Nonetheless, the data presented in these pages represent a contribution to that process. In three different dimensions of well-being – they show how far behind the median level the least advantaged are being allowed to fall. And the fact that different countries show very different patterns indicates that some countries are making more progress than others towards ‘the just society’.” [page 26 of the report]
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Also stated in this report:
“Reducing bottom-end inequality – to the extent that it involves reducing the steepness of the socioeconomic gradient in health, education and other dimensions of child well-being – will therefore require renewed government efforts to ‘row upstream’ in the years immediately ahead.
“Stepping up efforts to protect those most at risk from falling behind is even more necessary at a time when governments are seeking to cut public expenditure…. But it is also more difficult. And if efforts to prevent children from falling avoidably behind the norms of their societies are to be reinvigorated in changed economic times, then a strong case must be made.
Risks and consequences
“That case is strong in principle. For a child to suffer avoidable setbacks in the vital, vulnerable years of growth in body and brain is a breach of the most basic tenet of the Convention on the Rights of the Child – that every child has a right to develop to his or her full potential. It is also a clear contradiction of the principle of equality of opportunity to which all OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries aspire.
“But the case is also strong in practice. Allowing children to fall unnecessarily far behind brings in its wake a long list of practical costs and consequences. Causality is always difficult to establish, but many hundreds of studies in many different OECD [ countries have shown what the costs of falling too far behind may be. They include the greater likelihood of:
— low Birthweight
— parental stress and lack of parental time
— chronic stress for the child, possibly linked to long-term health problems and reduced memory capacity
— food insecurity and inadequate nutrition
— poorer health outcomes, including obesity, diabetes, chronic asthma, anaemia, and cardio-vascular disease
— more frequent visits to hospitals and emergency wards
— impaired cognitive development
— lower educational achievement
— lower rates of return on investments in education
— reduced linguistic ability
— lower productivity and adult earnings
— u7nemployment and welfare dependence
— behavioural difficulties
— involvement with the police and courts
— teenage pregnancy
— alcohol and drug dependence.
“Many individual families – faced with disadvantages of income, education, health and housing – overcome the odds and bring up children who do not fall into any of the above categories. But this cannot change the fact that children who fall behind early in their lives, or who spend a significant part of their early years in poverty, are likely to find themselves at a marked and measurable disadvantage. It bears repeating that none of this is the fault of the child. And a society that aspires to fairness cannot be unconcerned that accidents of birth should so heavily circumscribe the opportunities of life.
The costs
“The practical case for a renewed effort to prevent children from unnecessarily falling behind is further strengthened by the economic penalties involved. The heaviest costs are paid by the individual child. But the long list of problems cited above also translates into significant costs for a society as a whole. Unnecessary bottom-end inequality prepares a bill which is quickly presented to taxpayers in the form of increased strain on health and hospital services, on remedial schooling, on welfare and social protection programmes, and on the police and the courts. In addition, there is a significant cost to business and to economies as a whole in the lower skill levels and reduced productivity that are the inevitable result of a large number of children failing to develop to their potential. Finally, there is a cost that must be paid by all in the threat that bottom-end inequality poses to social cohesion and the quality of life in advanced industrial economies. “Wide inequality,” says the 2010 report of the United Kingdom’s National Equity Panel “is eroding the bonds of common citizenship and recognition of human dignity across economic divides.”
“The scale of such costs, though almost impossible to calculate, is clearly significant. For the European Union as a whole, it has been estimated (2007) that health inequalities alone account for 14% of social security costs and 20% of health care costs…. In Canada, the overall cost of child poverty has been estimated (2008) at between $4.6 and $5.9 billion a year for the Province of Ontario alone…. In the United Kingdom, estimates by Donald Hirsch, in a report (2006) for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, put the direct costs of “services to remedy the consequences of childhood deprivation such as poor health, low educational attainment, crime and anti-social behavior” at approximately $18 billion a year.
“In sum, the costs of allowing children to fall too far behind – costs to the principle of fairness and costs to social, civic and economic life – are enormous. And it is against the full weight of these costs and consequences that the economic arguments for and against a renewed effort to protect those most at risk should be set.
Early intervention
“Finally, if the effort to reduce bottom-end inequality in children’s well-being is to make further progress, then it is not just the level of government efforts that must be increased but their effectiveness.
“Children who fall behind begin to do so in the very earliest stages of their lives. And in that simple statement we come face to face with one of the most important and least-acted-on research findings of our times.
“During pregnancy and the first few weeks and months of life, critical stages in the child’s mental and physical development follow each other in rapid succession. Each stage serves as a foundation for the next. Any faltering in early childhood therefore puts at risk subsequent stages of growth and development. In other words, disadvantage in the early phases of life can begin to shape the neurobiology of the developing child and initiate a process that, once begun, has a tendency to become self-reinforcing.
“In particular, it is in cognitive development that the disadvantaged child is likely to pay the heaviest price. By the age of two, cognitive ‘falling behind’ can be measured. By the age of four, much of the potential damage may have been done….
