Austerity shifted welfare back to families financed by private household debt

Evidence

We can also observe multiple ways in which cuts to public funding in healthcare, education, and welfare have pushed more and more people back towards kinship-based forms of self-care and mutual support and how the expansion of consumer credit has turned household deficit-spending into a substitute for state deficit-spending. Today, family responsibility very often takes the form of intergenerational debt where parents and other family members are actively enrolled in the debt obligations of children, signed up as guarantors or required to post their housing wealth as collateral to fund the social mobility (or simply stasis) of younger generations. Here too neoliberal policy prescriptions have played an important role, as Friedman and Becker were among the first to suggest that investment in “human capital” such as education should be the responsibility of the family, aided and abetted by private credit markets, not the state. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 247

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s austerity/neoliberalism advanced study corpus and the ‘small acts of decorum’ theme about how policy abstractions land on households. — connects to: Welfare-state cuts halt the intergenerational mobility they once enabled — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 19; Households borrowed heavily to preserve their lifestyles amid economic insecurity. — Neil Fligstein & Adam Goldstein, The Emergence of a Finance Culture in…, 41; Decades of neoliberal reform reinstated the family as first-line welfare provider — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 260 (+5 more)
• ADDENDUM: The intergenerational debt and parental co-signing material could extend ‘Grafting & Growth’ framing only indirectly, but more strongly supports a follow-up on how family responsibility was deliberately engineered into debt by the Chicago School.
• SEED: Angle: how ‘family responsibility’ language in neoliberal theory functioned as a rhetorical bridge from state retrenchment to private credit markets — a genealogy of the parental co-signer.

Broader Connections

• Decades of neoliberal reform reinstated the family as first-line welfare provider #corroborates (0.92) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 260
• Neoliberal deregulation replaced social protection with credit and indebtedness #expands (0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 746
• Austerity is a recurring policy suite that entrenches wealth and private primacy #expands (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 21
• Debt securitization served as inadequate compensation for welfare-state dismantling #expands (0.78) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 963
• Austerity policies required sacrificing the welfare of most British citizens #corroborates (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 860