Tales of Robin Hood (part 4): Social security and risk over the short and medium terms

The answer to the questions of who benefits from the welfare state and who pays depends on which data are assembled and how those data are presented and analysed. In the previous article in this series (Whiteford 2015a), I looked at Chapter 3 of John Hills’ Good Times, Bad Times, in which he examines the distribution of benefits and taxes across the life course. Both Hills’ findings for the United Kingdom, and my own for Australia, showed that the measured impact of the welfare state from a life course perspective was different from our analyses made at a point in time—the focus in an earlier instalment (Whiteford 2015b). But there is yet more to the story. In moving from a point in time to a life course perspective, there is necessarily a large number of intermediate steps, such as changes of fortune and circumstance experienced within any single year and from year to year. Rather than showing the life course effects on individuals and families, these perspectives show us the impact of risks that individuals and their families face.