“The central practical message for efforts to reduce bottom-end inequality in child well-being could therefore not be clearer: the earlier the intervention, the greater the leverage.
“Overall, the case both in principle and practice for intensifying the efforts to prevent children from falling behind – and for acting as early as possible in the child’s life – has been well summarized by the Nobel laureate and University of Chicago economist James Heckman:
“Investing in disadvantaged young children is a rare public policy initiative that promotes fairness and social justice and at the same time promotes productivity in the economy and in society at large. Early interventions targeted toward disadvantaged children have much higher returns than later interventions such as reduced pupil-teacher rations, public job training, convict rehabilitation programs, tuition subsidies, or expenditure on police….
Child care
“Within the developed world, trends in the way in which young children are being brought up may now offer a unique opportunity to put this message into practice. Today’s generation of children is becoming the first in which a majority are spending a significant part of early childhood in some form of out-of-home care (subject of Report Card 8). In theory, this offers a large scale opportunity to take early action against the different dimensions of disadvantage that threaten to become established in the lives of very young children. Public demand for high-quality child care already exists, and OECD governments are already responding by investing in free or subsidized early childhood services on an increasing scale.
“At the heart of this opportunity is the idea that high quality early childhood education and care can help to reduce bottom-end inequality because it is the disadvantaged child who stands to gain the most. “Although early childhood education and care benefits all children,” concludes an OECD-wide child care review by Canadian researchers Cleveland and Krashinsky, “much of the evidence suggests that the largest benefits flow to children from the most disadvantaged families….”
“In practice, there is a danger that the child care transition will contribute to a widening rather than a narrowing of bottom-end inequality. It is more educated parents and higher-income homes that tend to be most aware of, and more capable of affording, child care of the right quality. And it is the poorer and less educated homes where the pressures for the earliest possible return to work are felt most acutely and where resources for high quality child care are least likely to be available. Without specific policies to address this issue – and to ensure the availability and affordability of high-quality early childhood services for all children – this opportunity will therefore be lost, ‘double disadvantage’ will become the norm, and the child care transition will likely become a new and powerful driver of still greater inequality in children’s well-being. [this important statement is on page 30 of the report]
“The costs of taking advantage of this chance to reduce inequalities in children’s well-being on a significant scale are obviously substantial. The costs of not taking the opportunity will undoubtedly be even higher. No one who has worked with disadvantaged or at-risk children can be in any doubt that, as James Heckman and many others have argued, attempting to compensate for disadvantage after the event is more difficult, more costly, and less likely to be successful. Children need to be supported and protected from avoidable ‘falling behind’ at all stages of their development, but the point of greatest leverage is the point at which the process begins.
Conclusion
“This report began with the argument that children deserve the best possible start, that early experience can cast a long shadow, and that children are not to be held responsible for the circumstances into which they are born. In this sense the metric used – the degree of bottom-end inequality in child well-being – is a measure of the progress being made towards a fairer society.
“Bringing in data from the majority of OECD countries, the report has attempted to show which of them are allowing children to fall behind by more than is necessary in three dimensions of children’s well-being (using the best performing countries as a minimum standard for what can be achieved). In drawing attention to the depth of disparities revealed, and in summarizing what is known about the consequences, it has argued that ‘falling behind’ is a critical issue not only for millions of individual children today but for the economic and social future of their nations tomorrow. [with America being very nearly at the bottom on all measures!]
“In making this case, therefore, principle and practice argue as one. For if the effort to prevent the unnecessary falling behind of children in different dimensions of their lives is not made, then a fundamental unfairness will continue to shame our pretensions to equality of opportunity – and our societies will continue to pay the price.”
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A word about the statistical reality that forms the foundation of this report [see page 29]
Monitoring: The Need to Know
“The statistics presented in this report are not built on a comprehensive consideration of what constitutes child well-being but on the more mundane foundations of data availability. In particular, an acknowledged weakness is that almost all of the available data concern older children and adolescents who are attending school; there is a glaring lack of comparable information on the critical years of early childhood.
“Responding to this inadequacy of data may not seem to have much of a claim to priority in difficult economic circumstances. But a renewed commitment to reducing bottom-end inequalities in child well-being nonetheless require a renewed commitment to selective monitoring.
“If limited resources are to be used effectively, then governments need to know not only how many children are falling behind. They need to know by how much, in what ways, and for what reasons. They need to know who and where they are. And they need to now how policy is affecting and interacting with wider trends in the social and economic life of the nation.
“Finally, they need to have the relevant data at their disposal not once every five or ten years but on a timescale that permits timely response to protect those at risk. Monitoring requires resources. But it is the indispensable hand rail of cost-effective polity.”
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See also (with America again being at the bottom): UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre Report Card 7
Next post:
+AMERICAN CHILD WELL-BEING: SOME ‘IN-HOUSE’ GAPS
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Stop the Storm 